26 Insight!|!SPECIAL PROFILE
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!|!Insight 27
THE MOON UNIT
ould walk
c
I
t
a
h
t
e
m
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veral
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t
s
a
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down the s
ail jobs
n
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lp
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’ve
res,
u
g
directors we
fi
n
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v
e
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metime
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,
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s
h
t
r
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e us.”
is
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28 Insight!|!SPECIAL PROFILE
ck
rom the pa
PHOTOGRAPHS: SPUTNIK @ THE MOON UNIT
ut f
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he Moon U
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ay
Any w
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L
ook 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.”
!|!Insight 29
THE MOON UNIT
eone
m
o
s
t
e
g
u
o
y
“Sometimes
t I say.
a
h
w
e
t
i
r
w
u
thing
who says ‘Yo
n
i
a
m
e
h
T
.’
ision
This is MY v
t being a
u
o
b
a
n
r
a
le
you have to
o ego.”
n
e
v
a
h
o
t
is
ghostwriter
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
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
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. S