This story was told to me by Evan Stark, talented copywriter best known for the TV spot, “Mama Mia, That’s A Spicy Meatball” for Alka Seltzer. When Doyle Dane Bernbach won the Alka Seltzer account in the late 60′s, Evan and his partner Roy Grace wanted to review the historical reel of Alka Seltzer TV [...]

Sometimes, life hands you a pile of crap — even if you’re just 7 years old.  My parents had just bought me the best gift in the world – a shiny red wagon. I was so excited, I wheeled it all the way down Bolton Street where we lived in the Bronx to show my [...]

That’s Joe Rein in a recent photo with the great Manny Pacquiao. Joe was our VP of Broadcast Production at Cohen/Johnson.  It was a big job because we were producing over 75 TV spots a year. He was an experienced, street smart, can-do kind of guy.  A former prizefighter whose tough battles in the ring [...]

The jingle is a lost art. At some point, creative people in our business decided jingles weren’t cool.  Instead, they started using pop tunes to propel their TV commercials and videos along or they abandoned music altogether. Pop tunes can be great, but their weakness is that they’re generic and interchangeable, unlike a great jingle [...]

The last campaign that Bob and I did at Wells, Rich, Greene before starting our own agency was a controversial one. In early ’73, Hush Puppies hired the agency and asked for the guys who did the Alka Seltzer campaign.  Their business was hurting and they were looking for some kind of breakthrough to make [...]

It was Julio DiIorio’s worst nightmare.  A potentially life-altering experience.  An anatomical disaster of epic proportions.  Yet, it began so pleasantly. In early 1970, all of us at Wells, Rich, Greene were offered a nice perk.  One of Mary Wells’ many rich friends was developing an amazing property in Acapulco called Tres Vidas En La [...]

Who better to write great Alka Seltzer commercials than Jewish copywriters who grew up knowing, firsthand, that burning feeling in their hearts!  In this post, I pay tribute to two of my favorite neurotic Jewish copywriters. Bob Schulman, pictured here, was a one-of-a-kind writer who crafted what I would call 60 second screenplays.  His hysterical [...]

Advertising is a serious business.  With every creative campaign, brands and careers are on the line.  So, it’s easy to fall into the trap of becoming very grownup and serious. That’s a mistake. Serious is the enemy of creativity.  It strangles free thought and suffocates inspiration.  So, I’ve always made it a point to stay [...]

Today, I was in a long strategy meeting at the agency and was eager to get out before my brain melted when one of our talented art directors, Armand Kerechuk, said, “No, no, don’t go, I’ve gotta show you something!” And with that, he whipped out his iPhone and showed me some pics he had [...]

At Wells, Rich, Greene/LA, one of our most challenging accounts was Columbia Pictures.  The agency was responsible for doing the advertising for all of their releases, which added up to about 20 films a year. In 1979, there was great anticipation for a film called Nightwing, which the marketing guys at Columbia saw as a [...]