Full Bleed

When Danny Duffy, a 35-year-old high school English teacher, decides to leave the classroom to become a junior copywriter at one of Boston’s top ad agencies, he thinks of it as pressing the restart button not just on his career, but on his life.


Thrust into a world where big ideas and even bigger egos vie for attention, Danny learns, sometimes the hard way, about life in an ad agency. He meets clients who can’t always tell you what they’re looking for, but will know it when they see it. He goes to focus groups that have their own peculiar ideas about what makes good advertising. He’s dragged into an internecine war between the “suits” and the creatives, both of whom accuse the other of not doing their job. He experiences the highs of coming up with successful ads and campaigns and the lows of coming up empty as deadlines loom.


At the same time Danny is dealing with adapting to his new world, the ad agency, Mason Ottinger & Marsh, has to cope with its own set of changes and challenges. Like what compromises do you make to keep the doors open in a down economy? And how

do you continue to produce the kind of smart and engaging advertising that separates the best agencies from those that view their role as keeping their clients happy by simply taking dictation from them?


Whether you love advertising or hate it, or a little bit of both, you’ll find Full Bleed to be a funny, insightful and engaging peek behind-the-curtain at the people who come up with all those ads you find funny or annoying, meaningless or moving. And who knows, it may even get you to think twice before you say, “That ad sucks. I could have done better than that.”


Joe Mahoney taught English and Latin for 12 years and was a copywriter for 30, the last 25 of them at Arnold Worldwide in Boston where he was an Associate Creative Director. After retiring in 2008, he has taught advertising at Suffolk University, continues to do freelance writing and dotes on his two grandsons. He lives with his wife in Quincy, MA, just down the street from where John Cheever was born. He readily acknowledges that’s the closest he’ll ever get to literary greatness.