ABSTRACT
Neil’s description of the dyad’s typical process fits their actions on 2/14-15.
The afternoon after the morning’s brainstorming session, Neil, alone at his
PowerBook G3 laptop in his office, typed 20 lines, tag (1), or different passages
of body copy of multiple sentences. Of those, 18 were presented at the tip-ball
ad selection meeting verbatim. He did not linger over his sketchpad that held
scrawled drawings and notes from the morning meeting: “just looked through
it real quick just to see, ‘oh yeah, those are those four that I thought would
work.’” Neil’s notations served as a memory cue rather than a self-contextualized
message. As he told me, if a week elapsed between when he wrote and when
he consulted them, he could not decipher them. Here are the layout ideas and
copy Neil produced the afternoon of February 14 (see Table 4):
Only one positioning tag came from the morning’s meeting, and a headline
mentioned that morning came from an earlier campaign; however, 13 of the 15
headlines Neil generated that afternoon addressed concepts from the morning’s
session. So the “aha” moment for concepts came to Neil and Jesse when they
were working together, but for the lines, it came when Neil worked alone; as Neil
said, “I took from [the morning’s] things we did and just . . . tried to flesh some of
them out.” An example of something developed from a kernel idea in the morning
session was what developed from the line, “Agavez makes life easier.” Neil had
envisioned using the same headline with several visuals, but since he was doing
that with “Lawns are our life, not yours,” he decided to do headlines for each
graph ad, the “Research suggests . . .” lines. As Neil told me in a subsequent
interview, “too many campaigns are all sort of the same, so I mix it up, [use]
different styles.”
