The Moon Unit: The Opposite Of Advertising

The Moon Unit is a team of ghostwriters providing a round-the-clock, round-the-globe pitch/treatment writing service to the world’s top commercials directors. Carol Cooper discovers the secret of their clandestine success

Look up the word ‘advertising’ in a thesaurus and you’ll be richly rewarded with a tasty stash of such mouthwatering synonyms as ‘hogwash’, ‘hoopla’, ‘proselytism’, ‘ballyhoo’ and ‘puffery’. And under antonyms? Just a few words, including ‘secret’. So a secret is the opposite of advertising. Which means, in a business drenched in hoopla, whose very function is to create ballyhoo and puffery, it’s fascinating to find a small quiet part of the industry toiling away, contributing to great campaigns anonymously.

The Moon Unit is a team of ghostwriters providing round-the-clock, round-the-globe pitch/treatment writing services to the world’s top commercials directors. The owner goes by the pseudonym of Alf, short for Alpha, in keeping with the outfit’s lunar theme. A Brit now based in New Zealand, Alf was born in “the glorious county of Essex” and started out producing promos for MTV, BBC, Sci-Fi, Channel 4 and others, then spent around 12 years directing TV commercials. “I was a fairly successful director working in several markets: Asia, Australia/New Zealand, UK and Europe. I met a lot of directors and agency people and I built up a network of people around the world,” he explains. He then realised he was, “a better writer than a director” and started helping fellow directors write pitches and treatments. Soon his services were being recommended – those he’d helped were winning more pitches – and the ghostwriting took off. After a couple of years he found himself writing speeches for a prime minister whose name, of course, I can’t divulge. “Writing for a politician is dreadful, you have to learn to yawn with your mouth shut,” he recalls. “Once the copy has gone through the private secretary and press secretary it’s so watered down, you think ‘Why am I bothering?’ It’s horrible, I did it for four years and just about escaped with my sanity intact.”

Alf relocated to New Zealand and was down the pub one night with his chum – a Cannes Lion-winning creative director for top agencies, including Saatchi – when the ghostwriting idea started to take shape. This chum observed that, in a way, he’d always been a ghostwriter, finding voices for brands to communicate with consumers. So in 2011 Alpha and friend, codename Omega, launched The Moon Unit. “We called ourselves The Moon Unit because New Zealand is so remote you might as well be on the moon. It started off as a joke, then it kind of stuck,” explains Alf. “We thought, okay, if we’re ghostwriters, we should have a ghost logo, but the white hoods made it look like we were the Ku Klux Klan, so we thought, let’s be astronauts.”

Though he’s a family man with a six-week-old baby and an 18 year old (“I drink beer with one, change the other’s nappy”), Alf certainly delivers on his company’s promise of a fast-response 24/7 service. Early one evening in London – around 6am NZ time, I sent him an email asking if he’d be free for a Skype interview later, assuming he’d be asleep. “Sleep?” he replied, barely a nanosecond after my finger had left the send button, “plenty time for sleep when you’re dead. Let’s Skype now.” I asked him to turn on his camera, a rarity due to the anonymity thing – his clients never want to be seen and rarely want to see their ‘ghosts’ – and there he was in his Wellington home office with a vast map of the world on the wall behind him, looking every inch the global communicator. “We realised when we set up The Moon Unit we needed to be active in all time zones so we could offer an instant response.” Last year he bought out Omega, so is the sole owner with 10 creatives on his team, a mix of writers, picture researchers and designers – TMU also provides visuals to complete the package. There are offices around the world, from Spock in Tokyo, to Gamma in LA and Sputnik, his European CCO, based in Berlin. “Sputnik is on the other end of the clock, so when I go to sleep he picks up the comms. Because, yes, I have to sleep sometimes,” he admits.

After growing the business via word-of-mouth recommendations, Alf and his team then went ‘undercover’ to provide an anonymous service that’s been hired by some of the world’s top commercials directors. Off the record he lists an impressive client list, a who’s who of production companies. “Most directors don’t like it to be known that they have their pitches written for them and much of our work is under NDAs. It never ceases to fascinate me that we can get a job pitching on campaigns worth millions of dollars and people are placing a massive amount of trust in us, but they don’t know who we are,” muses Alf. “We all work under pseudonyms but are happy to turn on our Skype cameras any time for our clients. Most of them prefer to talk but not switch on video. It amuses me that I could walk down the street past several directors we’ve helped to nail jobs worth six, sometimes seven figures, yet they wouldn’t recognise us. But some of the early clients I still write for do know me by my real name. They’re confused that I have this alternative covert persona.”

The loneliness of the long-distance pitch writer

What has been his marketing strategy? “We beam transmissions from the moon to planet Earth.” So, he sends out the odd email. “We have clients whose first language isn’t English. Big growth markets for us are China, Russia, Turkey and Asia. And we get plenty of work from Italy, Germany, all European countries apart from France – only ever one or two jobs from there...”

Other clients are those who just want to present a more polished pitch, but his main clients are successful US and UK directors who are too busy on shoots to write. Do they ever come to his team with half-formed ideas that need working up? “The ones we like to nurture are the ones who say ‘These are my ideas, can you come up with something in that area?’” As his previous career included six months as a CD, Alf is always happy to contribute. “Our most successful relationships are those where we collaborate and become like another creative.”

Not everyone wants more input, though. “Sometimes you get someone who says ‘You write what I say. This is MY vision.’ The main thing you have to learn about being a ghostwriter is to have no ego. If the director wants something, go with it. If he ignores your ideas, that’s fine.”

Apart from the healthy day rate they charge (“We work with the cream, we are not cheap and we won’t cut our prices.”) the job could seem less than rewarding, particularly for ad industry types, ie extroverts not averse to a little praise. With a team comprised of lone ‘astronauts’ in outposts round the globe and client interaction being either screen- or phone-based. I ask him if he ever misses face-to-face meetings? “We always Skype. I’ve never met a director face-to-face, but I am fine with that. We live in an IT age where we can all be digital nomads now.”

We say our farewells and, with Skype’s Star Trek-style bleep, I dispatch Alpha and his pixelated image back through space to his side of the planet.

Standing out from the pack

In this sample pitch from The Moon Unit, the writer plays on the rough-as-guts tradition in New Zealand beer ads, giving it an ironic spin. The Moon Unit’s client, a director with a great reputation for comic spots, got the job, and the resulting ad boosted the ‘outsider’ beer brand’s market share.

“Far from the quiche-munching, cappuccino-swilling wankers of Grey Lynn lies a world of wide-open spaces where men are men – clearing gorse, lambing ewes, breaking in horses and tilling soil. The same today as it was 150 years ago.

This is the central Otago Highlands, home of the rugged Southern Man, with its exact geographical centre being a little town called (town is brand name).

This is a mythical New Zealand, beloved by all NZ males, where images of the South Island high country present a particular construction of masculine identity. Rugged, tough, macho, real warts-and-all characters that represent to the NZ identity what the Wild West did for the USA. Core values like loyalty, integrity, mate-ship and a “she’ll be right” attitude that taps into a construct that all New Zealand men identify with.

And this territory has been owned by a rival brand that rhymes with ‘crates’. For the last 23 years, in fact. Even though their product might taste like a combination of horse piss and rancid student’s socks, twice distilled through a whore’s knickers.

Let’s face it. Beer is war. Dominated by different tribes.

You drink Heineken? You’re a used-car salesman. Too young to get into a pub? You’re drinking Ice Beer. Anoraks and train spotters? Rheineck. Gang members and bogans? Waikato – or Lion Red. Barefoot in the supermarket? You’re drinking Double Brown.

If you go back in time, every town had its own brewery and you drank from that town. Times have moved on, but brands have come to represent certain values. Groups of friends often drink the same beer for a sense of belonging.

The Southern Man has become iconic – he’s the man standing tall in the tussock-clad prairie that every New Zealand bloke really wants to be. Real men who don’t fart around with fancy green bottles and designer beers. The brewers, the publicans, the students, the farmers of Otago. Pig-hunting bushmen with rampant mongrel pigdogs and bloodied boars slung over their shoulders. Men who want a real man’s beer. Real beer that puts hairs on your balls. Superb drinkability that only increases when one owns a couple of slabs.

(Brand name) has the potential to be the challenger brand that can tap into this construct and reclaim some of its real estate, springboarding it into the popular consciousness by adding a further dimension to the tired, wooden stereotypes that the Southern Man has become.

By hijacking the wry humour and laidback pace of the ‘good on ya’ forebears, and injecting the cheeky vivacity of the brand from Mangatainoka. Right.

Any way you look at it, (brand name’s) time has truly arrived…”