I Hope This Email Finds You Well

How and why I infuriated corporate by changing my email signature.

I work at a creative agency called MullenLowe, and for the last two years, I’ve been discretely changing my email signature.

Here’s why:

First, I never identified with Junior Copywriter. I chose the career because it was the best way to be creative, strategic, and not homeless. Copywriters don’t have to mangle their art into paid social like an art director. And copywriters don’t have to write kitchen-sink briefs like some strategists.

We get to do the cool stuff and bang out the lame stuff from Starbucks.

But I’m not a copywriter’s copywriter. I don’t have a movie script. I never wanted to write a Great American Novel. I’m not obsessed with France, or beaches, or French beaches. And unless the manifestos are communist, I don’t think people should bother reading them.

Second, we take ourselves too seriously. If I can make one person chuckle in our dimly lit, poorly ventilated, beige-painted Boston office, in the dead of winter, at 3:30 pm sundown — that’s better than any advertising headline. Except for the one I wrote two months ago, that one was pretty damn good.

Life is a chain — not an email chain — though maybe something uncomfortably close to one. Our survival and wellbeing are interdependent. If an email interrupts the siege of working from 9 to 9, then, I hope this email finds you well.

Kind Regards,

Thank you for reading.

If you want to talk business or chinwag, you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter. In addition to copywriting, I’m the founder of a gaming incubator at the MullenLowe Group called Questing, the owner of the analog game company Explorers, and a consummate nerd everywhere else.

Until next time,
Clayton Notestine