Off-the-record.
November 24, 2015
By Gonzalo López Martí / LMMIAMI.COM
- How do you write a new column every single week of the year?
- People ask me this question quite often.
- In some cases they use the word “blog”, which I kind of like.
- In my humble opinion, “blogging” is the brave new literary/journalistic genre of our era.
- Or sub genre, if you will.
- Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut would’ve blogged had they been born 50 years later.
- Jack Kerouac was a blogger ahead of his time.
- Folks who seemed to be immune to the proverbial syndrome of “writer’s block” that has frustrated and driven the human species nuts since the dawn of times.
- Advertising creatives are not foreign to the dread of the blank page (or should I say the blank screen).
- It takes some creatives entire weeks to write a single line of copy.
- Not in my case, as you might have noticed.
- Quite the contrary, I suffer from a bad case of stream-of-consciousness on steroids.
- Then again, as you might know too, writing for my beloved HispanicAd is not my day job.
- It’s just a side gig.
- I run a marketing and advertising agency (err… boutique).
- I have clients.
- Very demanding clients.
- High maintenance clients.
- I have employees, vendors, bills and taxes to pay.
- This blog is not precisely a central revenue stream in my business model.
- Could I use this column to toot my own horn?
- You bet.
- Comes with the territory.
- However, I wouldn’t want to take it too far and disrespect the founder & editor of this prestigious medium, Mr. Eugenio “Gene” Bryan, with petty self-promotional tactics.
- So, what’s my secret to gush out 1500 characters of copy every single week of the year.
- You really wanto to know?
- It is not drugs.
- I’m a clean, mean writing machine.
- First & foremost, I have been working in marketing and advertising for close to 20 years.
- Roughly half of my stint on this planet.
- For agencies and clients big & small, in all the categories imaginable.
- In the three Americas and parts of Europe.
- This racket holds few secrets to yours truly.
- I’ve seen it & heard it all.
- However, there’s an extra ingredient in the secret sauce: I’d say that north of 50% of what I write is not strictly my opinion.
- I get a lot of my material from peers, colleagues, rivals, competitors and outright enemies.
- Yes: I am a de facto mouthpiece for various professionals in our industry who, for a number of reasons, want their opinions to be known while obsessively keeping their identities out of the picture.
- To be continued.