First, a disclaimer, because I would like to keep my job. I write ads for a living at an agency I am not going to name, for clients I am not going to name. Nothing on this page is about my agency, my clients, or anybody I work with. These are my own opinions about commercials that are on TV right now, where anybody with a couch and a remote can see them. If you disagree, e-mail me. I love a fight about typography.

Why "Ad Nauseam"? Because that's what the average person feels about advertising, and I don't blame them. There is a lot of bad work on the air. But every so often thirty seconds comes along that makes you sit up, and I wanted somewhere to talk about why.

The Taco Bell chihuahua. "Yo quiero Taco Bell." Yes, it's a fad. Yes, the line is on T-shirts and everybody's sick of it. But look at what it does: a tiny dog with enormous eyes wants a taco more than anything in the world. That's the whole brief for a fast-food ad (make people want the food) delivered by a character you can't stop looking at. It's one idea. It's simple. And it's funny without a joke in it, which is the hardest kind of funny to write. The talking dog will wear out, they always do, but for a while there this was the best-known campaign in America and it earned it.

Got Milk? Two words and a question mark. Six years old now and still going. The genius of it is that the ads are never about how good milk is. They're about the horror of not having any: the mouth full of peanut butter, the cake, the cookie, and the empty carton. It sells the product by showing you the moment you'd miss it. And the tag line is the kind of thing a copywriter dreams about: it went into the language. People say it. They put it on their own signs. That's the jackpot.

Gap, "Khakis Swing." This was last year, 1998, and I still think about it. A bunch of kids in khakis swing-dancing on a white background to "Jump, Jive an' Wail," the camera freezing them in mid-air. No copy to speak of. No product shot the way you'd normally do one. Just: our pants, on people having the time of their life, and a song you couldn't get out of your head. It made a pair of khakis look like the most exciting thing you could put on. That is what a great art director does when the writer gets out of the way.

The Energizer Bunny. Ten years old and I'm still not tired of him. The joke (he keeps going and going) is the product benefit. Not next to the benefit, not pointing at the benefit. The joke is the benefit. Every time you laugh you're memorizing the selling point. I use this one when I explain the job to my mother.

Volkswagen. The whole "Drivers wanted" campaign, but especially the one from a couple of years back with the two guys driving around to "Da Da Da" and picking up a chair off the curb that turns out to smell. Quiet, odd, no announcer yelling at you. It trusts you to get it. Most car ads are a car on a wet road with a voice saying "starting at." This was two guys and a chair and it sold the car better.

The dot-com ad boom. Not any one ad, the whole thing. In 1999 every company with a ".com" on the end of its name and a fresh round of money has decided to buy TV time, and a lot of it is the same spot: a weird visual, a wacky sound effect, a URL, and no idea what the company does. I've watched thirty-second commercials three times in a row and not been able to tell you whether they sell pet food or stocks. That Super Bowl in January was the first time I noticed how many there were, and it's gotten worse since. Here's the rule they're breaking: if I don't know what you're selling, I can't want it. Some of these companies are going to burn through a whole lot of money being clever and end up with no customers, and I say that as a guy who would happily take some of that money.

The local car dealer with the microphone. You know the one. Every town has him. Screaming, flags, "no reasonable offer refused," a phone number that fills the screen. I'll be honest: it probably works, which is the depressing part. But there's no idea in it. It's a shout, not an ad.

Anything with a "hip" grandmother. A grandma who raps, a grandma who skateboards, a grandma who says a slang word. It was funny once, in about 1985. Now it's the thing you write when you have no thing. Retire her. She's earned it.

Ads that explain the joke. When the announcer comes in at the end and tells you what the funny part meant, the client got scared in the edit room. You can hear it. Trust the audience. They're smarter than the research says.

Ads that are just a celebrity holding the product. No idea, no promise, no reason to believe. Just a famous face and a logo. It's what you buy when you have a budget but not a thought.

My creative director has a speech about this, and it's a good speech, and here's my cheap version of it. A commercial that works has three things, and only three, and if you can't find them in the ad you're looking at, that's why it doesn't work.

1. One idea. Not two. Not "it's fast and it's cheap and it comes in blue." One. Thirty seconds is nothing. The viewer is reaching for the remote, the dog is barking, the phone is ringing. You get to say one thing. The whole fight in an agency is over which one thing, because the client wants all seven, and every time you add one you lose half of what's left.

2. A promise. What does the person get? Not what the product is, what it does for them. Nobody wants a battery. They want the toy to keep going. Nobody wants milk. They want to not choke on the peanut butter. Find the promise and the ad writes itself. Miss it and no amount of clever will save you.

3. A reason to believe. Why should I trust the promise? Sometimes it's a demonstration. Sometimes it's a fact. Sometimes it's just that the ad is so honest about the product that you believe the people who made it. But there has to be something, or it's just noise.

That's it. Idea, promise, reason. Everything else (the music, the dog, the swing-dancing) is how you get people to sit still long enough to hear it. And the best ads make the "how" and the "what" the same thing, which is the trick nobody can teach you.

One more, for free: say it in the fewest words. Every word you cut makes the ones left over louder. I have never seen an ad get worse when we took copy out. Not once.

The list every copywriter keeps. Some of these are older than I am. That's the point. Good is good.

1. Volkswagen, "Think Small" (1959). A tiny car in a sea of white space and copy that admits the car is small and ugly and tells you why that's good. Every honest ad since has been trying to be this one.
2. Volkswagen, "Lemon." Same campaign. The headline calls their own car a lemon. Then the copy tells you it's a lemon because an inspector rejected it for a scratch you couldn't see. Reason to believe, in one word.
3. Avis, "We try harder." They were number two, so they said so. Turning the weakness into the promise. I'd give a year's pay for that line.
4. Apple, "1984." The Super Bowl spot for the Macintosh. Ran once. People still talk about it fifteen years later. That's a commercial that's more famous than most movies.
5. Wendy's, "Where's the beef?" Three words. Went into the language, the same way "Got Milk?" did. When a line does that you can retire.
6. Nike, "Just Do It." Not a claim about shoes at all. A claim about you. That's why it works on everybody.
7. Got Milk?, the "Aaron Burr" spot (1993). The history buff, the mouth full of peanut butter, the radio quiz he can't answer. The first one, and still the best. A whole short film about not having milk.
8. Energizer, the first time the bunny walked through somebody else's fake commercial. An ad that makes fun of ads, and sells batteries. Have your cake.

"Book" is what we call a portfolio. Mine lives in a black case that I carry to job interviews and I can't put the actual ads up here (the client stuff belongs to the client, and the spec stuff needs a scanner that isn't the one at my mom's house). So here it is in words, which for a copywriter is probably the fairer test anyway.

• A regional bank. Print and radio. The idea was that the tellers know your name. My headline, over a photo of a teller: "She will never call you 'valued customer.'" It ran. My first thing that ran. The tear sheet is framed in my kitchen.
• A hardware store chain. Radio, sixty seconds. A man reads a list of every tool he has bought to fix one dripping faucet. I played the man on the rough tape. They hired an actor for the real one, which was correct.
• Spec work: a bus line. Outdoor. "The scenic route, $1.25." I'm still proud of it. Nobody bought it. A lot of a junior's book is things nobody bought.
• Spec work: a pencil. Every creative writing class does the pencil. Mine: "No batteries. No upgrades. No year 2000 problem." I did this one in the spring and it gets a laugh in interviews, which is what spec is for.
• A regional dairy. TV, thirty seconds, in production right now. Can't say more until it airs. Watch this space.

If you are a creative director and you got here somehow, e-mail me and I'll bring the black case anywhere within a three-hour drive.

Pete. 26. English degree, which prepared me for exactly this and nothing else. Two years as a junior copywriter, before that a year writing catalog copy for a lawn and garden company, where I learned everything I know about hose reels. I live in a one-bedroom apartment with a television, a VCR full of taped commercials (my roommate in college thought this was the strangest thing about me, and he was a philosophy major), and a Pentium II that I built myself. I tape commercials the way other people tape ball games. Yes, I fast-forward through the shows.

I read too many books about advertising, I collect old print ads from the library sale, and I watch the Super Bowl for the reasons you'd expect. I'm on ICQ most evenings if you want to argue about a tag line.

Elsewhere on GeoCities.us: Clip Art Corner is by a real designer and will make your page look better than mine, and Saturday Morning Memories is the only other person I've found who remembers the commercials as well as the cartoons.