another olde tyme post on the earlie education of a nascent copywriter

As avid readers of this blog (and there seem to be at least couple who don't share an IP address with me) may remember, my first adventure in this glamourous endeavour we call Marketing was as a proofreader in the in-house advertising department of the unsinkable luxury liner of Canadian retail, Eaton's. (Or, chez Québec, Eaton.)

Now, this in-house operation was serious. It was several times larger than some agencies I have subsequently worked at. It pumped out multiple newspaper ads every day, for dailies all across the country, as well as national flyers, DM inserts, credit card statements, in-store signage for over 100 stores, and retail radio spots. They had even just installed computers throughout the department, and set up their own studio using the biggest, fastest Macs being made – the Mac IIcx, I think. In retrospect, for 1989, it was pretty advanced.

I was slightly awed. (Keep in mind, I finished university in one of the last years it was possible to be an undergrad without a computer.) There were some really good people there, folks I learned a lot from. There was a whole new and very precise way of looking at language, something I hadn't really bothered to cultivate at university. And there was a pantload of material to proofread, with most flyers having several versions, based on both pricing and language variations. But in spite of my awe, there was one thing that deeply bothered me.

The tagline. Eaton's tagline throughout the late '80s made no sense to me.

We are. Canada's department store

The necessity to declare your own existence seemed a trifle desperate. (With good reason as it turned out.) But worse for me was the lack of a final period. How can you introduce the idea of a period halfway through a sentence, placing it with a good deal of arbitrariness, then abolish it three words later? Seeing as how they'd hired me as a proofreader, I began to obsess about this. How could mistakes like this happen? No one I worked with seem to know, or at least didn't want to share with some half-bright rookie asking stupid questions.

About a month after I got hired, the Advertising Department held its annual Christmas party.

I was pretty reserved; I didn't know a lot of people, and I was still figuring out who was who, let alone what my job entailed. But for the dinner, I found myself sitting at the same table as the VP of Marketing. (Let me assure you, this isn't a tale of drunken embarrassment.) He was courtly, and solicited people's thoughts, and actual dialogue seemed to occur. Lord knows it was probably painful work for him, but he didn't make it seem that way.

Anyway, at one these junctures of actual dialogue, I somehow found the nerve to ask about the missing period. And he didn't tell me to piss off. He gave me a response filled with what turned out to be the first nuance and insight I encountered in this business.

He said that when they first came up with the line, they had tried it the logical way, with a single period at the end, and that it had seemed a little flat. Then they came up with the two sentence structure, with two periods, but somehow that seemed off, too flat a declaration. Then someone had had the flash of insight to erase the final period, and the declaration "We are" got balanced by the openness of whatever followed, usually "Canada's department store." (It was a little like today's Nissan Shift campaign, with multiple phrases getting dropped in.) Suddenly the damn thing worked.

I had never thought of this before. I'd just assumed that applying the rules to the language would make it correct, and therefore right. As soon as I started thinking about what the line would look like properly punctuated, I saw exactly what he meant.

It was the first time I understood in a working sense that advertising language didn't have to be prose; that it could, if not be poetry, at least use some of the techniques and freedoms of poetry. 

It was the first demonstration I had that what works is much more important than what is correct.

And no, I didn't get fired. I don't think he remembered my name or my impertinence the next day. A nice secondary lesson that it never hurts to ask.