Dawn of a New Era

A degree in psychology convinced me not to become a psychologist. Living in Israel helped me decide not to become a rabbi.  So what’s a boy to do when he grows up? Which Siren might call, beckoning me to my destiny?

The world didn’t need another lawyer, my grades wouldn’t get me into medical school, and the finance industry seemed utterly alien, hostile and beyond my reach.

Waiting on tables through college had given me more than my fill of the restaurant business. Date farming taught me that agriculture was not my thing.

I couldn’t sing, and my guitar playing was worse.  Cameras didn’t particularly like me either in front of or behind the lens. I couldn’t fix anything automotive, and the NBA prospects were slim for a six-footer who couldn’t dribble, pass, shoot or jump.

About the only thing I was any good at was writing.

So there was my clue: be a writer.

But be a writer of what?

I had published a couple freelance articles in a local newspaper and trade journal, mainly because my girlfriend’s father made an introduction for me to some people who offered a modest fee to write about some events they wanted publicized.

I didn’t really know the difference between journalism and public relations, other than the obvious distinction of who was paying.  I knew nothing about reporting and had no defined political stand from which I could pontificate. I wasn’t rude, crude or shrewd enough to corner people and demand answers to loaded questions. Instead of demolishing reputations, achievements, companies or myths, I was inclined to admire and believe.

Perhaps because I was a nice guy, my fiction seemed fictional, and was a yawn even for me to read.  I had no idea how to write a novel or screenplay and couldn’t afford to spend years figuring it out. I needed to make some money.

My girlfriend at the time was a nurse and in the midst of applying to medical school. Randy was her name. She had a dream, a good dream, of being a physician. In terms of career dreams, I was sleep-deprived.

Then a neighbor down the hall from our Chicago apartment suggested advertising.

Advertising.

I liked that idea, though all I knew about it came from reading (and loving) Jerry Della Femina’s memoir, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.  I was not quite sixteen years old when I read it, and never forgot that book. He made the business of advertising seem creative and fun, qualities I yearned for in a job. In an ad agency it seemed you could get a regular paycheck and health care benefits just for coming up with ideas. 

“So, Chuck,” I said to my neighbor who wrote copy for a direct mail agency. “How do I go about getting a job as a copywriter?”

Chuck looked at the stuff I had written, which was related to the healthcare field largely because of my girlfriend. “You’ve written about medical stuff,” he said, “so let’s look for medical ad agencies.”

I’d never heard of such a beast, and only after he said it did I notice that the medical journals my girlfriend read did indeed have ads in them. They were mostly ads for drugs. Chuck found a directory of Chicago agencies at his office, and copied down the names of three that specialized in medical advertising.

I called the creative director of each, and to my surprise found that one of them was actually looking for new writers. We made an appointment to meet, where I could show him my crude portfolio, and talk. I was naive enough to believe I might actually get a job despite lacking relevant experience.

On the appointed day I donned a tie, an extremely wide 1960’s hand-me-down from my older brother, and the black pants I wore as a waiter, and went downtown to meet with Bill Schmidt, the creative director. Bill was a bespectacled, pipe-smoking, lean fellow who had enough self-control not to burst out laughing when he gazed at my tie and meager portfolio. There was nothing in my articles, or self-styled public relations promotional work, that bore any semblance to the copywriting craft in which he excelled.

Bill saw something, though, that gave him pause before completely dismissing me. Whether it was my bushy beard, or the hungry look in my eyes, or the fact that I had somehow cobbled together a portfolio-like object out of thin air, he wasn’t sure. But there was something about me, perhaps the way I spoke, that he later said gave him a hunch. So instead of merely sending me away, he gave me a test project to see if I had any ability to do the kind of work he needed done.

The challenge was to create an ad that would introduce a new kind of medicine for the treatment of duodenal ulcers. I didn’t know “duodenal” from “doo wop,” but I was not about to let complete and total ignorance stop me. The ad was to be written for physicians, as the product was to be a prescription-only pharmaceutical, and could not be obtained without the physician’s written approval.  It could be as long or short as I thought necessary, and was left entirely to my imagination and analytic skills as to how to structure the ad.

I could come back in a week or a month, as Bill had no expectation he’d ever see me again. We parted with him giving me a brief description of the product, which I suspected was an imaginary drug contrived for purposes of testing novice copywriters. The pretend product was called sucralfate.

The year was 1981, the generation before computers opened up the world of anything you’d want to know at the touch of a button. This was still the era of plodding through reference books, trade journals and other manual resources.

Randy had a number of medical textbooks and reference materials for me to look up duodenal ulcers, and the currently available treatments. With a medical dictionary serving as my interpreter, I waded through The Merck Manual, Goodman & Gilman, and several other scientific tomes. I found that the really long words in medicine were mostly derived from shorter ones that, upon closer inspection, actually made sense. You just had to crack the code.

I scanned through some medical journals to study the form and style of ads for drugs, and noticed that “introductory” ads, those touting products newly available, tended to be longer than those for drugs that had been around for a while. Beyond that, it seemed that the bigger an advance the product represented, the longer the ad, and the paper they were printed on seemed thicker than the regular magazine pages.

I tried calling a couple of physicians whose names I obtained from the phone book, who specialized in diseases of the gastrointestinal (or “GI” as those in the know refer to it) tract, to ask them what they thought about when they treated duodenal ulcers. I learned one thing very quickly:  doctors expected payment for time spent “consulting” on drugs, and except for one very nice fellow, was bluntly told not to call back without offering an honorarium. Medicine was indeed a business and information, even opinions, came with a price tag.

As I looked through one of Randy’s medical journals, I happened upon a short article about a new ulcer drug that showed promise. The drug was sucralfate. I was stunned. That was the name of my make-believe product. I read the article a second time to be sure I was seeing what I thought I saw. No doubt about it, the imaginary drug was real.

I showed Randy the article, and she said that she would tap into the library resources at the hospital where she worked to find articles about this drug. She came home the next day with a number of scientific articles about the clinical trials that had been done with sucralfate.  Suddenly my imaginary job test became very real.

I devoured the articles, pausing to consult the medical dictionary every other word, until I actually understood the drug, the disease, and even some basic biology of the GI tract. “GI tract.” Like a child calling an adult by their first name, I felt uneasy with this newfound familiarity. Was I out of line using the same acronym as people smart enough to not only get into medical school, but graduate?  Armed with the mastery of my subject that three days of research can earn you, I began creating the ad.

The next few days saw me producing pages of typed word experiments, cut out pictures from magazines, and ultimately came up with eight pages of what seemed a reasonable way to advertise the new drug.  I thought one of my headlines waxed poetic while signaling a change in the way ulcers would be treated from now on. It would be some years later that I’d grimace at the hackneyed, overused cliché that was still new to my ears at the time.

Dawn of a New Day in Ulcer Treatment.

I selected graphics for the ad, using a photo of mountains with the sun coming up behind it, portending the hopes and potential of the new morning. My layout was a half step up from an elementary school art project, with cut out graphics, handwritten headlines, and unevenly cut blocks of typed copy pasted onto plain white paper. Thankfully I wasn’t interviewing for an art director job.

Bill invited me in the next day when I told him I was ready with my test project.

“It’s only been a week,” he said. “I didn’t expect to hear from you for at least a couple weeks. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

With a little excitement and a lot of trepidation, I handed him the scientific magazine into which I had crudely inserted the eight-page ad, so that it might look more real.  He nodded and smiled appreciatively as he took the medical journal. Given the thickness of my pages, layered as they were with glued-on slabs of paper, it took barely a moment for him to open up to the ad.

Having never shown anybody an ad I had created, I was not sure how to gauge Bill’s response. But even then I sensed that his was a reaction not soon to be forgotten. His eyes opened wide and his mouth registered surprise as he looked at the first page. Then his eyebrows furrowed as he quickly turned and scanned each of the subsequent pages. He didn’t say a word, but shook his head at least twice and mumbled something. I thought it might have been “Son of a…” but it trailed off to quiet. It was probably only another twenty seconds, but the silence felt like an eternity, as I sat nervously awaiting his judgment. 

Finally he looked up, fixed me with an interrogator’s glare, and said, “Who have you talked to?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. “I tried calling a couple doctors out of the phone book, but they didn’t want to talk without getting paid.”

“No,” he said. “I mean here. Who did you talk to that works here?”

“Just you,” I said, wondering what he was asking. I might’ve said “hi” to Lorraine the receptionist, but that couldn’t be what he was asking.

He looked back at the ad again, and thumbed through it as he said, “Come with me. I’ve got to show you something.” He carried my magazine with the ad and led the way from his corner office down the hall to the office of a fellow he introduced as Dudley the art director. As we shook hands Bill asked if we’d ever met or talked. Ever. We both replied no.

Bill then handed him the magazine with my ad and told him to take a look at what I had done. As Dudley opened the journal, the creative director pointed to a wall upon which hung the most recent version of an ad being prepared for the introduction of Carafate®, the brand name of sucralfate. I was shocked. Dudley looked at the amateurish ad I had created and his jaw slacked open, too.

The ad I had done and the ad he had been working on with his veteran copywriting partner were almost identical.

My headline was “Dawn of a New Day in Ulcer Treatment.”

Their headline, “Dawn of a New Era in Ulcer Therapy.”

Mine had a graphic of mountains in the background with the sun rising behind them.

Theirs had a silhouette of mountains behind which the sun was rising.

Mine was eight pages long.

Theirs was eight pages long.

Mine first described what this drug was to be used for and why it was different from current drugs used for duodenal ulcers.

So did theirs.

Mine offered an overview of the clinical trials that proved it was effective and safe.

So did theirs.

Mine finished with a final page of summary points reinforcing why it represented a “New Day” in ulcer treatment, as did Dudley’s.

The only difference beyond the fact mine looked like a child cut and pasted it together while theirs looked professionally produced was the fact that their version was the result of over a year of concept development, market research, rewriting and refining, more market research, and input from multiple levels of agency and client management. Mine was the result of a green novice spending a week with some magazines, a scissors, glue, and a typewriter.

I felt a little like the monkey left in a room with a hundred other monkeys and typewriters, that against all odds had just produced literature.

Bill marched me back to his office, sat me down and asked, “When can you start?”

I was still digesting the fact that my ad didn’t suck, and answered, “What time is it now?”

He asked, “How much do you need to be paid?”

There was the question I dreaded. It would have been easier for me to get thrown out and declared hopelessly inept.  I had no idea how much a copywriter was paid. I figured the most I had ever earned as a waiter was around twelve thousand dollars a year, so I was prepared to accept anything that came close to it.  Ten would not have been out of the question.

As I saw it, though, there would be some negotiating involved, so I shouldn’t set the bar too low. But what if I priced myself right out of the job?  I figured “what the hell” and came out with a number that was bold, daring, and risky. “I suppose I’d need something in the range of seventeen or eighteen thousand. Sixteen thousand minimum.” I braced myself for the rejection. I wasn’t prepared for what he actually said.

“How about we just round it off at an even twenty thousand to start.”

For a guy whose biggest paydays had always come in the form of gratuities, this was astonishing. To this day I have never felt so wealthy, so deliriously rich, as the moment he rounded the offer up to twenty.

“I’m going to give you a chance to prove this test was not a fluke,” my new boss said. “I’ll give you three months to show me you deserve a staff position. Think of it as a hunting license to bag an account of your own. Make yourself useful, learn the craft of copywriting, and we’ll decide if you stay.”

It was the dawn of a new era in my life. From student days, waiting on tables and living with second hand furniture, to the austere times as a date farmer and life-on-the-road backpacker, to this, the days of making money just for thinking. The amazing part was they’d pay me to do stuff I thought was fun.