My first job out of college: ad copywriter for a direct marketing company on Long Island. I wrote catalog and space ads. I think they hired me mostly because they needed one more Jewish male to make minyan.

I won’t name the company, for reasons which will be made clear. But I will say that they were legendary for once running a promotional offer of one real diamond with every catalog purchase over ten dollars. These diamonds absolutely were real – real, industrial-grade, and just about worthless. The ad wasn’t lying; you got a diamond for ten bucks. A shitty diamond.

Every morning, I would punch the clock and wade into a stack of sell sheets detailing garbagey non-products no one could possibly want or need; bland bulleted lists which I’d have to turn into tight, bright, appealing ad copy. Sometimes I’d get to play with the items themselves. Like the Musical Sweater – an ugly off-red pullover, embroidered with reindeer and snowflakes, which played an 8-bit “Jingle Bells” when you pressed a button on the collar.

(Right now you’re all like, Musical Sweater = WANT! I know, right? But ad copy man, can I wash something like that? Jeez… I have no idea! That info was not on the sell sheet.)

I knocked out copy until lunchtime, and then I had one hour to pull off as much awesome shit as I could. I might meet Chris Hug at one of Long Island’s finer Toys ‘R’ Us locations, or visit Nathan’s at the Broadway Mall with other members of The Hanslick Rebellion, or make out with Cheryl Mare in the IHOP parking lot… but even as all this adventure beckoned, some of my favorite lunch breaks were the ones I spent alone.

There was a great comic book store in Hicksville which no longer exists; I would go there every Wednesday, pick up the week’s new releases, and read them in my car with some drive-thru Wendy’s and Mike and the Mad Dog on the radio. Pure 21-year-old Long Island dork bliss. I still fondly remember the day the Knicks signed Allan Houston and Chris Childs. I didn’t give a fuck about basketball; I just loved listening to Mike and the Mad Dog bitch while I ate my Triple with cheese and caught up on some Justice League.

On non-comic weekdays I might follow the same routine, except with a newspaper or a copy of the Star or National Enquirer. I used to find space ads I’d written all the time in the Star. One that comes immediately to mind was for the Comfort Air Cushion, which was an inflatable pad the size of a car seat that you’d blow up and put on top of your car seat. Yeah, I know, I know.

We don’t often appreciate how pervasive even the most mundane advertising can be, but it is no exaggeration to say that this company’s ads were seen by millions of people. In addition to running in circulars and tabloids, they were mass-mailed in catalogs and sweepstakes packets designed to entice a less cynical population to open and read them, carefully targeted to the Americans most likely to buy a Glow-in-the-Dark Doorknob, or an Adorable Kitten Throw Rug, or any of five-dozen guardian angel-themed products: the Guardian Angel Picture Frame (guardian angels watch over your loved ones when you place their photos in these delightful frames!), the Guardian Angel Lamp Topper (now you can have the warmth and cheer of a guardian angel fill your home every time you turn on the light!), even Glow-in-the-Dark Guardian Angels (who knows what the fuck’s the point of this shit!).

I wrote ads for cheap mail-order shoes, toy trucks with wheels that didn’t turn, and devices which projected an illuminated target into the middle of the toilet bowl so you wouldn’t have to turn on the bathroom light in the middle of the night. I learned the power of phrases like “now you can”, “wherever you go”, “orthopedically designed” and “toasty warm”, and the mystique of the “AS SEEN ON TV!” burst, which was so potent that you could fill the same rounded red box with “not ON TV!” and people would buy the product as if it were on TV. And more housewives and geriatrics read my writing than Stephen King’s, which sounds wonderful but is something I try not to think too hard about.

After a few months on the job, I earned a transfer to the company’s top book, which advertised what were purportedly health products. There were lots of pills in the catalog, yeah… but all of the pitches were circumstantial. The tagline for Shark Cartilage pills was “SHARKS DON’T GET CANCER!” So what? You’re not a shark. And the catalog’s Diet Tea could be part of any weight-loss plan, sure, but there was nothing special about it; all tea is low-calorie until you add sugar. I wasn’t allowed to promise any results in my copy; I could say that a product might “help promote” health benefits, but not that it actually did anything.

I acquired a reference library of alternative medicine textbooks and encyclopedia, which I pretty well wore out trying to find an honorable basis for selling these products. I’m not going to say that alternative medicine is bullshit, because there is plenty of evidence that some disciplines are beneficial. But in the year-plus that I worked on that catalog, I wrote ads for dozens of “holistic” products, from ginkgo biloba to St. John’s wort to tea tree oil, none of which could legally be pitched as providing any medical benefit whatsoever.

I still shiver a little at the memory of my first health catalog meeting. The buyer, who ordered all the stock we’d be writing about, sat at the head of the table showing off the latest products. One of the products appeared to be a hot water bottle.

“Check this out,” the buyer said. “Looks like an ordinary hot water bottle. And it is! But when you add this tubing here, it becomes a do-it-yourself home enema kit! One of the worst things about an enema is that you need to have somebody else administer it. How embarrassing is that? You have to call a friend to shoot water up your ass. Well, not anymore!” Then he whirled around and pointed in my direction.

“Davis, give me a headline!”

What popped into my head was not acceptable, but I blurted it out anyway: “With enemas like these, who needs friends?”

“Good,” replied the buyer. “Clean it up; go with it!” What?!

“This next product is for people who suffer from incontinence. Studies show that anyone can control his bodily functions – if he is aware of them! Incontinent people are not! But this device will change all that. It slips comfortably into undergarments, and has a sensor which detects moisture. At the first sign of wetness, the device emits a mild electric shock which makes the wearer aware that he is soiling himself – so he can stop! No more embarrassing, bulky diapers! It’s a miracle product! Davis, give me a headline!”

The dude was clearly not gonna pay attention to anything I said, so I offered: “Stop pissing your pants – NOW!”

“Good! Clean it up; go with it!”

One day, a sell sheet for something called “Royal Jelly Pills” landed on my desk. It had no bullet points – no list of benefits for this product. I spent an hour trying to find a mention of royal jelly in my various books, but no luck. I went to the buyer, and he had no idea what these pills did, either.

“Well,” he asked, “what do we know about royal jelly?”

“If this is the same royal jelly that comes from bees, then it’s the compound which is fed to a larval bee that makes it grow into a queen bee,” I said.

“Go look up the life expectancy of a queen bee as compared to a worker bee,” said the buyer. “Then clean that up and go with it!”

So if you’ve ever seen an ad for utterly useless Royal Jelly Pills with the headline “DISCOVER THE SECRET OF ROYAL JELLY!” and the tag, “Worker bees live for three weeks, but the queen bee can live up to three years! Royal jelly is the difference. Find out what it can do for you!” Well, that’s mine. Yeah, I know, I know. I know.

The job began to weigh on me. Writing ads for junky nicknacks made me uncomfortable, but the products were so overtly ridiculous that I could justify the gig: anyone stupid enough to think his life would be improved by something called Glow-in-the-Dark Reusable Snowflakes deserved to be out five bucks. The health catalog was different, though. It was all semantic gymnastics to offer benefits yet avoid promising any result, because no result had ever – or could ever – be proven. And it was targeted at low-income hypochondriacs who had more important things to do with their money, or worse, at genuinely ill people and people in demographics most at risk of becoming ill, who really had more important things to do with their money.

I had begun making websites by then, and I devoted part of mine to detailing all the ways I perceived this company to be ripping people off. It was 1997 and weblogs hadn’t been invented yet, but that’s what this was. I wrote in secret, mostly to soothe my conscience, and the blog wasn’t linked to anything – but I made the mistake of sharing the address with one coworker. Next thing I knew it had spread across the entire company, and I became the first person ever fired for blogging. To this day, it’s the only thing I’ve done online that could be construed as going viral.

Apparently I never learn, ’cause here we are. But that experience did teach me one rule of thumb: never take a job you would negatively blog about. This policy has enabled me to enjoy work – and to keep it.

Yesterday I ran across an old demo of “Hold On To Your Soul” from 2001, recorded after my deal with Kasenetz-Katz went south. Listening to it reminded me of my copywriting days, which in turn made me realize how similar the music business is to that job, and how I was probably never meant to have a “record contract”. When I did get one, I wrote shit like this to ease the guilt of recording for The Man.

Jed Davis | “Hold On To Your Soul” demo | August 1, 2001

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Filed Under: History, Music, Personal, Shit that would turn you white, Solo, Under construction