Pregnant pause

As a freelance copywriter, you go through different seasons.

The unemployed season. The four-agencies-want-you-at-the-same-time season. The let's-have-lunch season. The I-think-I've-used-too-many-hypens season.

One season I went through for a while was the copywriter-on-maternity-leave season.

It seemed every gig I booked was for exactly three months, filling in for someone who was out on maternity leave. It always made me happy. Ask anyone who knows me, they'll tell you I'm a romantic at heart.

When love is in the air, money is in the bank.

Anyway, my point is it's never too early to start planning ahead. I'd like to suggest to all the female copywriters thinking about bringing a bouncing bundle of joy into your lives that now is the time. There are so many benefits - for you I mean.

Your parents will stop asking when you're going to have a baby. You and your significant other can start planning the gender-neutral color scheme if you live west of Lincoln, or whether the room is going to be blue or pink if you live east of Lincoln. Your friends can start thinking about how much they're going to spend on your gift at the baby shower (insider tip: don't give the Diaper Genie, they already have one. It's called a trash can).

And you'll have a tax deduction you didn't have before.

In case you were wondering, suggesting you get started now has nothing to do with the fact my son's 2016/17 tuition is due end of August, beginning of September, coincidentally right about the time you'll be having your baby.

Take it from me, nothing in life is more rewarding than you having a baby.

That goes for both of us.

Quiet time

Ad agencies are inherently loud places.

Even before open space floor plans – don’t get me started- hallways would be filled with people yelling from one office to the other.

You'd hear self-congratulatory chuckles of creative teams laughing at their own ideas.

Heels tapping along polished cement floors, while people walked fast and conversed like they were on The West Wing.

And of course, the ever present click clack of computer keys, followed by the jet engine roar of the printer firing up and spitting out copies of resumes…er…creative briefs.

There’s an unmistakable rhythm, hum and drone to the daily pace of an agency. Which is why it’s so eerie when an agency goes quiet.

Sometimes it’s a convergence of several things. People have left or been let go and have yet to be replaced. Others are out on production. Art directors are out on press checks. Copywriters are working (on our lattes) at Starbucks. People are behind closed doors in meetings.

The end result is an unsettling, yet welcome quiet. You can almost hear the tumbleweeds a blowin’ down the hallway and smell the honeysuckle.

Anyway, as sure as the the ebb and flo of the tide, the noise eventually returns to quiet agencies like swallows to Capistrano.

Loud, egotistical, long-lunching, knit-cap wearing, ironic-tshirt sporting, complaining swallows.

I can't wait to see how it ends

Advertising has never been shy about being behind the bandwagon, then jumping on it and saying they've been steering it the whole time. It's also a business that's never met a buzzword it didn't like.

If you've been on any agency website recently, usually in the About section, you've probably noticed the unholy alliance of bandwagon with the buzzword du jour: Storytellers.

Apparently agency creative departments aren't staffed with copywriters and art directors anymore. Instead, they've been replaced by storytellers.

I get it. It's a romantic notion, and it plays well in pitches where the client is told how the "story" of their brand will be conveyed to the waiting masses. Like many other things in advertising, it's hyperbole.

It's the janitor calling himself a sanitation engineer.

I can't exactly tell you why this trend pisses me off so much. Maybe because it's so blatantly untrue. Or the image it conjures up is of someone who's facile with exaggeration, able to spin a yarn or an impossible - and unbelievable - tale out of thin air.

And if there's anything advertising needs to be more of, it's unbelievable.

Storytellers, the really good ones, are skilled at the practiced art of spinning straw into gold. But when the story's over, compelling though it may be, you're still left with straw.

Storytellers, brand stewards, marketing gurus (yes that was on one of the sites), dynamic social directives officers. Whatever. It all sounds false and a little desperate to me.

As for the agencies who insist on calling themselves that, I believe their future can be summed up in two words found in every story.