God bless the boys from IT. To stay relevant in to new world of binary wonder, Wilson Binkley is now diving headfirst into the so-called blogosphere, and the IT department has asked for some content. Which pretty much describes the entire day of an Ad Man: give me some content.

One of the coolest things about the ad business is that I don't know what I'm going to write about today. It can be a health-related topic that I know nothing about, or it can be some flowery language to describe the most serene property a shopper can buy. It can be a dry, mechanical press release or it can be a headline for a retail ad. Take this blog for instance -- 20 minutes ago, I didn't know I'd be doing this!

Words are beautiful, powerful, wonderful, compelling things. The right word can be elusive as a woodland snipe and as powerful as a steam locomotive. To make them subservient to the craft of advertising is part of the mission of the language, and far from debasing or diminishing the words, it is great fun to bend them to my will.

When I was younger and thought I would be a writer before I realized that there are few ways to make money writing the way you want to write, I would concoct short stories and play fast and loose with the rules of English. Like a Cormac McCarthy novel, why are we slaves to the 'rules'? So I would smash strings of words together to convey an original thought, freebasing linguistic components into a sticky, tar-like substance that would make the reader dizzy. Suffice to say, that style of writing is rarely needed in advertising.

So here we are, filling our first blog post with words about words. Advertising is a strange bedfellow to the soul of an artist, but it is most assuredly a viable career for the Bohemian artist that has a penchant for the things only money can buy.

More later...