In General with no comments
Hello everyone out there in Internetland! I’m writing an update with little real content to just keep this blog alive and active. So if you’re curious about my career movements or me personally, read on. If not, I’ll have a blog about my Garmin spec campaign soon, and a bunch of new work, both spec and non, being posted up here in the next week or so.
If you’re still here, it means your curious. I like that, it shows me you care. So where to begin? I feel bad having not updated this blog in so long, but I’ve had a lot of other career activity going on. First and foremost has been applying and interviewing like mad. I’ve been going to a lot of interesting places. Some have been phenomenal, while others…well, let’s just say you shouldn’t always trust Craigslist. To get more detailed, I went on an interview which was listed as “Marketing Account Executive” which turned out to be “Door to door office supply salesman for a pyramid scheme.” It was pretty funny, on the “interview,” which would be more accurately described as me shadowing someone who was doing this awful job, my “interviewer” got chased out of 2 buildings by security. Not exactly the most professional environment. I should have guessed this wasn’t what it seemed when the receptionist was BLASTING techno at unreasonable levels prior to even starting, but I like to give everyone a fair chance.
On the plus side, I’ve gone to a lot of wonderful places and met a lot of extremely exciting and interesting professionals who have had a lot of great advice and things to say. I’m waiting to hear on a couple of jobs, but as of right now I’m still up for grabs; I suggest anyone who needs a solid copywriter get in on this action before it’s too late! I have a few more great sounding interviews coming up, and it’s always exciting to stop in and talk with pros who I can respect. I love meeting people who are so excellent at what they do, it gives me a goal to work towards. I have a constant strive for self-improvement and making everything I do better, which is never a bad thing. There’s always room to grow.
Speaking of improvement, my current project is improving the aesthetic of my existing physical portfolio. My current setup is starting to look a little dated, so over the next week or two I’m revamping all of my hardcopies into a more appealing package. Aesthetics are everything - when all is said and done, everything is going to look super.
All in all, it’s been an interesting couple of weeks, and I’m striving ever and ever harder to take my career as a copywriter to even further levels. It’s a challenging environment, and with the economy in the state it’s in, it’s no cake walk. But what can I say? I like a challenge.
In General with no comments
Hey advertising professionals! There’s just two quick things I want to say today…
1) To any potential employers out there: My name is Scott Delbango, and I would love to work for you. Contact me at the phone number listed on this page, or at scott.delbango@gmail.com. You’ll be happy you did.
2) I’d like to request some feedback on my work and my writing style from anyone out there reading. Don’t think I’m fishing for compliments here; as long as it’s respectful and constructive, you can say anything about my work. Compliments are welcome though, so if you think my stuff is rad then please, say it (and then hire me if you’re in such a position!) Try to be as detailed as possible and feel free to give advice - There’s always something new to learn, so it will all be appreciated.
Also, if you’d be so kind, include how you stumbled upon this page in your post. There were a few people who found it before I was even done with it, and I’m very curious where you came from.
In Spec Ads with 1 comment
Whenever I show anyone this ad, I always get the same question: Is this a real product?
The answer is yes, and it is FABULOUS. A real Gibson quality guitar that can TUNE ITSELF.
If you couldn’t tell by my enthused response, I’m something of a guitar nerd. And yes, I will admit, with my spec work, I’m guilty of bringing in a lot of my personal interests and loves as fodder for my advertisements. But I don’t see this as a sin necessarily. It’s important to show diversity in spec work, but I also feel spec work is a place to really let your work show who you are in real life: Your interests, your passions, and your personality can all shine through in creative ways with good spec work.
As for this particular piece, I would say this is one of my favorites, if not the best one I’ve done, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, this is the first piece I attempted to art direct for myself. I will always say, I’m not an artist, but I am a very visual thinker. I’ve been teaching myself Adobe Photoshop in an ongoing attempt to improve my ability to communicate with art directors and graphic designers. I can’t take all the credit for this, because I was given some help by Dan Berkowitz on this one, but for the most part this was designed and constructed by me. It was an interesting experience, and I’m making a continuing effort to improve and refine my design skill.
Secondly, I just think it’s a clever concept. The moment I began thinking up concepts for a Robot guitar ad, the first things that popped into my head were the Terminator and HAL. From there, the ad just flowed naturally. It’s a guitar that senses tone, essentially hearing your strings. So “It’s listening” came immediately to me. From there, I took the guitar and realized, from a certain view, it has a kind of anthropomorphic structure. So I put it down in the corner, and it all clicked. It looked like a mischievous little robot eavesdropping. It’s a little creepy, but it’s almost like a humor time bomb; your first response is a little yelp, and then laughter. At least, that’s the intention. Take a look and tell me what you think.
In Promotional with no comments
This project was brought to me by one of the graphic designers I was working on portfolio pieces with, Dan Berkowitz, when we were doing something entirely unrelated. He mentioned he and his friend Carl, an IT / coder, were launching a new e-commerce service. I started asking questions, and as it turned out, they had a solid concept, but no real direction yet. I started spitting ideas out, and Dan asked me to come on board officially and help with the launch as a freelance consultant.
We got back together and had a meeting with him and his partner the next weekend. I asked them a bunch of questions, and helped them lay out on paper exactly the type of business model they wanted. I helped them come up with both a company and a software name to brand them with, and helped them focus their target audience. After I gathered all the information from them I could, I went and wrote up this informational brochure for them, as both a point of internal reference to all the ideas we came up with, and as a pre-launch promotional tool for them to use to get potential customers interest up.
Gravity Commerce is currently in the final stages of launching. Keep an eye out for them if you have any small business needs, the stuff they’re doing is gonna be pretty great.
In General with no comments
Well, I finally got my new resume up on the site, so this baby is officially launched! There’s still bound to be a few cosmetic changes here and there in the upcoming weeks, but Scott Delbango (the website) is ready for action. In addition to this, Scott Delbango (the person) is ready, willing, and available to cater to whatever copywriting needs you have, be it freelance project or full-time hire.
As for the site, I’ll be updating this semi-regularly with new work as it comes in, and new spec work as I get inspired. Thanks for reading, spread the word!
In General with no comments
This blog is currently not ready quite yet, I’ve yet to launch it officially. I was surprised to find people reading and commenting already, and pretty impressed. But I’m gonna ask you to bare with me for a day or two while I get my new resume in place, a slightly improved design together, and make a few slight changes.
Thanks for your interest though! If anyone has any business opportunities to discuss, my contact info is at the bottom of the page <3
In Spec Ads with no comments
One cool technique for writing well targeted advertising that I’ve found is to take a universal concept and figure out a way to narrow it to a specific demographic. Universal concepts are a given in advertising because it guarantees that your ad will speak to the most people, but there is an inherent danger in using these because they’re just so stupid and cliché more than anything else. Sometimes I read advertisements and I can’t for the life of me understand what the copywriter was thinking. Maybe I just haven’t been around long enough in this game to understand, maybe the client demanded it, maybe the copywriter just wasn’t getting paid enough to care. There’s lots of situations that can lead to bad advertising. Generally though, I’ve come to believe that the most common mistaken assumption amongst cliché advertising is that broader is better. It ain’t. Not always anyway.
The way I see it, narrowing and focusing an advertisement is more effective in the same way that speaking directly to someone is better than shouting into a crowd of strangers. It’s just less crazy sounding. It may speak to less people, but it will have a much larger impact on those it does speak to. “So then,” you may be angrily hollering into your computer screen right now, “what is an effective way to use universals in advertising?” It’s simple: Combine the universal with a specific. I feel it’s effective for a couple of reasons. First, your ad starts off with something that everyone can relate to, but second, it hits them with something that speaks directly to them. It sounds like common sense, but the one-two punch can really hammer your message into a person’s head. The universal gets you in immediately, and the specific makes the person reading think on some base level that your product now helps define them as a person.
For this ad, I wanted to try to brand a car (in this case, the Mini Cooper) as a hip product for younger buyers. I took my inspiration visually from the Honda Element animal ads a few years back, which I felt were just awesome. They were cute, funny, strangely clever, and spoke directly to the young audience that they were going for (I feel my art director captured the look I wanted perfectly). As for the universal / specific dynamic of the piece, I took the boring, cliché universal of the backseat driver, and combined it with a concept appealing directly to the 18-30 year old audience of the Element; video games. Anyone who’s played a video game with a friend could tell you that a backseat game player is just as annoying as a backseat driver. Finally, I made sure to have the video game in question be something very universal. I won’t say exactly what the game is to avoid copyright infringement, but let’s just call him “barrel throwing ape” for now.
This is one of my favorite pieces. It’s visually striking, it has a good sense of humor to grip the person reading, and the underlying one-two punch present in it makes it effective. It’s a little weird, but let’s be honest: The 18-30 year olds of the world are also pretty weird now. Just watch Adult Swim.
In Spec Ads with 3 comments
When I was younger, in high school and early college, I used to read a lot of Maxim magazine. I eventually grew out of this and started making an active attempt to read more books and less articles on sexy dames and muscle cars. Still, as pretty much the first real magazine I read consistently, the advertising aesthetic stuck with me through the years. It’s amazing how effective an attractive woman can be in convincing men to do things - even if they’re just printed on a piece of gloss paper.
This idea came when I picked up a Maxim for the first time in a few years. I looked through, and was now more conscious of the advertising and its tone. I decided to try my hand at a simple “sex-sells” type ad, and this is what came out. It also happened to be December when I made this piece, so I decided to try to combine it with a holiday angle. I imagine the holidays are a perfect time to sell expensive jewelry to men scrambling to please their partners, so I combined an accessory which could fit a holiday theme (red and green jewels in this case) with one that could show off a nice pair of legs (an ankle bracelet). As I picked the specific product to focus on, I saw this exercise more as a marketing piece, advertising the store as a whole, rather than a piece whose purpose was to advertise a product assigned by the company. Just something meant to make the Zales name stick out in the readers’ heads and lure them into the store, even if they weren’t going with the specific advertised product in mind. Sneaky, no?
In Spec Ads with no comments
The Cup was a small, family owned coffeehouse I worked at a few years back. It’s a nice little place about two miles down the road from my house, right under the train station in Wantagh, NY. The genesis of this project came when I was puttering around town in my little green motorcar and happened to pass the ol’ girl. I started to think back to my days as a waiter there, serving coffee to yuppies and teenagers and all the drunk kids from the bar down the street, working ’til 3 in the morning, making five dollars an hour.
*sniffle* I’m getting all misty just thinking about the old days of manual labor.
No time for that though! Times change and I’m no longer a waiter anymore - I’m a copywriter now. And as an obsessive up-and-coming copywriter, I’ve begun subconsciously branding and re-branding everything I see in my daily life. It’s a gift and it’s a curse, but it’s a trait that leads to a constant flow of ideas. I began to wonder what kind of image would be effective marketing were they to expand into a chain. It hit me that the clientèle of the establishment - the yuppies, the drunk adults, and the hip teens - they all were visiting for the same reason. It was a fun, relaxed kind of place where you could just go to talk. A little less flashy than a Starbucks, but a little more like home.
My brainstorm on this project came together in this campaign you see here. I took the idea of “The Cup,” and transformed it into a motif for these three ads. Then I took three subjects which I considered were in direct opposition to the homey, fun atmosphere of the imagined chain. I also insisted my art director on this take a very basic, minimalist approach; I wanted the cups to do the speaking, not some fancy design. We came up with this layout together, and he designed a rather nice looking modern logo (a vast improvement over their current one).
Everyone who sees this project tends to giggle a little at the 2nd ad specifically. This makes me very happy.
In Spec Ads with no comments
The second piece in the spec campaign for The Cup.
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