BIO

I graduated from Andover in 1965, one year behind George W. Bush. I subsequently majored in mathematics, not quite graduating from Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA. Over the next few years, I went from computers to inventing to advertising. After stints at Digital Equipment Corporation (marketing) and Data General (sales), I invented the Hagoth voice stress analyzer in 1976 (all a mathematician has to do to become an engineer is learn Ohm's Law). I wrote the ads for my invention and ran them in airline in-flight magazines. Over the next two years, I appeared in stories everywhere from Business Week and The Wall Street Journal to guest appearances on ABC's Good Morning America, NBC's Today and Tomorrow With Tom Snyder shows, and PBS's McNeil-Lehrer Report. Then in 1978, at the urging of friend and novelist Frank Herbert (Dune), I sold the company and ran for Congress. I got creamed. Luckily, my old employer Data General had been keeping an eye on the success of my ads and asked me to do the same for them. During that time, I learned guerrilla warfare from Tony Schwartz, whose Daisy ad destroyed Barry Goldwater. Dick Morris introduced me to Tony, and we worked together on ads for the successful 1980 Massachusetts tax-limitation initiative (Morris subsequently achieved the singular fame of making the cover of Time Magazine on two consecutive weeks--9/2/96 and 9/9/96--first as "the man who has Clinton's ear" and then under less favorable circumstances). I moved to Silicon Valley in 1981 to do advertising for a computer startup, and opened my one-man ad agency in 1984. Since then, I've had the distinct pleasure of spending a hundred-million dollars of other people's money figuring out what works and what doesn't. Also during that time, besides helping make Larry Ellison on-again/off-again the world's richest man, I finished my first novel (available at www.destroyingangel.com).

Mission Statement: There is no problem I can't solve with the right ad, run at the right time using the right media.

Yes, this is a direct contradiction of conventional reach/frequency/image thinking. Maybe I watched too many Andy Hardy movies as a kid. Remember the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland solution to all the world's problems? They'd shout: "Let's put on a show!" (And those morons from Hollywood say entertainment doesn't create behavior!) Advertising is just "putting on a show." That's why Tony Schwartz and I hit it off so well in 1980. His one ad, Daisy, ran just one time on one network (CBS). The other networks wouldn't air it, and CBS pulled it after just one shot. Well, it was one hell of a good shot. Daisy completely destroyed Barry Goldwater's presidential bid. So notwithstanding conventional advertising agency gibberish about spending this "much money" and measuring results over this "much time," my highest ambition is to make one shot count for everything. I treat all my clients as if the money they spend on the next ad is the last money they have in the world, and the ad had better generate profits enough to pay for itself or my client is . . . out of business. Have I succeeded? My work speaks for itself.

My Orphanage Project