author lands book deal with Y&R

Can't get a deal for that novel manuscript? Try ad agencies. Young & Rubicam commissioned Booker award-nominated novelist William Boyd to tell any story he wanted as long as it featured a Land Rover vehicle. Not surprisingly, the commission prompted Boyd to "realize how prominently Land Rover has featured in my life" and write THE VANISHING GAME, a novella published by Land Rover in print and e-version and advertised in display ads and paid posts on Vox, Quartz and NYTimes.com. The story can also be accessed on Tumblr where it's a multi-sensory experience including images, video, animation, sound, music and narration.

The novel-commissioned-by-client isn't unprecedented. In 2001, Bulgari hired novelist Fay Weldon to write any story she wanted, as long as it mentioned the name of the jeweler 12 times. Perhaps because she was a former copywriter (Ogilvy), Weldon exceeded that count, including 34 mentions. That product placement deal, a first in publishing, created quite a kerfuffle, as reported in in the New York Times and Salon. It's not known whether the commission helped Bulgari sell jewelry, but to Weldon's credit, the book still isn't out of print.

Thanks to Shareen Pathak of Digiday for letting us know. 

secret source for building fictional characters

Upon hearing of Secret, a new app that lets you post anonymously, removing the last bits of restraint preventing people from sharing whatever is left they're reluctant to share…seemed to me of dubious value. But then, I signed up. And discovered Secret's true (yet unmarketed) worth: as fodder for writers building fictional characters. "Brought a can of cat food to a dinner party instead of pate and no one noticed." And presto! A fully realized character leaps to your screen, one who'll move freely, creating scenes, engaging in dialogue. Cut. Paste.

RIP Elmore Leonard, ex-copywriter

Elmore Leonard died today, at age 87 while working on his 46th novel. Leonard wasn't always a crime writer, he began as a copywriter, writing ads for cars and trucks in Detroit where his father worked for General Motors. He stayed in advertising for 10 years, getting up at 5 am to write, staying up late to work on his stories, until finally his first crime novel, rejected 84 times, was made into a movie. His mastery of dialogue and plot was legend. No matter what you're writing, your writing can benefit
from his rules of writing:

 1. Never open a book with the weather
2. Avoid prologues
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"
5. Keep your exclamation points under control!
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use dialect sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Same for places + things.
10. Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.

mad men reading list

It's a soggy Saturday where I am (Northwest CT) making it an excellent day to do what you never have time for anymore: reading longform. For Mad Men fans, I've compiled a list of books that memorialize those who fought in the Advertising Wars:

Jerry Della Femina's seminal ad memoir "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor" was first published in 1970 and made the ad business sound so enticing it inspired me (and many others) to go into it.

Yes, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a film but the novel is better imho, even without Gregory Peck's moving performance. Great writing, complex portrait of Mad Men-era office life and satisfying exploration of surprisingly contemporary theme of relative values of family vs. career.

And speaking of novels that are (way) better than films adapted from them, Revolutionary Road tells a dark story in Yates' stellar prose, the tale of a couple who buy into the American Dream of the 1960s and how it all unravels for them. She's a homemaker (of course) and he's got a thankless job in the ad industry (oxymoron?) The book resonates with vivid Mad Men-esque scenes like the one in a hospital waiting room, where everyone is smoking cigarettes.

Joshua Ferris was a copywriter in a cubicle in Chicago which gave him the chops to write a hilarious fictional sendup of the business Then We Came to the End. I defy anyone in advertising to read this without laughing. Out loud. Like I did. On a subway. So loud, the person next to you gives up the seat.

If there is a real-life Peggy Olson, it's Jane Maas who started at Ogilvy in 1964 and rose to be creative director and agency officer. With good-humor, wit and convincing detail, Mad Women tells the story of what it took to break into the mad men's club with award-winning work like the "I Love NY" campaign while raising two daughters you want to grow up to be normal.


I was freelancing at McCann when ECD Nina DiSesa's book came out and corridors were abuzz with alternating takes on the book: "It's brilliant!" "It's slander!" "It's her swan song before getting out of the business!"I immensely enjoyed Seducing the Boys Club which is not only the well-told story of how DiSesa herself ceiling-crashed to the top, it's advice to women in her wake on how to "Lean In" and grab those titles and agency stock-options.

I worked down the hall from John Kenney at Ogilvy and have long admired his writing, not just his elegant copywriter prose, but his humor pieces in the New York Times and the New Yorker which are LOL-funny. So is Truth in Advertising, a new satire on the business, which is alternately sweet and sad and hilariously on target. Gwyneth Paltrow doing a diapers commercial that has to stop filming because the baby cast to be hers turns out to be black? Only a veteran of the business could come up with that.

What are the odds that two ex-copywriters from Ogilvy would come out with a novel set in advertising, at the same time? From the same publisher? Another debut novel from Simon and Schuster this season is my own: Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue. It's a coming-of-middle age story about a woman and a business (advertising, of course.) It’s sort of like Mad Men thirty years later, from the point of view of an older, wiser, married Peggy Olson. One of the themes explored is technology, and the book offers readers opportunities to further explore characters in a digitally enhanced epilogue. Advertising, meet Transmedia. (Hey, where better to peddle your wares than on your own blog?)

Happy reading!