The pain has stopped. After seven hours of media research for my MBA dissertation, I always knew starting a client assigment at 8pm wasn’t going to be much fun. Dreaming up ideas for seven double-page spreads for a carmaker, after a day painstakingly building 480-point data matrices of media sentiment for FTSE350 companies; it’s all murderously time-consuming, and car ads are harder to write than you’d think – all cars are good now, so good that only Clarkson can tell the difference between them, and there really isn’t much difference between the main brands. Which is why car companies’ ad budgets are among the highest. Any copywriter who can make any particular box on wheels sound special is worth hiring.
But luckily, I think I’ve cracked this one now: not a set of sketched concepts to send in tomorrow, but an actual story, the same idea threaded through a sheaf of pages despite each page highlighting a different feature. This is really, really hard to do, but when the pain suddenly stopped at 10.40pm I knew everything was going to be ok.