Rob Feakins, who is now President and Chief Creative Officer of Publicis New York didn’t build his book in a fancy portfolio school. He did it without the help of industry proven teachers and a high tech computer lab. Rob’s book was built in dank dirty garage.

Before Publicis Rob spent time at Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners, TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles, Euro RSCG and Ammirati Puris Lintas. His work for the Energizer Bunny is represented in the book, The 100 best commercials.

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After college I was a reporter for a newspaper, living in a sleeping bag on the floor of my brother’s garage apartment in New Jersey. At the paper, I wrote obituaries, covered PTA meetings and did an occasional feature. Operative word there is “occasional”.

Now while this sounds romantic, it wasn’t. On top of that I was driving a late 60′s Volkswagen Beetle. I was broke and smelled of the above Beetle’s oil and gas.

One night I was telling my sister how wonderful life was. She was a planner at Ogilvy. She said to me, “You should be a copywriter.” I had no idea what that was. But she described to me what a copywriter did.

In the garage below my brother’s apartment were about 200 National Geographics. So I would think of a campaign for product. Write headlines and scripts and cut out photographs from the National Geos and glue them onto bond paper to create ads and storyboards.

I then would call Creative Directors in the city and ask them if I could bring them a coffee and donut and spend fifteen minutes of their time one morning to find out what life was like as a copywriter. Amazingly most said yes. But after they saw my portfolio any discussion of what it was like to be a copywriter ended, the review of my portfolio began.

In about a month I was offered a job for $16k a year.
I wish someone had told me what it was like to be a copywriter.