A Portrait of the Ad Guy as a Young Man
When asked why and how and what the hell I was thinking in regard to my career in advertising, there are no clear answers, unless of course, you speak to my therapist.
Suffice it to say that my latent potential for marketing stardom was evident early on; Mrs. Blankenship’s third-grade class to be exact.
A traveling rodeo had come to our rural Georgian community and us students were presented with the challenge of designing a poster to promote the event. The winning designer would receive VIP seats to the spectacle, and most importantly, have their picture featured in the local newspaper.
At last, my shot at fame had arrived.
Fortunately, the competition was slim. Besides me, only three of my classmates had returned signed permission slips for the after-school work sesh. Mrs. Blankenship placed a grey poster board in front of us each as we gathered around the small work table, taking stock of our sad allotment of raw materials: a few scraps of felt, tissue papers, a few sheets of dog-eared holiday stickers, two shoeboxes of crayons, a half-dried bottle of glue, and an industrial sized box of macaroni from the school cafeteria. (Pre-Millennial fun fact: In the 70’s, dried pasta was the universally accepted standard unit of elementary school creative expression.)
Terry M. threw himself into the work, somehow managing to pick his nose with one hand while simultaneously grinding a jumbo crayon down to the nub scratching out an impressionistic image (to use a kind phrase) of a cowboy on a horse. In truth, the picture was so crudely drawn that prehistoric cave-kids would have ridiculed him at recess. Anita W. typically opted for the laziest solution, going with an all-typography approach. Unfortunately, she wrote COME TO THE RO in such massive letters that all other relevant information was condensed into a deranged jumble of chicken scratch along the bottom of the poster. Tara H. admirably attempted a large horse head as her primary visual, using strips of brown tissue paper for the mane. Most of the tissue paper never made it to the poster from her glue-laden fingers, making her horse appear more like a diseased Afghan Hound.
Yet even had my classmate’s artistic aspirations come to fruition, it seemed obvious to me that something was severely lacking. A concept!
And so, seizing the opportunity to create something entirely new and unexpected in the world of rodeo marketing, it came to me. A poster IN THE SHAPE of a horseshoe.
I painstakingly sketched my vision onto the poster board, but my horseshoe more closely resembled a squat Omega scrawled by a drunken frat boy. Still, buoyed by unflappable confidence in my breakthrough idea, I set to work exhaustively cutting out the shape using little snub-nosed scissors duller than Anita’s imagination. The result was incredibly flimsy and left remarkably little real estate for rodeo-hype verbiage. Still, practicality be damned, all I needed to add was some greatly abbreviated event details, a bit of macaroni trim, and a few inexplicable Thanksgiving stickers. Bam: A rodeo poster par excellence.
The judges — Mrs. Blankenship, Pam the obsequious teacher’s aide, and a rodeo manager straight out of central casting — loved it. “So clever!” “A horseshoe! Bless your heart!” “Pretty dang good, son.”
As I basked in the glorious glow of a job well done, the judges quickly conferred and turned back to us with smiling faces, awarding first prize to not me. Tara H. got the free tickets and her picture in the paper and I was left to pick up the pieces of my shattered dream.
I was, as Mrs. Blankenship later told me in a conspicuous attempt to lift my spirits, a very close second. Second place was fine, of course. Except that it wasn’t. Something had been triggered by Tara’s triumph, something deeper than the pure joy of creative expression. My competitive spirit had been unleashed.
And as waited curbside for my mom to pick me up, still dazed from the shocking defeat, one thing was clear:
This would not be my last rodeo.
