My dad, Grant Recksieck, in addition to being a terrific, beloved father, was also a funny guy, a copywriter and an advertising lifer. I recently found some of his writing and thought that even in death he can help me with some fun content. He died before blogs or listicles were even a thing, but he was a man ahead of his time. This 40-year-old glossary still holds up.


Account Executive: A well-dressed extrovert blessed with mediocrity and a genius for small talk.

Account Executive’s Rough Layout: Tall grass adjacent to the seventh green.

Advertising Agency: The only allegedly professional enterprise in the whole world that requires no formal training or any proven skills whatsoever.

Agency President: Ex-radio station time salesman who can’t write or draw but has "a million ideas a minute."

Agency Review: The hopeless exercise of an ad agency going through the motions of presenting a "fresh campaign approach" to its disenchanted client even though the agency knows it doesn’t have a chance in hell of hanging onto the account.

Art Director: A frustrated illustrator who spends most of his or her time drinking wine at all-day photo shoots.

Art Director’s Rough Layout: White space with no copy whatsoever except for a short headline in six-point script type being consumed by a polar bear, apropos of nothing.

Associate Creative Director: A self-styled Renaissance man from the art direction side who can’t spell "Renaissance" and doesn’t care how it’s spelled.

Client: The creative genius who could write all the ads by himself if he only had the time.

Copy: All the stuff you can’t get into the headline.

Copy Chief: The ad agency’s senior writer who tomahawks the ideas of junior writers and then presents them as his own.

Copy Contact: A junior account executive who is paid to write but not to drink.

Copy Platform: What the copywriter dives (or falls) off of when he or she discovers that the art director doesn’t have any good ideas either.

Copywriter: A third-rate mystery novelist whose best ad ideas somehow keep winding up in the copy chief’s portfolio.

Copywriter’s Rough Layout: The Encyclopedia Britannica on microfilm.

Focus Group: An in-depth consumer research group consisting of the bartender, a Jesuit priest and the cleaning lady.

Headline: The words in big type at the top of the ad which, in big U.S. ad agency advertising, are deliberately devoid of any humor, intrigue or human interest whatsoever.

Marketing: Taking a trip to the grocery store.

Marketing Director: The guy who makes the trip to the grocery store and forgets the grocery list.

Marketing Plan: The grocery list.

Marketing Strategy: Crashing the supermarket express lane with 32 grocery items, a $200 check drawn on a Bert Lance bank in the Azores and an expired Lebanese driver’s license.

Media Director: The lowest paid person (female of course) in the agency, including the janitor.

Media Plan: Random selections from the agency’s complimentary publication subscription list.

Medical Advertising: Drug trafficking without standing on street corners.

Merchandising: Moochandising with the powdered milk of human kindness and a few bucks on the side.

Multilevel Marketing: A quasi-legal pyramid scheme standing there on your front doorstep with a big grin on its face.

Outdoor Advertising: The dwindling province of far-sighted motorists and near-sighted acrobats.

Printing Press: A prolific junk mail machine capable of jamming every mailbox in America to the breaking point within 24 hours.

Telemarketing: A modern mass marketing technique which stimulates residential occupants to leap out of a warm bath and, after half killing themselves, grab the phone just in time to catch a salesman’s cold call (and sometimes a previously transcribed one at that) giving the lucky telephone the opportunity to cash in on the opportunity of a lifetime while standing there stark naked, shivering and dripping wet.

TV Producer: The guy who has a terrible ear for dialogue but a terrific grasp of economics.

TV Studio: A windowless crypt crawling with dead-sure pretension and cryptic nonsense posing as enlightenment.