Friday, January 2, 2009

Thinking of Ed Butler.

Ed Butler was a brilliant creative director I had the good fortune of working for when I was at Ally & Gargano. Besides being a great copywriter he had the gift of the epigram. He could utter things that stuck.

"Kenmore (a client) is just covering his not inconsiderable ass."
"That's as flat as a plate of piss."
A line he wrote for Dannon yogurt "The unforbidden fruit."

I was thinking of Ed yesterday as I went to pee in a men's room by the pool.

There was at Ally a sloppy pee-er. Someone who sprayed this way and that at the urinals. Ed couldn't take it any more. So he had a sign typeset and placed over the urinals.

"Players with short bats should step closer to the plate."

I wish I could say that cured the sloppy pee-er of his issue, but it didn't.
However, in the days before galloping HR-thought-control, it handed everyone, or almost everyone, a good laugh.

2 comments:

  1. Hmm, just a thought here, but perhaps the sign did in fact correct the sloppy pee-er's problem. However it caused others to laugh so hard while peeing that it inadvertently created multiple new sloppy pee-ers?

    Just goes to show you the power of well written copy. Or to borrow from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's famous line, "the pen is mightier than the pork sword."

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  2. At every agency I've been there's been unflushed toiletd, toilet paper strewn on the floor, pages of newspapers left in a mess. The newspaper pages suggest that even monkeys can read.

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