I wrote a terrible bank ad that didn’t get me a place in Axis Ad School 1997, but the following year I wrote another terrible ad. Then in 1999 I got in with my ad about noise control. It showed a house wearing a giant pair of earmuffs. Perhaps I somehow knew I’d one day own two pairs of earmuffs for wearing around my children.
After one week in the classroom, where an ad agency creative taught the class “the client is a brainless shithead”, and another shared his thoughts with a slide presentation titled “Out of my mind”, the remaining two months of Axis was placement in an ad agency to write ads from briefs from the school and, if we were lucky, live briefs.
My partner and I were placed at Y&R Auckland, where the creative director, Gordon Clarke - nicknamed “God" - had recently hired a new junior creative team (writer and art director). One of the juniors had got into Ad School with an ad about respecting parking wardens that showed a car taking up two parking spaces, and the headline “Who’s the arsehole now?” He showed early promise as a standup comedian when, noticing a small toy spider on a landline phone, he quipped “your phone’s bugged”, while standing up.
One day God gave me the best advice I’d ever received. I was a fragile, autistic 25 year-old and I told him I was “going through a rough patch” in my life. “Get over yourself,” he replied. Another time I showed him some soft lines I’d written for an ad aimed at people with road rage: ‘No, you need something like “Road rage is for fuckwits.”’ This inspired me to write an ad that showed a prison door, with the line “People are locking doors because of road rage.” God liked, and improved it: Doors are being locked because of road rage.
The final brief - and the one we were judged on - was to create a three-ad print campaign to encourage people to register their dogs. My brilliant art director - Hayden Chambers - and I made the three ads pictured. We won second place. The winning team wrote the line “It’s not the same when you’ve lost your dog.”, and I remember one of their ads pictured a book called 100 Dalmations. That team got hired, but we didn’t. Hayden and I separated and I continued to job hunt alone.
Unsuccessful, I decided to return to AUT to complete my three-year Diploma in Advertising. I took a paper called Copywriting. “Unusual name for something that’s meant to be original,” quipped the lecturer Jim Falconer. Jim was a retired creative who’d worked in ad agencies around the world. He told the class that when he’d worked in the USA he put the red “o” in Mobil, and that he wrote “Fresh Up - It’s got to be good for you” and the “Cats prefer Chef” jingle.
I dug Jim’s dry humour: he recalled being approached by a thug while stopped at traffic lights in South Africa, only a few days after being robbed. The thug demanded money, to which Jim replied “I’ve already given.”
Jim showed us not only great ads - for example a print ad for the American Association of Advertising Agencies in response to claims that advertising was too manipulative, that showed a picture of Moses holding the two rocks inscribed with the Ten Commandments, and the line “However powerful a message is, some people may not buy it.” - but also great poems such as Marianne Williamson's “Our Deepest Fear” and Robert Frost's “The Road Not Taken”. Jim thought the latter was about the decision to become an artist. I think it’s about that etc.
To make ends meet I was kitchenhanding at two restaurants across the road from each other in the affluent suburb of Remuera. Late one night, cycling home from work I approached traffic lights, where a gang of Remuera youths loitered, spilling out onto the road. I gave them minimal wide berth and one of them grabbed my handlebars, forcing me to stop. Then another guy mashed a slice of buttered bread into my face. Next thing I knew I was lying on the road hearing a woman yell from her car window “leave him alone!” One of the delinquents had punched me in the mouth and knocked me out - the only time in my life I’ve been KO’d. I got to my feet and yelled “get back, in Jesus’ name!” They went back to eating their lunch. White bred. It was too late for them to retrieve their buttered bread... they'd already given.
Next day I told work I couldn’t come in because I’d been assaulted. The day after that my colleagues saw my injury and said they’d expected it to be far worse. Perhaps instead of having a sick day I should’ve got over myself.
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