by Ronan Doyle, Creative Director

As I roll into my 12^th year in the advertising business I can’t help but look back at the very unlikely path that led me here, and what it was that first had me thinking that this is something I could do, and do well.

I didn’t set out to be a copywriter when I headed off to college. I was a business major briefly, believing I’d be happy as a bank manager. There was no real foundation to this desire other than the fact that our family friend with the best cars and houses was a VP at a bank. I loved his cool contemporary home, and his classic ’71 Mercedes, so I wanted to do what he did. I then considered psychology because I had a great psych 101 professor who entertained me, and had me thinking that a better understanding of psychology would allow me to get a handle on my own bizarre neurosis. Like, for example, my need to have the inner most pleat on my pants ironed carefully into the crease of the legs. Thank God for flat front chinos.

It wasn’t until I was a senior in college that I even became aware of advertising as a career. Previously, my only knowledge of it was Angela Bower’s agency on Who’s The Boss. I was too young to be a 30 Something viewer, so I unfortunately missed that stellar show, and its portrayal of the ad biz. The more creatively driven assignments that my communications or marketing classes offered up, the better I did. Suddenly, acing a class became second nature. This stuff just made sense to me. After all, success in advertising seems to require a little business, a little psychology, and a lot of neurosis.  All my learning to that point had prepared me well.

Of course, knowing nothing about the structure of an ad agency, copywriter wasn’t something that was on my radar at all. I was taking a much more macro approach and began to think that I simply wanted to pursue advertising.

I graduated. I began sending letters to ad agencies. I was obviously getting nowhere because I had no idea what, exactly, I was going to do within the walls of those agencies. Then I saw an ad. A print ad for Volkswagon. I was waiting, coincidentally, to have the tires on my car replaced, and was flipping through the magazines in the waiting room. I don’t remember the headline of the ad at all. I barely remember the layout. I do know it was for a Jetta (we’ll come back to that later) and I do remember what I found so remarkable about the ad: the fine print.

Somewhere buried below a photograph, in 8-pt italicized type was some legal jargon about MSRP and extra options shown in the photograph. Must’ve been a price ad, come to think of it. But then, as I read the final line of the legal copy, I knew exactly what I wanted to spend my career doing. The line read: Always wear your safety belt. And we’ve heard some good things about beta carotene, too. I re-read it. And re-read it again. And I knew that someone did that. Someone intentionally snuck that simple little joke into the legal copy. And some company, in this case Volkswagon, liked it enough to let it through. And I knew that I was going to do that. I knew I could. I knew that I could spend my life thinking of ways to communicate ideas. And that I could find as much pleasure in the tiniest details as in the broadest strokes. And that there were companies out there, like Volkswagon, who would keep coming back saying, “give us more,” and that I would be happy to do it. And that the smallest little things I could think of would add to the personality of a brand, and make it just a little more special than it already was.

That VW ad, with it’s quirky little legal copy that was probably overlooked by 90% or more of its readers, changed my life. It also served the company that approved it well, because later that year, I bought a VW Jetta. And I did so because I knew I was part of a really cool club of people who chose a company like VW that’s juts a little different, and cares a lot about the details. And then, with my Jetta, I went into advertising. Which works out pretty well when you think back to that pants pleats OCD of mine, since the life of a creative means rarely, if ever, wearing pants that need ironing.