It’s a passion and while a lot of copywriters (one of my many hats) can slip into a mode and start writing the same thing, just with a different sponsor inserted, my “that was great but what are you going to do now?” radio training keeps me always looking for that next thing.

Truthfully, sometimes a new thing is just a tweaked version of an old thing.  But when you’ve been around this long, you have a lot of different things running through your head.  You just reach into the back, try to find something that hasn’t been used for a while and bring it out.

It’s not easy when you’re asked to write something really, fresh, creative and, oh, “I need it in an hour” but again, I defer to my radio training.  Having an account exec come in and say “I need a spot, written, produced, approved by the client and on the air in half an hour” wasn’t that unusual.

So, the other day, Car Toys decided they wanted to try and boost sales over the weekend. They would offer additional discounts, even on TOP of prices that were already on sale.  OK, on the surface, that’s a pretty big limited time offer.  So, I made a playful, but pretty direct 30-second commercial.  Wrote it up, got ready to send it off for approval….and then, remembered: “Wait…it’s supposed to be a 60-second commercial!  I was 30-seconds short!”  And that’s when it dawned on me.  The beauty of a 30-second commercial is that you’re concise, it doesn’t demand too much on the attention span, and it’s an efficient way to get out an easy-to-understand message.  Why not state that 30-second concept and then use the 2nd half of the spot to playfully point out the offer again?   After all, radio commercials can be heard or ignored, they’re just a part of our background and it takes a lot for one to grab our attention.  But this was a real departure and might be a hard concept to sell.  So, I recorded a demo of what it would be like and it was sent off to the Car Toys brass.  In no time at all, they said, “Go for it.”

The copy was sent off to our very talented voice guy, Mike Madeoy, in Hawaii.  We sent both the script and my demo, to give him an idea how playful I wanted that second half to be.  Mike has always been the ultimate pro and taken it one step further and this time, he knocked it out of the park.  He decided at the end to have his dog bark at the end and respond to it, “That’s right, Zeus”.   We got the voice, Scott Burns put his masterful production touches on it and it went off to Car Toys for almost instant approval.

The amazing coincidence–among those approving it, one of them had a dog…..named Zeus.

You may have already heard the commercial, but if not, here you go.

We took a chance and it seemed like this commercial was destined to be on the radio.  Right, Zeus?

Tim Hunter

I would go as far as feeling sorry for those people who got too wrapped in it, only to have their candidate lose or their initiative fall short and then feeling like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were saddling up.

After all, if you review history, no matter which major election you look at, the passionate people on the losing side always feel like all is lost, the world will come to an end or threaten to leave the country.  Yet, somehow, we always manage to survive.

I remember being very young, when someone at my parent’s house was overheard saying about John Kennedy, “If he’s elected, we’ll all have to pray to Mary” because of his being a Roman Catholic.  The election after that, there was a powerful commercial the democrats played about Barry Goldwater that simply planted the idea if he was elected president, nuclear war would break out.  Lyndon Johnson won easily.

Yet time after time, worry after worry, we’ve somehow managed to survive. No one candidate is that much worse than another candidate.  Once in office, they really don’t have that much power.  We’re not electing a Czar, just a figurehead who has to play the game.  In the case of the President of the United States, he can have all the grandiose ideas he wants, but unless congress goes along with him, those ideas will never see the light of day.

For a while, I’ve been following the Republican candidate shakedown.  First, I watched Bachman, Perry and Cain whither away or self-destruct.  It pretty much seemed like Romney was their guy and, at least, a reasonable alternative to President Obama.  I believe that Barrack, much like Jimmy Carter, is a good man, but his learning on the job has resulted in a nice guy surrounded by the wrong people giving him advice, leaving him in something over his head.  While Obama has been learning on the job, to this point he hasn’t demonstrated to me that he definitely can fix this country.  He’ll try, but another four years of trying isn’t good enough.

However, if Gingrich wins the Republican nomination, I’m going to become so pro-Obama, it’ll be annoying.  OK, maybe it’s more anti-Gingrich, but for the first time in my many, many years of life, I actually feel sickened by the thought of Newt becoming our next president.  His arrogance, his attitude, his desire to be seen as ”the new Reagan”…only to find out later that there are several clips on film of him dissing Reagan and how he did things.  He divorced his first wife to marry his mistress whom he divorced to marry the next mistress….and this is the far right’s version of a moral leader?

I started this collection of thoughts a week ago and in that time, the Republican race has gotten meaner and nastier.  What they don’t realize is that, instead of convincing me that one candidate is better than the other, I’m starting to feel like none of them are fit for the job.

Then, the president gave his State of the Union address Tuesday night and I sat through the whole thing.  He said everything I wanted to hear and while that doesn’t mean it will happen, he’s at least given me his intentions of how the United States could be if he stays in office over the next four years.  Am I in complete agreement?  Hardly.  But the majority of his goals and aspirations for the country really resonated with me. After surviving his three plus years of on-the-job training, I’m started to feel like we’ve turned the corner and the worst is over.  Remember, this financial disaster did not start on his watch and  don’t know that replacing him for the sake of replacing him would be such a good idea.

I do know how I feel about Mr. Gingrich, how his popularity completely baffles me and if America chooses to ignore the many, many warning signs about this guy, for the first time in my life, I’m going to become “one of them.”  But I have faith in the system.  So, bring on the relentless, negative campaign ads.  I’ll hit the mute button for six months every time one comes and just ride it out until the day after election day.

I’m holding out that hope that maybe, just maybe, I can completely avoid turning into “one of them.”

Tim Hunter

OK, maybe they’ve got something there.  After all, it’s fair to self-evaluate one’s self for the sake of improvement.  Snow does cause people to do funny things.  A few years ago, a well-meaning nutjob Seattle mayor decided not to put salt on the roads because he said  it could go into our drain system and find its way into the Puget Sound.  A body of salt water, I might add.

But this headline was yanked right out of the Los Angeles Times!  The place where it never snows was criticizing how we reacted to the largest snowstorm we’ve seen here in 30 years. Yep, someone sitting around in their bathrobe in a town where 60-degrees triggers a frost warning was calling us a town full of “snow wimps”.

Maybe Anchorage has the right to do that.  Or a Siberian writer.  But what’s with Los Angeles judging us on how we deal with snow.  Now, I spent the first 18 years of my life growing up in Torrance and outside of a couple of hard frosts, we never had anything close to snow.  I remember as a young kid, we would drive up to Santa’s Village near Big Bear Lake to see some real snow.  For a time in the 60s, we had that classic Mr. & Mrs. Snowman scene in the family front yard at Christmas, complete with white fiberglass snow. After a couple of years, it became dirty and looked more like an aquarium filter than it did snow.

Now, a writer entrenched in the warm ocean-side region of  Southern California has deemed us wimps.  Because we get into accidents?  Wimps don’t get into accidents, they stay at home.  And, while you may call them wimps, it could be out of wisdom that they stay at home.  The accident statistics you stated were examples of those who didn’t know better or thought they were better at snow driving than they really were.  But they weren’t wimps.

I’ve done my fair share of proving myself over the years.  My guess is the only chains this writer has ever installed were 14-karat and went around his neck.  I’ve driven with and without chains, gone through years of changing tires over to put on the studded ones.  Even though I grew up in California, I’ve easily been through a couple of dozen snow episodes up here.  Being on the radio a bunch of years, I HAD to get in…wimping out simply was not an option.  I don’t see how going out into the snow, having an inexperienced driver plow into me and spending the next several weeks working with a body shop to repair my car makes me less wimpy.

I can’t decide if it’s arrogance or ignorance or a combination of both (ignoarrogance) that inspired this writer to pick on Seattle.  One fact that may have eluded him/her is that our weather forecasts are about as accurate as our country’s economic forecasts.  The local weather folks have a sketchy record at best and even with all the latest technology, they still didn’t nail this one.  As I write this piece, it’s snowing.  Something that wasn’t supposed to be happening today. We went from “maybe some snow” to “up to 14 inches” to “well, maybe 6-inches” to a Winter Storm warning and back to snow.  Today was supposed to be Thawsday, the day we returned to a steady Seattle diet of rain, with occasional showers and drizzle thrown in for variety.  Just turned around again. It’s still snowing.

I’ve heard people from the midwest start to criticize Seattle drivers and how we handle the snow. But after reminding them that they live on a mostly level playing surface and we have hills, mountains and other sharp inclines, they’ll say, “Oh, yeah.”  We’ve got speedbumps that have a higher elevation than Beverly Hills.

Wimps.  Someone in LA criticizing how we deal with our snow is like someone in Seattle criticizing how you run your pro football team.  Oh, wait….

So thank you for the wonderful observations from the land of Kardashians, drive-by shootings and where kites can actually get stuck in the sky on the really bad smog days.  Since we’re helping each other out, why don’t you tan less, stop outsourcing solutions to your problems, use a lower dosage of Botox and stick to offering sage advice to people closer to home.  From what we hear in the news on a daily basis, there are a lot of people who need your help.  For instance, do what you can to stop the animated Napoleon Dynamite show from airing another episode.

We appreciate your thoughts and find it comforting that you’d take the time to point out our inadequacies.  After all, Los Angeles driving is the envy of the nation, if not the free world.

Also, thanks for the reminder of why I got out of there almost 40 years ago.

Tim Hunter

Well, they’re at it again. Forecasters are going out on a limb and projecting that we’re going to get clobbered with snow on Wednesday. Depending on who you listen to, up to 14-inches are on the way to the worst-hit areas. There’s a joke there about a guy promising 14-inches, but I’m steering clear of it. Take your cheap shots here. I remember back when we had that huge storm in the late 80s. I was at work in Bellevue, the kids were at a daycare in Bothell and it started coming down around 1pm. Everyone started to bail, hit the roads at the same time, and no one moved as the snow came down. I remember getting close to the kids’ daycare provider and getting stuck, so I had to walk the remaining part of the way at 6pm at night. Yep, almost four hours of panicking and worrying back in the days before cell phones could give you the answers to your worrisome questions. I saw some pretty nasty and cold days back when I played radio in Yakima. It was where I first met black ice, which up until that time, I thought was a malt liquor. I was heading home after a dance in the East Valley area and state troopers had us going 5mph hour on a stretch of road, for good reason. There were many cars in the ditch and the slightest amount of speed and you started drifting sideways. I heard all the warnings this morning—have food in your car, water, essentials, warm clothes….everything you’d need should you get stuck. Something that wasn’t brought up—gas! Keep your car topped off in the event your only source of heat is an idling car. It happens. So, good luck to all as we approach what could be a historical weather event…or the latest in a long series of disappointing weather warnings that have become a northwest tradition.

Tim Hunter