TINY'S BIG IDEAS

After nearly a decade in hiding, the truth can finally be told: I am Pat Halstead. I profiled multi-award-winning advertising copywriter Erin Pollock for the October, 2000 issue of The Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine. But at the time, I was working for another Cleveland ad agency and didn't think my superiors would think much of the publicity given a competitor. Hence, my one and only (so far) pseudonym. The last name comes from back a ways in my family ancestry on my dad's side. The first name, "Pat" was craftily designed to further confuse the reader by even muddling the gender. I'm devious when I have to be.

David Searls

“Anyone interested in a lesbian cruise? Besides every heterosexual male on the planet?”
Ad for Green Road travel Agency promoting lesbian vacation packages

Black on black is the fashion statement of the evening, the men in buttoned-to-the-throat shirts sans neckties, the women decked out stylishly or hip, depending on age or outlook. Stones glitter from earlobes of both genders and the sprinkling of round, horn-rimmed glasses puts one in mind of a Woody Allen movie. The account people work the room while the creatives hang back with their own kind, looking vaguely uncomfortable. After dinner and cocktails, the hosts dim the lights and steer the crowd to another room with another bar, and usher the attendees into chairs set before a stage.

Welcome to the Cleveland ADDYs, the annual Cleveland Advertising Association-sponsored award show which in 2000, as well as other recent years, seems to have been called to order predominantly to honor a tiny, tiny young woman in black leather pants and matching top. Erin Friedman—now Pollock, due to her recent marriage to Adam, a pediatric dentist—will be photographed receiving an award more than thirty times this evening, her exuberant grin never slipping into boredom or self-satisfaction. The girlish copywriter gleefully pops up to take home almost half of the first-place Golds and about a third of the Silvers. She nabs three out of four of the Judges’ Choice Awards, and, as a sort of industry coup d’ etat, earns the one and only Best of Show, an honor that must seem anticlimactic after she’s swept everything else.

In all, Pollock walks away this March evening with 25 of 66 top awards along with fourteen certificates of merit. To add insult to everyone else’s injury, several of the honors she doesn’t pick up are in such word-free categories as logo design or still photography.

“I’ve seen the judges’ reactions, and her work obviously lights up their eyes,” says Lane Strauss, a copywriter from Wyse Advertising who’s nabbed more than his share of ADDY recognition over the years, including seven of the major awards at the 2000 show.

Pollock’s accomplishments are the equivalent of Mark McGwire hitting not 70 homers a year, but 80 or 90 or a hundred. While she probably weighs as much as one of the famed slugger’s thighs, she’s obviously got the mental heft needed to have risen to the top of her profession in less than a half dozen years. At the tender age of 29, Bill Brokaw Advertising’s Erin Pollock stands as tall as any copywriter in Cleveland.

Ad agency folks love awards shows. Account people drag along their clients to prove what brilliant accomplishments have been made on their nickel. Winning writers and designers subtly lobby for more bucks or better jobs (as industry recruiter Laurie Mitchell phrased it in her ad in the last ADDY program, “You win. We place.”) or simply preen before peers. And everyone thinks the plaques and trophies look cool in the agency lobby.

Among such back-patting shows, the local segment of the American Advertising Awards—or ADDY—is a major draw as the first of three steps, followed by districts and nationals, to top-of-the-profession acclaim. The winners gleefully accept their plaudits while the losers are left to ponder the shortcuts that certain agencies might have taken to nab their victories.

Ad people whose clients manufacture camshafts or promote funeral services, for instance, might dwell on what they could do if given free rein to create posters for divorce lawyers or small-space ads for pet-sitting services or lesbian vacation packagers. Yes, Bill Brokaw Advertising has been known to snag such delightfully quirky clients with shoestring ad budgets that contribute little to the agency’s bottom line, but yield opportunities to create attention-grabbing messages that run on just enough of a media schedule to qualify for show entry.

In typically irreverent fashion, Pollock once addressed this controversy head-on when assigned to write copy encouraging agencies to submit work to the Cleveland ADDYs. “Hey, if it ran once, it ran,” read one award-winning poster. Another enthused: “Your cousin’s wife teaches naked yoga. Can you say poster campaign?”

But Pollock silences the naysayers in a bigger way, by also winning on behalf of such all-business and potentially mind-numbing clients as manufacturers of pressure-sensitive adhesives and sewer pipes. For the latter, for instance, she wrote a direct mail seminar invitation promising free sewer pipe design software. The kicker came in the subhead: “(You’ll just have to sit through some crap first.)”

“Going to the Van Halen concert tonight? Something tells us you’ll have the munchies.”
Ad for Mel’s Grille

“I’m not a writer,” Pollock proclaims with a shrug. “I’m a concepter."

Or at least not a writer like her classmates at The Portfolio Center in Atlanta, an intensive two-year copywriting training program, where she went after earning a journalism degree at The Ohio State University.

“A lot of them really wanted to do something more literate, and were writing copy as a means of getting paid,” says Pollock. “But for me, advertising is all I ever wanted to do. Journalistic writing is too much correct grammar and spell-checking.”

Words are not highly valued by volume in advertising. It’s a craft, not an art, the object being to cajole reluctant consumers into stopping, engaging, consuming. At The Portfolio Center, Pollock learned such golden rules as KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and ROI (Relevance, Originality, Impact). Steadily she nurtured her talent for the amusing headline and succinct few lines of copy.

Having grown up in Mayfield Heights, the only child of Ella and Joel Friedman, it was to the Cleveland area she returned during one semester break, with resume and school samples in hand. “Everywhere I went, they took one look at my portfolio and said I should take it to Brokaw,” she says.

This was 1995, and Bill Brokaw Advertising was in the early stages of establishing its reputation as a youthful shop creating sassy ads for clients willing to have a little fun, take a few risks.
Bill Brokaw—the man, not the agency—felt that the young writer now known agency-wide as Tiny would fit right in “She’s quick and bright and her ability to hit the nerve of her audience is very sharp.”

Initially, the nerves hit hardest by Pollock’s work were her own. “I’d be up at three in the morning writing down ideas. I used to freak out. I’d cry, like I wasn’t going to be able to come up with anything.”

The worst is when she gets a poor reaction for a new-business pitch. “A client will give you another chance if they have a history with you, but when I let down a prospect who doesn’t know me I feel so bad. It’s like I dropped the ball.”

Her daughter struggles this way with everything, according to Ella Friedman. “Erin’s got a Type A personality, and she’s always been hard on herself. At first, she was convinced she wasn’t even going to be able to get a job in Cleveland.”

Pollock says that she learned to fight the stress by keeping things fun and by trusting her gut reaction. As at many agencies, Pollock works in tandem with an art director, most frequently and successfully with low-key but humorous Steve McKeown. They’re about the same age, and have virtually the same start date at Brokaw. They work so well together, spinning ideas back and forth, that Pollock claims it’s hard to remember who came up with a good one.

“I scribble stuff down, and Erin makes fun of it,” McKeown jokes in explaining their easy work habits.

Pollock’s trademark irreverence isn’t just saved for agency clients. According to co-worker and fellow copywriter Chris Viola, “Erin will say stuff that everyone else thinks, but won’t say.”

In other words, Tiny is a bit profane?

“Oh God, don’t say that. My mother will read this,” Pollock wails. After a pause, she adds with a smile, “I’m outspoken, not profane. And I don’t have the best ‘edit’ button in my head.”

Mrs. Friedman’s feelings aside, Pollock fits right in at an agency with a cluster of photos of everyone who a staff amateur photographer could, over time, convince to pose in oblivious proximity to a phallic symbol sneaked somewhere onto the scene.

Conversation spills from Pollock in quick bursts. Then she stops and second-guesses everything she’s just said. Her most frequent target is herself: she’s not that good, she’s not really a writer, she gets an awful lot of help from the geniuses around her.

“Everyone I work with is funny but me,” she insists. “I’m funny in my obnoxiousness, I guess, but not really funny.”

While Pollock professes repeated disbelief that anyone would want to read about her accomplishments, her “You wanna talk to me?!” routine seems genuine rather than coy. After all, she doesn’t even let two of her biggest supporters go to the ADDYs.

“She says it’s queer if your parents go,” according to her mother.

Despite her rising profile in Cleveland, Pollock throws credit around as liberally as a summer intern hoping to get hired on fulltime. She seems to mention everyone in the creative department as an inspiration, but saves her highest praise for Creative Director Greg Thomas.

“He can fix anything. He’ll change one word and suddenly my headline’s working,” she says. It’s Thomas she credits for pushing her to work on her “voice,” the tone she assumes with each message. “You can’t be too irreverent or edgy if you’re working with a hospital,” Pollock admits. “At first it was hard for me to work in voices other than humor, but it’s getting easier.”

Respect is a two-way street between Pollock and her creative director. “Erin has an uncanny ability to cut right to the meat of the issue,” says Thomas.

The best example of that might be his favorite Pollock creation, a mailer promoting the services of a laser vision surgical center. Through the blank vellum cover a single word can be seen as no more than a blur. Only when the cover page is turned does the reader discover the word is “After.” As in: Before—blurry…After—clear. It might take the reader a second or two, but the payoff precisely hits the main selling point of laser surgery. Or at least that’s the way the American Advertising Federation saw it in awarding the agency a national Gold ADDY for the mailer.

“Hey, Sparky, you’ve just won 114 races, what are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to the incinerator!”
Poster for Greyhound Adoption

You’ve “met” Erin Friedman Pollock if you’ve turned on the tube and seen that series of Bryant & Stratton commercials featuring oddballs who are looking into admission to the small business school for all the wrong reasons. There’s the girl whose stated ambition is to be homecoming queen, and the slacker whose only questions are “Do I have to go to all my classes?” and “Do you have gum?”

Pollock also wrote the “Be a Moover” radio spots for Smith Dairy, like the one with the chatty Valley Girl who does her part for humanity by saying hi to a socially inept classmate spotted gulping milk from a carton rather than the client’s cute portable bottle.

Despite Pollock’s burgeoning—and award-winning—experiences with broadcast advertising, print is where she still feels most comfortable. After all, how could the magic of television improve upon the wry simplicity of designating a client restaurant and bar “The Official Celine Dion Concert Husband Drop-Off and Pick-Up” spot?

Naturally, Tiny won an ADDY for that one.