April 19, 1955

Dear Mr. Calt:

On March 22nd you wrote to me asking for some notes on my work habits as a copywriter. They are appalling, as you are about to see:

1. I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.

2. I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years.

3. I am helpless without research material—and the more “motivational” the better.

4. I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.

5. Before actually writing the copy, I write down every concievable fact and selling idea. Then I get them organized and relate them to research and the copy platform.

6. Then I write the headline. As a matter of fact I try to write 20 alternative headlines for every advertisement. And I never select the final headline without asking the opinion of other people in the agency. In some cases I seek the help of the research department and get them to do a split-run on a battery of headlines.

7. At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)

8. I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts.

9. If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.

10. The next morning I get up early and edit the gush.

11. Then I take the train to New York and my secretary types a draft. (I cannot type, which is very inconvenient.)

12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.

Altogether it is a slow and laborious business. I understand that some copywriters have much greater facility.

Yours sincerely,

D.O.

When you can’t support your favorite team in the Super Bowl, one thing you can do is tune in to see if the commercials live up to expectation (a nearly impossible feat). With the amount of money spent each year on these spots (about $3.5M per 30 sec for media alone in 2012), needless to say the bar is extremely high. It is also telling of possible trends we can expect in advertising over the course of the year.

In a word: Dogs.

While cat people enjoyed a recent surge in all things kitten and cute over the past year, the dogs clearly had a leg up in the competition this year.

Case in point. Kim Kardashian’s contract was up with Sketcher’s and they replaced her with, yup you guessed it – a dog, or more accurately “Mr. Quiggly.”

…and though I enjoy the little old school snippet of Tone Loc thrown in at the end for good measure, I think Mr. Quiggly was slightly upstaged by Bud Light’s “Here we go” dog who fetches his owners…what else? Bud Light.

This was followed by sled dogs for the Suzuki spot, which demonstrates that even in Alaska, wives are always nagging their husbands about something and the husbands are always trying to pull something over on their wives.

But by far, my favorite spot of the day which also featured a dog, was Volkswagon’s newest spot entitled “The Dog Strikes Back” which followed up the very popular Star Wars spot.

I mean, that dog can act!

Not to mention ALL the doggy Doritos commercials! In the next one you will see people acting as dumb as dogs, as opposed to the other way around. Nice spin.

And when you run out of cute dogs, don’t worry, there are always babies, polar bears and other cute characters to expect in your commercials.

For close to a decade we have had the distinct pleasure of working with one of the most strategic and innovative marketers in the world of higher education. His name, like his risk tolerance is uncommon: Sundar Kumarasamy. He is the Vice President for Enrollment Management and Marketing at the University of Dayton, and in addition to being a long-time friend and client of 160over90, he is constantly going against the grain in an industry often riddled with clichés.

But don’t take our word for it.

In addition to being featured in a Forbes article alongside Steve Cannon, vice president of marketing for Mercedes-Benz USA, Sundar, in collaboration with the agency, was also featured by Adobe, discussing our development of the first fully interactive university viewbook iPad application, which utilized Adobe’s digital publishing suite software. And now, The Chronicle of Higher Education has written a feature article documenting his unique and sometimes controversial approach to higher education marketing.

Published on New Year’s Day, highlights from the article include:

The mesmerizing “mission wall” sprang from Mr. Kumarasamy’s head, which may or may not contain humming wires and hot circuits. He’s a fast-thinking marketer who seeks a precious share of teenagers’ attention even as he tries to distinguish his university’s mission, its intangible heart, in a world immersed in shallow slogans.

Case Study UD from Flightphase on Vimeo.

“This could have been a six-figure mistake,” says Sundar Kumarasamy of the custom-built “mission wall” he designed for the U. of Dayton’s welcome center. The wall is meant to convey the importance of community—and to grab teenagers’ famously fleeting attention.

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Imagining a New Brand

Early on, Mr. Kumarasamy hired a Philadelphia-based marketing firm, called 160over90, to help redesign the university’s viewbook, in which photographs of the campus chapel’s ivy-covered walls had long figured prominently. The new version, unveiled in the fall of 2007, was fresh and edgy, full of questions (“Where do you find faith?”), and images striking and strange. Perhaps none was as memorable as the photograph of two bare-shouldered blonde women emblazoned with the question: “Do you know more about Lindsay Lohan than Darfur?”

To say the least, some faculty members and students hated each of the viewbook’s 84 pages. The campus newspaper, the Flyer News, dubbed the publication a “glossy orgy” that reflected poorly on Dayton.

Although the viewbook marked a break with tradition, Mr. Kumarasamy believed that it also expressed—in fresh, bright colors—the university’s Marianist values, which he had studied carefully. A Marianist maxim says “New times call for new methods,” and that has become his own mantra.

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A Changing Campus

As another week begins at Dayton, the fall recruitment cycle is in full swing. On this Monday morning, applications are up by 1,000 over the same date last year.

Since 2002, applications have increased to 11,567 from 7,496. Enrollment of out-of-state students has increased to 48 percent from 35 percent. Average ACT scores are up, and so are retention rates.

All those numbers, Mr. Curran believes, reflect Dayton’s inherent strengths, but he credits Mr. Kumarasamy with finding clever answers to a million-dollar question: “How do you get people to look at you?”

‘We Compete for Memory’

Enrollment management is often described as the balance between marketing and mission. At religious institutions, where morality and social justice are typically everyday concerns, that tension is especially pronounced. Mr. Kumarasamy takes seriously the framed copy of the pledge on his bookshelf; in it, he vowed to remain “spiritually present, alive and open to the call [of] the Marianist charism and mission.”

Still, he is blunt about the necessity of market¬ing muscle. “If you have 10 shops on the same street selling Chinese food,” he says, “how do you think each shop should behave? Unfortunately, it’s an over¬crowded marketplace in this noble industry. If we shouldn’t compete, we should be prepared to go out of business one day.”

Dayton, he believes, owes visitors a unique experience, a feeling they can take with them. “We are living in a time when we compete for memory,” he says of colleges. “If their journey doesn’t begin the moment they first arrive on the campus, when does it begin?”

In Mr. Kumarasamy’s own story lies the enigma of the right fit. He says: “It’s more of a feeling, a silent voice that says, ‘This is where I belong.’ It’s not easily quantifiable. How do you give evidence about falling in love?”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy09cXwsz6w

You Kutztown kids did a fine job of imitating us for this poster photoshoot, we must say. Despite all the time that Doug & I spend crafting our ~*~signature looks~*~, apparently we can each be simplified for parody purposes:

Doug — a mustache.
Me — glasses & a scarf.

Above: side-by-side comparisons of a couple of our favorite student impersonators vs. THE REAL THING. (We couldn’t do a real-time comparison because Doug shaved off his mustache last week. THANKS, DOUG.)

Thank YOU, Kutztown! Hope to see your internship applications filling up our inbox ASAP.

I think moments like this deserve more than that.

With “The League of A.W.E.S.O.M.E.” poster, the thinking was to make something more. To look past “expected” and see, well, “awesome.” The superhero-ness of Wilkes’ mascot guided us to the idea of a silver age inspired comic featuring The Colonel and his trusted sidekicks (one representing each of Wilkes’ fields of study and the Athletics department).

18 inches x 36 inches of youth, humor, power, tradition, and community all wrapped in a whole new way to see an acceptance package.

This is to remembering college is fun.
Dorm room walls rejoice!

When we realized we hadn’t yet gotten around to hosting an event at our office in Newport Beach, California, we seized the opportunity to host a party/fundraiser to spread the word. Tuesday evening, staff, clients, and friends both old and new joined us for our “160overNine-Nine-Ninety Whiplash Bash.” The punch was flowing, and so were the $$$s. Thanks for the contributions, and for helping us open up our new digs in style. And thanks to the locals for welcoming us and not busting up our boards. Next stop, White House!

Check out some of these hot pics:

Upstairs view of the office, located in the amazing Cannery Village of Newport Beach:

These garage doors really let in a lot of bugs. Who comes up with this stuff?

The piles of magazines prove that we’re for real:

Despite some of the world’s freshest seafood being literally steps from our door, we imported these oysters all the way from Nova Scotia! Take that, carbon footprint! And the flowers are edible (I had five, but they didn’t really taste like anything). Decadent!

Doubly decadent!:

Meanwhile, just down the street, Wednesday morning. If this beach was at the Jersey Shore, there’d be like a billion people on it:

But truth be told, I couldn’t be bothered to type more than a few sentences—I ate, like, a loaf of breadsticks.

So I’ll leave it at this: we went to Olive Garden for lunch today. The experience was a strange mixture of depressing, amusing, and filling. And because it was Chelsea Brink’s last Friday lunch on the Beast Coast, we took this religiously insensitive picture.

(With apologies to Leonardo da Vinci and God.)