In Hey, Whipple you wrote reverentially about working at Fallon during its hey-day. What made it so special?

When I joined Fallon McElligott, I would tell my friends how intimidated I was by all the smart people already on staff there. I used to say, “OK, the office arrangement on my side of the building goes like this: Genius… genius… genius… Luke’s office… genius… genius.” That’s when my friend Rod Kilpatrick would correct me and say, “No, no, no, Luke. The layout goes: Genius… genius… genius…  STAIRWELL … Luke’s office… genius… genius.”

The thing is, I still think of them as geniuses. Because they were. The proof was in the work, work which for years was the high-water mark of the industry.

I suppose we all have places we hold dear in our hearts. Times and places where everything seemed to be firing on all cylinders, where nothing was more important than the work, where every department was aligned to one purpose, where every person you met in the hallways was someone you could learn from, where politics didn’t exist, and everyone rooted for everyone else. That’s what it was like at Fallon McElligott. Those were the days.

In Hey, Whipple you encourage copywriters to focus on benefits and not features. Do you get a lot of feedback on that from readers?

Not particularly. I can tell you the single most wonderful thing about having written a book that’s gone into six editions is the vast number of emails I’ve received from people saying thank you. Thanks for writing the book that got me into the advertising industry. Man, that does not get old.

When I first wrote the book in 1998, there were no other good books on advertising available — zero. Since then, some really good titles have been published, some of which I used in my own classroom when I taught for 10 years. I am convinced that what makes Whipple different from all of the others is its tone. I think readers may agree I don’t take myself very seriously and am cracking wise at pretty much every opportunity. Most textbooks seem to think they have to take an academic approach in order to be credible. I didn’t.

I wrote Whipple when I was at Fallon. I had been saving speeches and articles for a few years in a file. Gradually, I started adding other people’s advice, insights, and articles and the file eventually grew big, unruly, and bad-tempered. Then one day, when I had to give a speech at the Portfolio Center in Atlanta, I raided that file for all it was worth. I handed out the notes of the speech and later learned the notes were turning up as screen savers in agencies here and there. In addition to being flattered, I began thinking there was a market for a decent book on advertising. Most books were pretty bad. All you had to do was look at the examples of “good advertising” these books contained and you could tell the authors weren’t practitioners of the craft, at least the craft I practiced. So, I just started writing. I didn’t have a publisher nor any hope that such a book would ever make it to the shelves of bookstores. But that was beside the point; I had to write this book mostly get it out of my system. After I had finished, I showed the first manuscript around to about 40 people I admired, just folks in the business: creatives, account folks, directors. Every one of them was kind enough to read the entire thing and give criticism. I am still in debt to those people. After that, it was just a matter of getting it into the hands of the right publisher. Not knowing the first thing about the process, I just wandered over to the Barnes & Noble in downtown Minneapolis and bought some books on writing book proposals and other how-to manuals. I followed what they said and that was pretty much it. It was fun. It’s made money, but not John Grisham money. First-time authors rarely make money. It was more of a love and pride thing.

You encourage practitioners to look for tension in a brand’s identity. Which brand do you think does this best?

Tension can mean any number of things. We can find tension inside a product, inside a customer’s mindset, in the cultural milieu, or the brand category. In terms of brand category, I think Burger King has been doing it extremely well for the last 10 years.

Maybe longer, given that Crispin had them in the ’90s. Crispin seemed to smartly reset that brand entirely and BK’s been doing great work ever since, most recently due to Anselmo Ramos’s teams at David/Miami and now at his own agency, GUT.

But if you look at everything BK is doing, they have no compunctions about naming McDonald’s as their competitor, no compunctions about taking them on, making fun of them, burning their ads, punking them. It’s all so stinking good. I use a couple of his campaigns as examples in the new edition.

But in the book, I address a larger use of tension – as a way to tease out brand narratives from any brief. It’s one of my most popular presentations and I’ve given it to agencies all across the world. I’m still available as keynote speaker and agency consultant. My email address is heywhipple@me.com.

What motivated you to leave Minneapolis agency life for Georgia academia?

 Well, I left Fallon after 10 years. My job title changed from staff copywriter to chief creative officer of a $425 million agency. That was a serious reset for me. Being a CD is so different than just being a creative.

From there I went on to one more agency and then one day, after some 33 years in the industry, I realized I wasn’t excited about going into my next client meeting. And you need to have passion and drive to succeed in this business. That day, I realized it wasn’t there. That was when I decided to try my hand at teaching. Teaching seemed a natural shift, having written a book that was being used in schools all over the world.

I enjoyed the heck out of it. Ultimately the school, Savannah College of Art & Design, wanted me to start teaching in classrooms, even while the Covid maps painted Georgia in bright red. I said no but I’d continue teaching remotely. They called that “breach of contract” —  caring for the health of your family is breach of contract? — and forced me to resign. They even fined me $5,000.

You wrote a memoir about your turbulent childhood, which you described as “The Shining … but funnier.” Was the writing of the book cathartic?

They say, “Write about what you know.” So, I have two books. One about advertising. And one about growing up in an insane household ruled by an alcoholic asshole – Thirty Rooms To Hide In: Insanity, Addiction, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic. Of all the things I’ve ever written, I am proudest of this piece. I had high hopes for it when I sent if off to New York publishers. I even had two agents trying to sell it to the bigs in NYC. But neither one was able to, both saying (and correctly so) that the market was flooded at the time with memoirs from children of alcoholics. Fortunately, good old University of Minnesota Press picked it up. And to answer your question, yes, it was very cathartic. The research on that took years and involved stuff like digging up the police reports on the arrest of my father, the police report on the discovery of his body, as well as a copy of the autopsy. I’m lucky I come from a family of writers, because I had years of my mother’s letters to work from, as well as the daily diaries my brothers kept at the time.

What is your favorite campaign that you worked on?

Of all the things I worked on, the one campaign I like the best is a local radio campaign I wrote for Minneapolis’s own Dunwoody Technical School. You can hear my favorites on heywhipple.com. The agency took on the little account mostly because I think there was a connection through the CEO, Pat Fallon (RIP). And the reason why it’s my favorite to this day is we had a client who never changed a single word of the copy. Another reason is the agency didn’t send the work through a phalanx of account people or strategists, and when I recorded them at Voiceworks, the only other person in the studio was a great producer, Andre Bergeron. And to further answer your tensions question from earlier, the strategy I used during the four years of this campaign was simply to pit the usefulness of a degree from Dunwoody against the average bullshit B.A. from a liberal arts college. I made a lot of fun of pretty much anyone who majored in art history. Sorry.

What is next for you?

I’m retired now. But not from speaking and consulting. This sixth edition is everything I learned in 33 years in the business, as well as from the constant studying and keeping-up with the industry you have to do to be an effective professor. All the presentations I offer today on my website are based on the main concepts in the book.

You didn’t ask, but here are a couple of the biggest differences between previous editions and this one.

All the best advice about concepting from the first five editions is there but is improved with new more updated examples. But I completely rewrote the last half of the book which resulted in several new chapters.

For example, I added a new chapter on coming up with ideas, titled: Rewiring Your Brain: Chasing Ideas and Making Big Creative Leaps – it’s a distillation of many new developments in applied creativity and inquiry-based innovation.

Another new chapter is about the role of tech in advertising, titled: Everything That Can Be Digital, Will Be: Creative Tech, Developers, and the Mobile Future.

The old chapter on social media’s been vastly revised and updated, Concepting For The Hive Mind: Creating Buzz with Social Media.  It’s about using emerging technologies and the different technical structures of social media platforms to bring brand stories to life. Two big interviews with two big shots at Facebook/Instagram helped me see social in a new light.

Another big new chapter is Make The Idea Bigger, Not The Logo: Or, Why Branded Content is More Interesting than Advertising.

I added so much new stuff to the copywriting chapter, it might as well be totally new: Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit: The Art of Copywriting.

And I completely rewrote the final chapter on putting together a portfolio, interviewing, and getting a job. All of which I based on ten years of teaching ad students in career strategies classes, titled: Just Start World War III: What it Takes to Get into The Business.