Who’s to blame for this blog?
Blame Madison Avenue and MAD Magazine. However, if you like anything you read here, consider hiring Mitch Devine, aka @DevineLines, as your friendly independent marketing copywriter, SEO writer and social media consultant.
Mitch creates marketing messages for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Some of his main categories of experience include automotive, fast food, health care, insurance, real estate, technology and utilities. Mitch writes words to fit innumerable commercial media formats including Web sites, email, print, collateral, radio (including voice-overs), TV, interactive multimedia, direct mail, outdoor, and point of purchase. Everything from gas pump videos to bar coasters.
If you’ve got something to sell, Mitch can help you say it well. (Rhyming optional.)
The Blandings Backstory
It’s a little strange to refer to oneself in the third person too often, so let’s just tell this in first-person, if you don’t mind.
I learned copywriting from the Blandings School of Advertising. In fact, I was enrolled and already in training—reading MAD satires, singing commercial jingles—before I ever dreamed advertising could be a job. 
My fascination with advertising traces back to the immortal slogan for a fictional ham company: “If you ain’t eatin’ Wham, you ain’t eatin’ ham.” It wasn’t good grammar, but it was great advertising. And great advertising didn’t have to follow rules.
The line was the Big Idea that supplied a happy ending to the vintage comedy film “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House”. But it wasn’t dreamed up by Cary Grant’s adman hero of the title. He just happened to overhear the family’s cook and housekeeper, Gussie, toss it off as she answered the kids. Luckily she bailed him out just before deadline. (At least Blandings gave Gussie a raise before the end of the movie.) 
The lesson? Account-winning/product-moving inspiration can come from everyday observations. At home, no less. Also, it helps to have a housekeeper.
I can thank/blame my mother’s love of old movies and magazine ads for leading me down the long and winding road of advertising. I don’t try to compete with Cary Grant or Clark Gable (see “The Hucksters“), but I do try to base marketing ideas on everyday truths that will resonate with the audience. 
I work with agencies and designers as well as directly with marketers. I’d be happy to write the words that say what you want to get across to your audience. Let’s talk.
Mitch Devine
(949) 293-9337 • devinewrite (at) gmail (dot) com
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