I CAN'T BELIEVE I LIVED THE WHOLE THING

Cohen tells stories about writing award-winning advertisements in this debut memoir of his years on Madison Avenue and beyond.

The author, who grew up in the Bronx and Brooklyn boroughs of New York City, entered the Manhattan-based advertising business in the mid-1960s, just when things were getting interesting: “Young twenty-something Jewish copywriters and Italian art directors were suddenly in high demand,” he writes. “These ‘street kids’ instinctively knew how to go beyond the consumers’ heads to touch their hearts.” He got a job with the iconoclastic firm Wells, Rich, Greene, captained by Mary Wells Lawrence, a pioneering female advertising executive who would come up with the famous “I Love New York” campaign. Cohen quickly established himself as a talented writer of TV ads, which was becoming an increasingly lucrative medium. In 1969, he began working with art director Bob Pasqualina, with whom he created two Clio Award–winning ads for Alka-Seltzer, using two slogans that entered the popular consciousness: “Try it, you’ll like it” and “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” The two admen would go on to form their own company, but after five years, it folded, and they returned to Wells and relocated to Los Angeles. He goes on to chronicle a career that spanned five decades overall, and hundreds of campaigns. Throughout this memoir, Cohen writes in the way that you’d hope a seasoned adman would—in a punchy, funny, and consistently surprising style. For example, here, he discusses a plan for a commercial featuring the destruction of a fast-food chain’s mascot: “Let’s blame all of Jack in the Box’s problems on the dopey clown. All that mediocre food—that was his fault, not Jack in the Box’s. And if we got rid of the clown, it would be proof that we had changed.” He also reveals how he was repeatedly forced to change with the times to anticipate consumers’ shifting tastes. Fans of the TV show Mad Men will particularly enjoy Cohen’s colorful stories, which follow the history of the ad industry all the way into the 2000s.

An entertaining account of a career in the highest echelons of American advertising.