Confession time
May 17th, 2008 | by Paul |First of all, I’m sorry my hiatus took so long. I think I’m mostly apologizing to myself. What started as an assignment has turned into something I really enjoy doing. It sucks that my other projects have taken away from the easiest one — writing about things I believe in.
I was thinking about this today as I rode my bike (another thing I’ve had to keep pushing to the back burner). Then it hit me. I’ve been doing this basically all year and I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I used to be an ad man.
OK, so it’s not like I was figuring how to get kids to smoke or revamping McDonald’s image into a healthy one. My biggest two projects were copy-editing a marshmallow company’s Web site and writing the corporate history of a cheese company. There’s no link for the cheese company history, as it was for special events tied with the company’s 60th anniversary. I also worked on a soy company’s client releases, but that’s not as funny.
How do I, guy-who-has-a-site-ostensibly-about-anticonsumerism, justify this? Simple. I needed money.
Right after college, I started freelancing for the firm where my sister worked. They would kick me some work when they were in a bind and give me a couple bucks for my trouble. I kept doing it on and off even after I got a full-time job at a newspaper. Have you ever seen a reporter’s salary? I made more money as a tour guide.
I never felt bad about it, probably because the cheese thing was my first job. Who can feel bad about a cheesemaker wanting to celebrate 60 years in business? Who can feel anythingabout a cheesemaker wanting to celebrate 60 years in business?
The company was an interesting one. It made off-brand cheese. I know that sounds disgusting, but all it means is that the company makes the cheese and sells it to other companies, who then put their label on it. Ever see Tostito’s Salsa Con Queso? That’s the off-brand cheese company’s queso.
What? You think Tostitos bought a dairy just for one product line? Companies do that all the time. It’s like the Brand X raisins versus Sun-Maid or whatnot. They’re the same raisins. Some just go into one box, some into the other. You’re just paying extra for the brand name.
Anyway, I never felt bad about my ad work. Except for looking for typos in a marshmallow company’s Web site (where I learned several interesting marshmallow facts), everything I worked on was B to B. That means business to business. Taking as an example the soy thing. It was a company that processed soy nuts, then tried to sell them to food companies as flour or whole nuts or crushed nuts. They wanted bread companies to put them as a high-protein additive. They wanted those places that cover soybeans in wasabi to use their soybeans.
It was wonderful because there were no attempts to artificially create demand. The bread company might not have included soy flour before, but it would be making bread. The wasabi-soybean places were looking for soy nuts anyway. All it was was getting them to look at this guy’s nuts.
Long way to go for a pretty bad joke, huh? It’s all true, though. I did work on this project.
I’m not against advertising. I find some of it disgusting, but I don’t see the harm in getting your name out when there’s an authentic demand for your product. When people try to manufacture demand, that’s when I have a problem.
Oh, and apparently marshmallow as a candy dates back to ancient Egypt. Who knew?