Welcome to Ad Nauseum

Welcome to Ad Nauseum. For a blog about political video and ads, that's not such a creative welcome. Hopefully it'll get better from here. The story how this blog was inspired goes something like this: I was having lunch with a friend of mine last week discussing my new company, Rabin Strasberg Media, and what I thought we could add to the glut of political media.  In the course of our conversation, discussing videos and ads we liked and disliked, he said something like, "You know, you should write a blog about this stuff."

My first reaction was, who would read a blog that I wrote?  Well, my mom -- except she doesn't even know that the internet is a series of tubes.  So I put that aside for a moment.

Then I thought, what would I say? Well, that part was a lot easier; I always have something to say about what I see out there -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- and there's a lot of ugly out there these days.

A last note: I'm not here to rip on people or their work, though I will certainly give an honest critique. Frankly, I want to be inspired, I want to be moved by what I see, but all too often I'm left either empty or shaking my head. Maybe this is my attempt to raise the craft of political media, to make ads everyone can be proud of.

I read this quote in the wonderful book on advertising, "Hey Whipple, Squeeze This." Steve Hayden, who wrote the Apple 1984 ad, said, "If you want to be a well paid copywriter, please your client. If you want to be an award winning copywriter, please yourself. If you want to be a great copywriter, please your reader."

Greatness is something we can all aspire to.