It took me a number of years (and an even larger number of interviews) to get my first full-time job as an advertising copywriter.

And so far, Interview #87 wasn’t going all that well.

I sat in the office of a senior copywriter at Ketchum Communications, as he thumbed through my samples, most of which were ads for small retail stores and press releases from Atari. He didn’t say much, which usually didn’t bode well.

But just as he was zipping up my portfolio case, and starting to say “I’ve got your resume, and we’ll be in touch if…,” the creative director burst into his office.

“We just got the Pacific Bell account! What are we going to do?”

And in one of those truly career-defining moments, the senior copywriter said “Well, you could take a look at Victor’s book.”

I ended up starting work there the following Monday.

Writing a brochure is like writing an extra-long print ad.  You can still create a memorable, attention-getting headline—and you take your audience on a serious tour of your product’s benefits and differentiators.  And to get yourself up to speed so you can write, you basically throw yourself in the deep end, immersing yourself for days, even weeks.

I’ve taken long brochure journeys with online gaming companies.  Semiconductors.  Education networks.  Petroleum additives.  Infectious disease tests.  Point-of-sale payment systems. Cancer-fighting equipment.  HR recruitment.  The “double volute.” And more. Every time, I was glad I spent the time, as I learned a whole lot along the way.  Proving that, once again, you have to get in over your head to fill it.

When direct mail doesn’t end up at the bottom of a birdcage, it can have a spectacular impact.

Take this PG&E EnergyStar mailer, which I wrote for FCB Rivet. When it was sent out in 2004, the numbers of energy-efficient new homes built in California went up,  (7,100 single-family units and 2,500 multi-family units), as contractors throughout the state took advantage of the program’s rebates. 

And the numbers continued to grow.  By 2015, the number of EnergyStar energy-efficient new homes built in California had risen to 165,783.

Of course, it’s hard to quantify how much of that success had to do with my little mailer. But it’s proof that direct mail (coupled with a compelling offer) is definitely not for the birds.

I love writing web content. Love, love, love it!  Where else do you get to write tight, crisp, short headlines and dive way, way down into details?

I worked on my first website back in 1998, for Sony PlayStation.  Since then, I've engaged in content marketing for wineries, routers and switches, restaurants, banks, real estate institutions, wireless carriers, you name it.

But I’ve probably learned the most about writing for the web from years as a web editor for Cisco.com (or CDC).

Business-unit account executives, project managers, and engineers would create piles of buzzword-and-acronym-filled text and email it to us. Our mission: to spin this highly technical straw into gold – or at least text that your average 8th grader could understand, while adhering to web best practices. Turn around a dozen or more of these requests every day, and it’s not long before it becomes second nature.

Since there’s more to web writing than just the writing, I attended Confab Intensive to learn about content strategy—and ended up learning more about writing in the process. The first nugget of wisdom from the conference?  “Nobody will be offended if you take the time to make your writing simpler.” Words to live by—and work by, too.

I didn’t have the best of luck getting TV commercials produced. I have stacks of storyboards and demo tapes, but not much that the public actually saw.

But I did have a moment presenting one of my ideas that I’ll never forget.

The ad agency I worked for, FCB/LA, had to write a commercial for “Baby Bink,” a crawling baby doll from Mattel that was to be a spin off from a John Hughes movie, “Baby’s Day Out.”

Our agency team was in a large meeting room at 20th Century Fox, where a crowd of studio execs and marketers gathered. We presented the storyboard, which featured a “You gotta rescue Baby Bink” jingle that I wrote.

I was reading the words and describing the visuals, when one of the execs exclaimed, “Why don’t you sing it?”

Gamely, I got to my feet. The, I belted out my song about the fastest crawling baby doll, Baby Bink (in my “don’t quit your day job” lousy voice).

The execs gave me a standing ovation!

Whenever you work on a product, any product, it’s always best to try it out yourself. Seems obvious.  After all, how can you convince an audience of a product’s merit if you don’t have any first-hand knowledge of it?

That’s why, when I was writing my first commercial for Taco Bell, I ordered the entire 59 cent menu—and ate every bite.  I bought and drank two six-packs of Hornsby’s Hard Cider when I was looking for inspiration (come to think of it, I still occasionally look for inspiration that way.)  And I went running in a pair of Avia athletic shoes before I ever set pen to paper (unfortunately for my inspiration and my running, the soles immediately started peeling off).

So when I got the opportunity to write these Verizon emails, I jumped at the chance to try the product for myself.  The company is renowned for having the best mobile network money can buy (with rates to match).  But as a long-suffering mobile customer, any excuse to switch carriers was fine with me.

Thankfully, it was worth it.  I got to work on some fun email projects—and the dropped calls I experienced on a daily basis dropped to zero.

To give you an idea of how long I’ve been at this, when I was getting started, I had to physically hand-deliver the copy after typing it up.

No file sharing, no emails, no faxes. Just shoe leather.

One time, a section of road to my place in the mountains had washed out in a storm. Did that stop me? Hell no! I strapped on my boots, and tromped my way through the muck of the collapsed section. The copy must go through!

Of course, when you hand-deliver copy, your client usually had no choice but to read it on the spot. And it was gratifying to get that immediate feedback.

There were exceptions. My designer partner at the time, Rick Tharp (much of his work graces this page), was always too busy. So he installed a wooden mouse trap on the wall outside his office, and told me to leave my copy there.

And in case I had any doubts, he chose a Victor mouse trap.

Sometimes, the life of a freelance copywriter is lived in isolation.  But the best work comes from collaboration.  And when you’re writing case studies, you need to get the best from others; namely, the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who have all the content you need—in their heads.

Working on these docs was a great way to sharpen my interviewing skills. I needed to learn the problem, how it was solved, and the results. I had to ask the right questions and follow-ups, or I’d have nothing. 

Fortunately, the SMEs I interviewed were only too willing to share their tremendous wealth of knowledge with me.  And it was nice to hear how, for example, deploying a Cisco network translated into real-life benefits, not just business advantages and ROI numbers.  In the case of The Midnight Mission, located in downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row, it actually helped the workers serve more meals to the homeless.

Big, bold, beautiful; posters literally have the power to stop people in their tracks and pay attention.  They’re certainly a staple in the Marxist-Leninist world, in countries like Cuba, which I visited in 2000 and 2006.  There, I saw more “Socialismo O Muerte” (Socialism Or Death) posters than I could count, as well as a number of “Fidelidad” (Loyalty) posters, which, of course, had a double meaning on that island.

Certainly, writing posters for wineries, submarine sandwiches, and corporate HR pales when compared to death and country.  But who knows? If the long-overdue warming in U.S.-Cuba relations continues, maybe I’ll be freelancing there someday!

Not long ago, Fortune 500 companies would spare no expense in creating and printing these glossy, photo-and fact-filled documents to grace their lobbies and stuff shareholders’ mailboxes.  But times have changed.

I was fortunate to be able to work on these two Cisco Annual Reports (with Tolleson Design), which live on in online versions. Cisco is known as being the unsexy “plumbing” of the Internet, but we captured how Cisco networks were the gateway to infinite possibilities at home, school, work, and everywhere else.  Nice assignments—for an era that has largely passed.

This format has largely gone the way of the woolly mammoth.  But I had a lot of fun working with it. I wrote my first manual back in 1983, for Atari 5200 Baseball.  And my career highlight was, without question, working at Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts).

There, the good folks believed that the documentation for their World War II flight combat simulation games could be more than just how-to-play instructions.  They asked me to write a detailed historical backgrounder, complete with photos, quotes, sidebars, and more. The result: a companion book that added to the role-playing atmosphere—and enriched the game-playing experience.

The final products were as close as I’ve ever come to writing history books.  And along the way, I got to fly a lot of “missions.” Interview World War II veterans and historians. Hang out with some interesting programmers and test/debug folks.  And even work at the Skywalker Ranch for a spell. 

Nice work if you can get it.  And, thankfully, I got it.

Everyone in this business has a pile like this.  Ad concepts that, for one reason or another, were never produced. The light bulb went on, only to be shattered later. It comes with the territory.

And it happens for a number of reasons:

I worked on an ad campaign for a floppy disk (remember those?). The  manufacturer claimed to be the only one that inspected 100% of each disk’s surface. My campaign was about to be produced—then the company told us that, oops, they didn’t actually inspect the whole disk after all. Bye bye, differentiator—and bye bye, campaign.

I wrote an ad for Rockwell International, who wanted to spotlight their heritage of successful military aircraft. My headline was “Our Roots Are In The Sky.” Nice…except that my creative director insisted on creating a layout that showed a forest of upside-down trees, floating in the sky, roots-up!  Naturally, the client killed it, but it lives on, right here.