Sadly, I was never a company man. Company men are safe. Mild-mannered. Conservative. They have good hair. But not everyone can be a company man. That said, our value is no less than those guys. (Nor any greater.) I’m a writer. A copywriter by trade. Alongside artists, designers, directors, illustrators, photographers, videographers, and others, writers are considered part of the “creative class.” Most of us aren’t company men. We’re sharpshooters company men hire. A writer’s role is to solve problems…
When it comes to building a brand, you should look to Google for best practices. Yes, Google. The search engine. And no, I’m not talking about their brand identity. I’m talking about their actual search algorithm. Stay with me. Branding, as it turns out, is fairly complicated. Or rather, we’ve made it complicated—just look out into your Linkedin thread and you’ll see any number of branding experts peddling their strategies. But essentially a brand is simply the embodiment of a…
I love my mom. And she listens to the Fox TV version of talk radio. It made me sad when I visited her last month. Everything is either jingoistic, or promotes the destruction of liberal thinking. And it’s all filled with manipulation and the very thing she and others like her profess to hate—fake news. I am an Independent. Which is to say I don’t think either of the two major parties in the US have all the answers. Rather…
I was sitting in my first big client meeting where we were rebranding a Fortune 200. There were four of us from the agency at the table, while the other six seats were filled by C-level folks from the company. About ten minutes into the meeting, after the executives from the company had finished their introductory arguments on why they needed a rebrand, I wrote a tagline on a notecard. As the clients continued to talk, and reinforce what I…
You have a job. And that job is where you work. But, unless you’re a writer, how I work probably doesn’t look like work to you.
NOTE: I realize that by publishing a post like this, I risk to lose the respect of some who will consider what I’m about to say as batshit crazy. Except, it’s not. It’s process. I am a white man in his early 50s. As such, my personal experiences have been more sheltered than most. There should be no way for me to effectively connect with people who are not like me, and who I’ll never meet in person, to convince…
