(2003-05-31) — Actor Sean Penn’s 4,161-word full-page ad in the New York Times has top agency executives rethinking the role of copywriting in great advertising. The rambling screed about patriotism, war, french fries and William Saroyan has boosted sales of mescaline overnight.
While the ad never mentions mescaline, or any hallucinogen directly, demand for the illegal drug has spiked sharply among wealthy liberals, a key New York Times demographic slice. And that has big advertising executives taking notice.
“Penn has rocked the advertising world,” said one unnamed creative director of a large unnamed agency. “He has achieved what we only dream of. He has become the product. It’s almost as if mescaline itself wrote the ad. This is a creative triumph, and has revived a product which had suffered years of sluggish sales.”
Creative directors agree that if Mr. Penn is to sustain his success in the copywriting business he will have to, as one put it, “become milk, or Mercedes-Benz, or Depend™ as the client demands.”