In my 23 year career, I have penned enough ad headlines, brochures, websites, and food packaging copy for the words to wrap around the earth six times. (Spaces included.) From Microsoft to Mighty Dog, I have done it all. So when California Cooler chose another writer’s “romance copy” over mine, it was just the excuse I needed to break-up with my copywriting clients. As most of you know, as I landed more and more naming gigs, writing volumes of copy became less and less appetizing to me. Sure, writing about nutritionally void food was a blast. “Hey kids, how ’bout some ooey gooey Cinnayums!” But when clients tapped me to wax poetic about serious food, like wine (snore) and organics (snore), it sucked. My first hint of this was working on Seeds of Change and being forced to write really sappy things like, “we nourish our bodies.” That’s just not me. You will never find me at Whole Foods. Where you will find me is at Pizza Hut in every Americanized place in the world including Amsterdam, Bangkok, Vienna and Egypt (not the Pizza Hut overlooking the Sphinx – the one in downtown Cairo near the Victoria Hotel). Junk food, Baby! That’s me. And my junk food is names and taglines. That’s what I binge on. So from now on, I vow to never string more than 6 words together to sell a product or service, other than Eat My Words. (BTW, after tossing around some new names for my naming business, including Binge and Alexicon, I decided to stick with Eat My Words. Steve Manning of Igor and Anthony Shore of Landor gave it the thumbs up. Okay, you can’t eat robots. But Eat My Consumer Electronics wasn’t nearly as fun.)
I’ll continue keep my super fun copywriting website on life support because I can’t bear to unplug it.
