First Post
By: Josh Mack
Tags: New, Advertising, Copywriting, Copywriting Tips, Blogging

This is cool. My own space to jot some ish down. So who am I? My name is Josh, I live in NYC with my roommate and I work at a media agency as a buyer. Why are you writing a blog? Haha nice question. I was recently furloughed thanks to the unstoppable force that is COVID-19. So you started a blog? Yo, let me continue..

Never fully knew what I wanted to do with my life. I have always been creative. I love writing. I love creating stories. I love observing people. I love advertising and marketing and consumer behavior; what makes a person buy something that they don’t know they “need”? I am extremely susceptible to ads targeted to me — its a disease almost. Ads follow you and follow you until you crave and convince yourself “Yeah, yup, I need this product. I needed this yesterday.” *click* Amazon Prime be there in 2 days sweet, thanks! Off topic (or on topic?) I minored in Marketing back in college, got a bs B.S. degree. First job was in finance which shipped me off for a 7-month training program in St. Louis and soon after I returned back to Jersey I quickly realized this is not for me. Had a cousin who worked at my first agency and thought it was a great foot in the door to the marketing world. Got the interview, crushed it, got the offer, took the job. I was a prestigious Local Activaton Media Buyer. Please, please, no pictures necessary! Pay was shit. But I made so many friends and connections that you can’t put a value on. Ended up leaving just short of my 2 year anniversary cause I decided I needed more money and was in the process of looking for apartments in NYC — not cheap. Also promotions were taking forever to process or else I probably wouldn’t have left. Whatever, everything happens for a reason. Took another job at another agency, where I currently work — err, furloughed — am I an employee? I don’t know. Where I currently reside, how’s that? Cool. Yeah, so took more money doing Network Audio buying. Same shit, different day.

But now with this new found time on my hands I decided to ask myself “what do I want to do?” I know media buying is not my endgame by any means. Like, at all. And not to say I’m sitting there a miserable schmuck. I’m not. But I know I don’t have a passion for what I’m doing and long term it will turn me into that miserable schmuck. No bueno.

Side note: the fact this site doesn’t auto-capitalize after a period is KILLING me.

So, the other night I’m watching the season finale of Lil Dicky’s show DAVE on FXX, and I’m a huge Dicky fan, I love his music. I find him hilarious and talented. Hilariously talented. We’re both Jewish (niceee) and I just think his story is totally inspiring. I knew he worked at an ad agency before he transitioned to rap. So I read his Wikipedia and saw he wrote copy for clients like the NBA. I start reading more into what writing copy entails and boom. Hit me. Nay, it smacked the shit out of me. Euphoria. Clarity. *ping* Lightbulb above my head? Nuh uh. I’m the I and the Pixar lamp jumps on me, squishing me. BIG IDEA TIME. Dude, you need to write copy.

Now, I currently work with copywriters for projects I work on but never fully paid attention to what they did. All I know is they produce the copy that I need for the client to approve rather quickly so I can then go back to the radio networks or streaming services and get it on the air.

I hop over to LinkedIn, I click the jobs button and I become a mad man looking for copywriting jobs all over Manhattan. Senior? Don’t care — click — send — easy apply — next. I sent to a bunch and what I noticed on the applications were sections titled *record scratch* Writing Samples. Writing samples? Hmm, don’t have those. Fuck it. I input N/A and clicked submit fully aware none of these companies were going to reach back out to me considering I have no copywriting experience nor do I have samples.

You’re probably putting all this together now, right? Nice. Good job!

Ha, so I go to bed. Next morning I get on Google and I research everything about copywriting and how to get started not having prior experience. I reached out to my HR rep about potential opportunities at our creative agency when all this is over. I read an article on here, Medium, about getting into copywriting and it was super inspiring. I contacted the author on Twitter. Slid into his DMs (niice) and he answered. Super awesome dude and gave me tons of tips on what to do.

Here I am. Writing posts. Fine tuning my craft. I think this will be cool though. Was never a pen and paper kinda guy. Hand cramps, neck hurts, back hurts, hunched over, just not good, not good at all — y’know? Going to try and write a post daily. Scroll through Twitter, news outlets, find shit going on I think is interesting and have thoughts on.

Let’s get to it..