Writing Fiction is Harder,
Says Jack Dillon（３）
Vice President, Copy Supervisor of DDB(in 1968)
Interviewer: In essence, first get your structure down on paper and then edit for style.
Dillon: Well, I don't plot the structure of a story ahead of time. It goes where the characters take it and along about the middle I see where it ought to go.
In fiction, the style takes care of itself.
But in copy. yes.
You can take a perfectly beautiful piece of copy that is written from an illogical basis and you cannot fix it.
But you can take a piece of copy that is written quite badly, but very logically structured and fix it in about five
minutes.
Interviewer: Apart from differences in the way you write fiction and copy, are there differences in attitude towards your work in each field?
Dillon: Yes, we in the ad business are here to write ads or
commercials to help put across a client's proposition.
He is spending money to have this proposition put across.
Our job is to bring to this proposition such art as we can, so that it will get the best response from the public.
I think the key word there isso that it wi II get the greatest response from the public.
We are not here as authors and artists.
We are here as advertising people who are bringing our talents-and art, if you will-to a business proposition.
Our job is not just to produce a work of art that people will
laugh at or tal k about. It's to move a cl ienfs product or proposition.
We don't have the freedom of an artist, author, composer to go our own way.
The advertisement created with A/D Mr.Helmut krone being requested advertisement to tell beetle to have reached five million production from president of German headquarters of VW by version in the United States and international version of 'Life' magazine.
We'd like to show you the 5,000,000th Volkswagen. But it's been sold.
Sorry.
A man picked it up in December.
（But you know what it looked like. It looked like a beetle.)
You might think 5,000,000 is a grand number for our modest car.
But then, the whole VW idea is to take the modest and perfect it.
We've preferred to leave a few things out of our car and put more quality into the parts that count. For years we even left out the fuel gauge.
But you got the best suspension and transmission in the business.
And you know the VW engine. In the Grand Prix, you might come in a day after everybody else. But you'll be the last one into a repair shop.
And yet some people have asked if our funnv-Iooking car was through, now that the VW 1500 has appeared.
No．(We'd be crazy.）
It's the third best-selling car in the world.
A/D Helmut Krone
Interviewer: You're saying an adman should be client-oriented.
Dillon: Not exactly.
We try to do ads that are a little more reader-oriented and a little less client-oriented.
Our job is to represent the publ ic to the cI ient, rather than the client to the public.
In other words, we tell the client what the public will respond to.
This is sometimes a little hard for a client to understand, because any slight change in his product becomes of great
importance to him, but the world isn't necessarily waiting to hear about it.
Your market for copy, the cI ient, isn't interested in writing for its own sake.
His business is selling wheelbarrows.
Writing is the business of publishers.
So you find more sympathy for a piece of writing for its own quality among publ ishers than you do among clients.
The advantage of writing ads is that you don't have to wait a year or two to find out if an ad is any good.
Spend 15 months writing a book and then find out it's terrible, and it doesn't hurt so much when a client wants you to revise a piece of copy.
（Interviewer is Mis Sandra Karl）
