Most of these folks were very down to earth and easy to work with. A few insisted on limos and other amenities. A few were real pains in the ass. It all comes with the territory of being a celebrity.

Now, marrying a celebrity to an ad campaign is a tricky issue. First, most of these folks cost five to seven figures per year for endorsing your product. The contracts are very specific — you only have access to them from a few hours here and there, or a specific number of days a year, depending on the contract you negotiate. So choose your celebrity wisely.

Then, there’s the downside of working with someone so famous and so cantankerous that the pain far outweighs the pleasure.

Give a listen to these 5-1/2 minutes of outtakes that I received over 20 years ago from a Los Angeles recording studio containing snippets of voiceovers from Orson Welles, Academy Award- winning director, writer, actor and producer for film, stage, radio and television for clients such as Paul Masson Winery:

Orson Welles mp3

Here are a few of the “as produced” MP3s for my favorite radio scripts for clients as diverse as:

• Caesars Tahoe Resort Casino featuring Ken Nordine of “WordJazz” fame to describe “The Caesars Odyssey” promotion within “The Glory, The Grandeur, And The Games” theme.

• Greyhound Lines with a :60 jingle for their casino service to Reno, Lake Tahoe and Atlantic City.

• Farmers Direct Auto Insurance with a humorous twist to a serious subject.

• Foremost Foods Cottage Cheese with Paul Frees (former voice of Scrooge McDuck, Capt. Crunch, Boris Badenov, and many other animated cartoon characters).

• And Barron Mortgage Company with one of their mortgage brokers telling a few humorous success stories.

Listen to these :60 Radio Commercial MP3s now.

Here are my favorite ads, ad banners, and radio commercial that I created as a San Francisco copywriter and direct marketing copywriter for Bank of America.

1) Bank of America — As an Associate Creative Director at Grey Advertising, San Francisco copywriter, I wrote this campaign of three newspaper ads for BofA’s Home Loan division. The ads were to have run for six weeks. But after only two, the client asked the agency to stop running them because the phone lines were swamped with a surplus of calls. Offering BofA’s lowest rates and the first ever refinancing adjustable rate home loans were also contributing factors to their success.
Download Ad #1 PDF
Download Ad #2 PDF
Download Ad #3 PDF

2) Bank of America/Nation’s Bank Animated Banners – For Carat Interactive Ad Agency, I wrote a bunch of banners for BofA after it became Nation’s Bank. (Of course, it’s now called Bank of America once again.) See the banners — scroll down to bottom of page.

3) Bank of America Priority Plus Home Loan :60 Radio Commercial and Newspaper Ad — This commercial needed to demonstrate that the bank was committed to approving applicants for adjustable rate home loans in only three business days, rather than weeks. So I found the world’s fastest talker in New York City, flew her to SF for a recording session, and hired a male voice actor as her “translator” for this script. You really can hear every word she says if you listen carefully. “PLAY NOW” to hear the “Priority Plus Fast Home Loans” MP3.
Download Priority Plus Home Loan Ad PDF.

For their news promotions, we would receive the news story scripts on a Monday each week. By Tuesday, we’d have created three newspaper ads with copy and layout, plus a radio script with three different tags.

This account forced me to think creatively, strategically and efficiently!

Here are four completed commercials of the dozens of radio scripts that I wrote for NewsCenter 4.

Advertising copywriting, I believe, should be entertaining with humorous headlines. So here are two I wrote that I still like, many years later. The first was a recipe ad that ran in Good Housekeeping and other women’s magazine. For it, we dressed a model up like the Mona Lisa, so the headline was “Presenting Mona Lindsay’s Olive Meatloaf.” The bacon-and-olive meatloaf recipe tasted much better than it looked.

The second ad ran in football programs in the Bay Area (49ers, Raiders, Cal & Stanford) because the Lindsay Olive sales team would take their clients to the games. For this one, we created the fun Lindsay Olive “Half-Time-At-The-Football-Game” Game. Download the ad PDF.

For Lindsay, I also wrote and produced some hilarious radio commercials that won lots of major awards. The first was a Jewish Olive talking about his son. The second was a “nebbishy” olive who was very homely.

Listen to these two :60 MP3 Lindsay Olive radio commercials now.

My own daughter was beginning to read at the time and I strongly believed in phonics being able to help young readers to read better.

My script featured a father telling a bedtime story to his little girl. But he made it more entertaining for her by weaving in a yarn about the letters of the alphabet holding meetings, mergers, leveraged buyouts and stock options.

The bottom line is this call to action in the script: “If you’re a parent, you don’t have to invent stories to get your kids to love reading. Just go to the best place in cyberspace for help… the Hooked on Phonics Web site. Visit us today at A-B-C-D-E-F-G dot com. Take the FREE personalized reading assessment to find out how to help your child become a more confident reader…”

Listen to the MP3 now for the :60 “Hooked on Phonics Fairy Tale” radio spot below.

My colleague, Ivan Lee, and I created a series of five animated banners in various sizes for a now-defunct VoIP telecom solution called TomatoVine.com. The sizes were 728×90, 468×60, 160 x 60, 120 x 600 and 300 x 250.

View the animated Web banners here:

Listen to one of the :60 radio spots here:

Below are the first two of commercials: “Yo Dude” and “Baseball.”

Plus, a few years ago, I wrote and produced these two :30 radio spots for the agency’s tagline: “Fung Shui your holiday with BART: “Holiday Travel/Shopping.”