Every audience wants to hear a good story.

Here’s mine:

I was born and raised in a little town in northwest Illinois. I worked on farms (ask me for corn detasseling stories) and played high school football (ask me for state championship stories). I washed dishes at a steak house (ask me for salad bar stories), umpired baseball games (ask me for bad parent stories), and sold shoes (ask me…yeah, no: ask me for more football stories).

I also worked in factories (ask me for stories about hearing loss), in professional lawn care (ask me for stories about trespassing), sold beads in parking lots at Grateful Dead shows (ask for any stories I can remember), and I served in the United States Air Force (ask me about flying MACH 2).

I took the scenic route to my bachelor’s degree in English (ask me for college stories, but they’ll be censored as needed).  

And I’ve written a lot of ads in my copywriting career – that makes for a lot of stories. Ask me for stories about ag marketing radio (Bayer, Intervet) and animal pharma collateral (Pfizer, PRN Pharmacal). Ask me for the story about tasting a new dog food (Hill’s Pet Nutrition) for a product launch, or the one about the big cooler full of Cook’s ham and Farmland bacon leftover after a photo shoot.

I have stories about what made kids choose UMKC, and about how to raise $165 million in donations for the university. I have stories about communicating with people who hate weeds and people who love them (PBI-Gordon). And I have stories about how to fix an email campaign with a 30% unsubscribe rate (Pet-Ag - And the answer is kittens in sunglasses).

What I really want to do, though, is tell your stories.