Otis Maxwell is a freelance writer and creative guy who has created controls for a diverse cross-section of America’s leading companies and non-profits including American Red Cross, Intuit, Metropolitan Life, CitiFinancial, Smith Barney, Isuzu, Phillips Publishing and The Salvation Army. He has won Gold, Silver and Bronze Echo awards, a Gold Caples, and Catalog of the Year finalist recognition for his catalog work.
Otis has written groundbreaking campaigns for such retailers as Harry & David, Neiman-Marcus, Liberty Orchards and Highlander and was instrumental in setting up automated customer correspondence systems at Bear Creek and Neiman-Marcus. He has written successful email/microsite campaigns for high tech marketers such as Anritsu, Webex, Macrovision and Mark Monitor and has spearheaded site redesigns for Niman Ranch (natural meat products), Frog Hollow Farms (organic produce) and New Pig Corporation (industrial absorbents) among others.
He teaches the DMA’s intensive two-day copywriting course at UCLA, San Jose and Seattle.
See Otis’ CV with client experience pdf
Otis graduated from Pomona College and UCLA film school and took his first copywriting job to support himself while waiting to sell a screenplay. (To see why he’s still waiting, click here.) After stints at Rapp & Collins and W.B. Doner, he became a full-time freelancer in 1983. Except for brief forays into the agency world to take creative director positions at PSW Direct and Response Associates, that’s what he has been doing ever since.
Dear Otis,
Louise Thompson here.
Just poking around on the interweb. I just (self, via Lulu,) published my father’s writing in three volumes. One: a semi-autobiogrphical novel, “Things to Put Away.” Very well written, about a young boy 5 years old, whose intellectual mother commits suicide in the 1920s. Each chapter from a different voice. Also, the two-volume set of “Straws in the Wind, Collected Work, Volumes I and II.” By John Thompson. This is my father’s collected essays, book reviews, stories and a fabulous dystopian screenplay, (“Sapicide”), ( I would email this to you). Available on Barnes and Noble, Lulu.com, and Amazon. (Lulu is cheapest…)
In any case, I would enjoy hearing from you one or two words.
I recall many things from those days of yore. Just for jolt: do you recall that gram of sticky opium? Remember that we always had raw spinach and raw mushrooms in the big salads? Remember Mises’s car breaking down every week? Everything was simple, even in San Francisco. Remember that goofy old (!) Lady who ran the “answering service” and had that weekly poker game?…. I hope that not all of your memories of me are horrible. Though they might well be if I think too much. In any case, mine of you are fond. I recall that I put you on a horrible LSD trip in that “commune” run by that shrimpy aged Asian retired banker. That “trip” was something your feelings about which I have often wondered, regretfully….
I hope all goes okay with you. (What else but okay can we wish, at this point in our… lives… Oh geez … and at this point in the life of the God damned planet…. ?)
As we say, as my adult children say….
Whatever.
Anyway, Hello Otis.
Louise Thompson
Cell: 646-287-6114
Email: louisesteketee@gmail.com