Off-the-record.

By Gonzalo López Martí / LMMIAMI.COM

• How do you write a new column every single week of the year?
• People ask me this question quite often.
• In some cases they use the word “blog”, which I kind of like.
• In my humble opinion, “blogging” is the brave new literary/journalistic genre of our era.
• Or sub genre, if you will.
• Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut would’ve blogged had they been born 50 years later.
• Jack Kerouac was a blogger ahead of his time.
• Folks who seemed to be immune to the proverbial syndrome of “writer’s block” that has frustrated and driven the human species nuts since the dawn of times.
• Advertising creatives are not foreign to the dread of the blank page (or should I say the blank screen).
• It takes some creatives entire weeks to write a single line of copy.
• Not in my case, as you might have noticed.
• Quite the contrary, I suffer from a bad case of stream-of-consciousness on steroids.
• Then again, as you might know too, writing for my beloved HispanicAd is not my day job.
• It’s just a side gig.
• I run a marketing and advertising agency (err… boutique).
• I have clients.
• Very demanding clients.
• High maintenance clients.
• I have employees, vendors, bills and taxes to pay.
• This blog is not precisely a central revenue stream in my business model.
• Could I use this column to toot my own horn?
• You bet.
• Comes with the territory.
• However, I wouldn’t want to take it too far and disrespect the founder & editor of this prestigious medium, Mr. Eugenio “Gene” Bryan, with petty self-promotional tactics.
• So, what’s my secret to gush out 1500 characters of copy every single week of the year.
• You really wanto to know?
• It is not drugs.
• I’m a clean, mean writing machine.
• First & foremost, I have been working in marketing and advertising for close to 20 years.
• Roughly half of my stint on this planet.
• For agencies and clients big & small, in all the categories imaginable.
• In the three Americas and parts of Europe.
• This racket holds few secrets to yours truly.
• I’ve seen it & heard it all.
• However, there’s an extra ingredient in the secret sauce: I’d say that north of 50% of what I write is not strictly my opinion.
• I get a lot of my material from peers, colleagues, rivals, competitors and outright enemies.
• Yes: I am a de facto mouthpiece for various professionals in our industry who, for a number of reasons, want their opinions to be known while obsessively keeping their identities out of the picture.
• To be continued.