Next stop, Palookaville. Or, how to not smell like Gardena for the rest of your ad career.

The middle of an ad career is a fucking minefield for many creatives. Take two wrong jobs in a row and you're on the proverbial meat wagon to Palookaville.

Palookaville is a whole lot like Gardena, California, as I see it.

Sorry, Gardena but let's get real, if only for a minute. People from Gardena say they live in Southern California or near Redondo Beach, but the truth is far more odiferous

Gardena-ites smell funky. Not Patchouli-oil funky. Petroleum-refinery funky.

It's an acquired smell that you don't want to be up or downwind from. And you sure as heck don't want it to stick to you like snot on a suede jacket as you're trying to move into the messy middle of an ad career.

Nowhereville. Boilerplate Blvd. Hack Ave.

I wrote a book about not getting stuck in the middle of an ad career because I was there and knew many who suffered the same malaise.

Stuck as fuck in my first CD gig.

Held hostage by conservative clients who were too damn scared to do anything interesting, afraid of rocking the boat and being exposed for being the one who approved something controversial and that actually got people talking.

And on top of that, the client was too damn big to scare away in the eyes of agency management. It was the second largest account in the global network, second only to P&G. Too big to take chances with. A dream killer if ever there was one.

The ol' one-two punch of playing not to lose.

It was hard to win with the Toyota client in Gardena a quarter of a century ago.

But it wasn't impossible. I saved my own ass when I volunteered to run motorsports, after being hired to be half of the group creative director team responsible for Toyota trucks and SUVs.

My side bet turned into a golden egg. Motorsports went from being an ugly stepchild afterthought in the agency to a feather in the Saatchi's cap.

Volunteering for exrta work was my ticket out of Palookaville.

Don Ciccone was his name. He was the only client in Toyota's building who dared do anything interesting. He was the director of marketing for Toyota Motorsports and I clung to him like driftwood for over two years.

There's always someone worth clinging to, even in Palookaville.

I had the good sense to give Don Ciccone a really good listening to the first day we were introduced. The core idea for our first motorsports effort came directly from Don Ciccone, who clearly understood the dynamics in play at the time.

When he mentioned the idea of featuring the drivers as Toyota's racing focus, it made a whole lot of sense for a motorsports program that was largely tanking, or to put it in corporate double-speak, in its fledgling "developmental stages."

Show me a loser and I'll show you an interesting angle.

We made the drivers and their stories the focus while Toyota finished in the back of the pack for an entire season of CART and Formula Atlantic racing.

Our work was about the courage and conviction it took to lose while risking your life doing it. The work couldn't have been more human or vulnerable. It also turned out to be universally appreciated beyond award books and the hallways of Toyota's headquarters.

Fans came out of the woodwork to ask for reprints of our ads. Toyota's top brass received compliments from truly unexpected places, including their competitors.

Never look a dedicated TV budget or a gift horse in the mouth.

Given the relative success of year one, a dedicated TV budget and production dollars were made available for year two's motorsports efforts. We had a real budget.

I had Don Ciccone to thank for it, who pulled me aside at the beginning of the racing season.

"You're the only creative director I've ever worked with that took an idea from me and ran with it. This year, let's do what you want to do."

A year after taking my first CD position, I had a client ready to approve whatever we wanted to do.

Poetry in slow-motion. With a side of Depp reading Kerouac.

We took an excerpt from a Jack Kerouac poem and put it over slow-motion footage of Toyota's CART cars carving through the chicanes and put a schmootz effect on the film. It looked dreamy and dreary and abstract.

Johnny Depp handled the narrative over music by the band "Come."

The finished CART and Formula Atlantic commercial felt like the odd effect of time. slowing. down. as you're experiencing an inescapable car crash.

In honor of Baja 500, our film footage looked like a war scene, much of it shot handheld from a helicopter. We put a deep sepia tone over the Baja desert footage. Think Apocalypse Now on two hits of good acid.

We delivered the narrative over desert racing footage to celebrate Ivan Stewart, the lone shining star of Toyota's racing efforts that year, who won his 16th Baja 500 that year.

"Six-hundred wild horses ridden by a madman who eats other men's dreams, and backs them with glory chasers... Ivan Ironman Stewart, sixteen-time winner of the Baja 500." LOGO UP.

A kickass client saved my ass.

Our print headline highlighted the fact that Ivan Stewart had passed out from exhaustion while still behind the wheel of his modified Toyota truck seconds after crossing the finish line. Co-drivers were the accepted norm. Stewart drove alone. Luckily he'd come to a stop first and was carried to a medical tent and hydrated before being triumphantly propped up on the victory podium --think Colonel Walter E. Kurtz from the aforementioned Coppola masterpiece.

Headline: Ivan got his ass kicked at this year's Baja 500. Imagine how the losers felt.

The year two work for Toyota Motorsports was languid, soulful, and gritty. You could feel the sweat and in many cases, the anguish of giving your all to come up short.

Don approved the work without blinking. We later had to pull it off the air when Toyota's top brass deemed it "too weird."

Meanwhile, I learned that GSD&M in Austin was hunting for a "car guy." I interviewed for the gig and took it.

I escaped from the refinery fumes and I now smell like brisket & queso.

My ticket out of Palookavilee was made possible by a body of credible truck and SUV spots and a good-weird motorsports campaign.

I landed in Austin, Texas, and even took a pay cut to get there. I never regretted that decision for a minute and we've maintained a residence here for twenty-three years, aka Rancho Funk.

I went from doing relatively tame automotive work to helming the Land Rover and Rolling Stone magazine accounts within two years of arriving at GSD&M.

The body of work I got from those accounts changed my trajectory.

Let's not kid ourselves about the location of Palookaville.

Palookaville is scattered all across the advertising landscape. It's wherever there are huge accounts at agencies that fund the salaries for an entire network's worth of muckety-mucks.

If you're in the middle stages of your career, be very wary of where you hang your hat and how long you stay. Volunteer for anything that can get you credible work.

Don't get caught naked, cold, and alone with drawers dropped doing mediocre work that funds somebody else's damn chateau.

You're only as good as the ads you sold yesterday and the ones you do tomorrow.

That's the naked truth.

Cameron Day is the author of the Advertising Survival Guide Trilogy, written to help you navigate the entirety of an ad career. Book Three, "Sticks & Stones" is expected to launch by year's end. Hand-signed editions of Books One and Two, "Chew With Your Mind Open" and "Spittin' Chiclets," are available via www.iamcameronday.com

Or you can send Jeff Bezos your dough via Amazon Books.

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