Hey Whipple, Squeeze This’ Will Add Four Hours to Your Workday

A few months ago, a senior copywriter recommended I read Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan. I was incredulous, mostly because I’ve been swinging off Ogilvy’s left you-know-what since Confessions of an Advertising Man.

(Getting into Ogilvy is like reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time. It will fuck with your mind.)

Just to be nice, I bought Sullivan’s book, and I’m really sorry I did. Because now my walls are COVERED in strategic doodling. I am developing ideas I wouldn’t have allocated brainpower to six months ago.

It’s not just that the author has an amusing obsession with Charmin’s slightly-pervy Whipple man. I have to stop every third sentence to highlight something or scribble out yet another new thought. The margins in my copy of Sullivan’s opus are a schizophrenic mess.

Reading Hey Whipple, Squeeze This will make you a better advertiser. (Skip the Bogusky foreword; that part’s pretty pointless.) Expect to take a lot of notes and just generally change the way you approach blank paper.

Which is why reading Hey Whipple, Squeeze This will take you a really long time. And why an eight-hour work day will suddenly spiral into 10 or 11. You’ll just care more.

Also, the paragraphs are tiny — and there’s pictures.