You never forget your first

I think it's pretty clear that, judging from the very first ad I ever wrote which you see here, I was destined to become a world-class, award-winning, creative-championing, sushi-loving, lunch-taking copywriter. Destiny was calling. Or maybe it was laughing. Sometimes it's hard to tell.

I've covered my illustrious career path before here, so there's no reason to repeat myself. Other than I get to talk about myself again, and being an only child I think you know how happy that makes me.

But I'll spare you. If you don't know the world revolves around me by now, remind me to remind you again tomorrow.

I remember being so excited when this ad actually appeared in Reader's Digest I told everyone I knew about it. My friends, my parents, my girlfriend. It was a much bigger deal at the time. I'd be in supermarket checkout lines, and casually pick up a copy and flip to the ad, talking loudly about how I'd written it.

This tactic always seemed to work better when I wasn't shopping by myself.

Of course, as you can plainly see, despite my illusions of grandeur and for almost every reason, it sucked. Plus the junior art director I worked on it with was a notorious asshole known all over town. He eventually went on to own his own successful asshole agency, until he was thrown out when it was acquired by another agency that didn't want assholes. He was an extremely unpleasant part of my first copywriting experience. It wouldn't be the only unpleasant experience I'd have with this asshole, but that's for another post (guess what the title will be).

Anyway, since the subject of the ad was how the "bite-sized pillows" were designed, his breakthrough idea was to make it look like a schematic and put it on graph paper. I was new to this ad writing thing, but even then I still knew how to roll my eyes.

I shouldn't be too critical - after all, this is the ad that launched me into a career path I never expected, and one that's been very rewarding both personally and professionally. In hindsight, I now realize it taught me a couple of extremely valuable life lessons that I think apply not just to advertising, but to virtually every industry. To this very day, I carry these learned philosophies with me to every job I do.

First, whether it's an insurance policy, a work of literature or an ad, if you're going to put a product out in the world make it as creative, entertaining, informative, thought-provoking and relevant as possible.

And second, don't work with assholes if you can avoid it.