Why am I passionate about this?
I taught writing and copywriting at Columbus College of Art & Design in Ohio for thirty-seven years (retiring as an ancient-but-somehow-still-living fossil in 2014). I taught all our majors, but most of my copywriting students were advertising and design majors. During those decades I wrote nonfiction for newspapers and magazines and copy as a freelancer for ad agencies and design studios. My copywriting book emerged from my experiences in and out of the classroom. I hope I’ve given good advice on advertising: how to think about it and how to write it. But you’ll be the judge.
George's book list on copywriters on the rise
Why did George love this book?
Howard Luck Gossage was an advertising innovator—a genius, really—whose ideas leapt far ahead of traditional advertising. Working in San Francisco during the Mad Men era, he created unusual campaigns that got people involved, inviting them to reply, assist, and even create the ads themselves; in short, he devised interactive advertising before there was such a thing. His iconoclastic, liberating ideas influenced everyone. As Jeff Goodby put it, “When Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein was opened in 1983, we ran an ad with Howard’s picture and the headline: 'An advertising agency founded by a man who’s been dead for 14 years.' Gossage was the plastic guy on our dashboard and we were out there hitting the gas in his honor.” When you read about how he worked, how he thought, and what he created, you’ll press the pedal to the metal yourself.
1 author picked Changing the World Is the Only Fit Work for a Grown Man as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
This is the story of a 'sixties adman who harnessed the big ideas of his age and set out to reinvent advertising - and then change the world. In so doing he introduced interactive, PR-generating stunts, and social media - way back in the 1960s. Then he used them to save the Grand Canyon, kick-start the Green Movement, free a Caribbean island and launch Wired magazine's 'patron saint', Marshall McLuhan. And he did it all with a flamboyance that inspired the likes of Tom Wolfe, John Steinbeck and the makers of the counterculture. His name was Howard Luck Gossage. These…