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Rex Roy |
Rex Roy was born into auto writing. At age 14 he was a product information specialist in the world’s 27th largest ad agency. In high school he sold “spy” photos to the buff books and could re-build cars. That his father had founded and built Ross Roy Advertising gained him entrée but memorizing car facts as easily as “other kids memorized baseball stats” earned him the respect of copywriters who relied on him for copy points and art directors who came to him to verify their product depictions were correct.
He was raised during Motor City high times when auto talk was the only talk on the city’s golf-courses, in its bars, over its dinner tables and at its backyard barbeques and cocktail parties – as well as its board rooms and assembly lines. The “auto biz” was the secular religion. For Roy, it was systemic and he felt a career in auto advertising was his birthright.
Yet, as have thousands of Detroit families who fully expected their children would follow them into the shops, studios, cubicles or executives suites of the Big Three or those of its vendors and suppliers, he found that things change. Drastically. For him, the first of two reality jolts came much earlier than the seismic one hitting Motown now. The death of his father and sale of the agency shortly before he graduated the U. of M. totally altered his expectations. The new owners “no family” policy barred him from Ross Roy which itself, within a decade was no longer a proud Detroit-owned agency, having been consumed and regurgitated by a communications conglomerate. Read the rest of this entry »
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