Friday, January 2, 2009

Thinking of Ed Butler.

Ed Butler was a brilliant creative director I had the good fortune of working for when I was at Ally & Gargano. Besides being a great copywriter he had the gift of the epigram. He could utter things that stuck.

"Kenmore (a client) is just covering his not inconsiderable ass."
"That's as flat as a plate of piss."
A line he wrote for Dannon yogurt "The unforbidden fruit."

I was thinking of Ed yesterday as I went to pee in a men's room by the pool.

There was at Ally a sloppy pee-er. Someone who sprayed this way and that at the urinals. Ed couldn't take it any more. So he had a sign typeset and placed over the urinals.

"Players with short bats should step closer to the plate."

I wish I could say that cured the sloppy pee-er of his issue, but it didn't.
However, in the days before galloping HR-thought-control, it handed everyone, or almost everyone, a good laugh.

2 comments:

theschwartex said...

Hmm, just a thought here, but perhaps the sign did in fact correct the sloppy pee-er's problem. However it caused others to laugh so hard while peeing that it inadvertently created multiple new sloppy pee-ers?

Just goes to show you the power of well written copy. Or to borrow from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's famous line, "the pen is mightier than the pork sword."

Tore Claesson said...

At every agency I've been there's been unflushed toiletd, toilet paper strewn on the floor, pages of newspapers left in a mess. The newspaper pages suggest that even monkeys can read.