I wanted to cry because I felt like you are not listening to what I'm pouring out here.

Yes, that's basically happened more times than I could possibly imagine.

People would just say to me, you know, I did something for the Kodak disc camera years ago.

It was a lousy camera where you put in this piece of disc thing and it was, you know, and they weren't selling.

And I wrote this catchy jingle because I said the only thing it's worthwhile for is for people who don't know how to use a camera.

So I wrote this jingle.

I don't want it.

Can we just get along here and make it right?

Give an example of a lesson or two that you'd want people to glean from the book.

Well, I have to tell you that my first boss was a woman at J. Walter Thompson who really should have been running the whole place.

And I was supposed to write these little dealer tags that were going to go over the loudspeakers at Kmart stores for the camera, Kodak camera.

And I stayed up all night writing these ridiculously long, obtuse, but actually very funny dealer tags.

And I walked in the next day and I had 37 of them and I figured...

If she likes them, we could also make it into a one-act play.

I mean, I just had so many of these one-liners.

I love it.

What do you guys think? It's a hit."

[laughs] This client thought we were crazy.

You know the problem when we were pitching it with all these other agencies, and we were a very small agency at the time, and I realize I'm giving you mounds of information, but the one thing they weren't doing is getting people to remember the name of the company, which it turns out they had 3% awareness.

And I said, "I'll find a way to get everybody to remember the name." So okay, so the client says, "All right, I don't care if you show me a naked man tap dancing on a roof, just get people to remember the name." We get back to the agency, nobody can remem- remember what we're pitching.

Aflac? What's Aflac? Aflac.

I ...

And somebody came in and said, "You know, you sound like a duck quacking."

H- how do you decide on Gilbert Gottfried as the voice?

So you two wrote a song together.

Well...

When Kodak pulled out of South Africa because of apartheid practices, we're talking several years back, Stevie Wonder was so moved, he called up the CEO of Kodak and said, I want to represent your brand.

And everybody was thrilled.

And we said, yeah, but you're selling Kodak film, beautiful pictures, that this man cannot see.

So they said, oh, Linda, you go to Atlantic City where he was performing, and you convince him that he should be doing the Kodak batteries because they operate cassette recorders and musical equipment.

I said, are you kidding me? This is above my pay grade.

Yeah.

I hear that ad, I've got to go, but at the same time, who am I going to call when I want to get rid of a car and I want to donate it? I'm going to call 1-800-CARS-FOR-KIDS, but that damn jingle, oh, my

God! I know.

It's an earworm, not necessarily the good kind of earworm, but...

Yeah, it does work.

There's very few jingles on the air anymore.

That's one of them.

And I'm not sure why that happened because they are the thing that gets you to remember a product.

Can we just get along here and make it right?

it was funny it was cute it was human and he made you feel comfortable and to me that's the essence of what advertising is it's taking a message and it's humanizing it and so how do you do that because you do know how to do that how do you humanize any message

You have to engage people by telling a story that's very compelling.

You know, if you say this man was in his bathtub and he died at 6 or 7 p.m. and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Nobody will remember it.

But if you start by saying, I opened the bathroom door and I saw that my husband was having an affair with somebody, so I shot him.

Everybody will remember that story.

And even when I do my keynotes, which I do all over the country and around the world, it's just a collection of stories.

What happened?

in looking back on that, uh, do, do you have an easy answer for how you and your team made something that is, um, in my head decades later?

You know, I come from the entertainment business.

I was doing theater and touring and stuff like that and doing comedy, so I came from a world of entertainment, and I knew when I got into advertising that you really had to entertain people and but you had to do it in these short segments, right? And I thought, you know, this great line that was written by now the famous author, he was my boss at the time, James Patterson, and he and some other people at the agency sorta came up with this line, "I don't wanna grow up.

I'm a Toys R Us kid," and I said, "Ah," 'cause I had my master's in music and I love writing children's songs.

I said, "It's gotta be a song.

The kids have to be so annoying they have to keep singing it to their parents," because a Barbie is a Barbie any place you go, so why would they buy it at Toys "R" Us? And I started writing a song, and I had to write it on a toy piano because it had to have a range that kids could sing in, and I don't wanna grow up.

And I, and I wrote it in about 30 seconds, to be totally honest with you, but I wouldn't play it for anybody 'cause I thought it was terrible.

Right