LWA’s

Byron, a character in Arthur Phillips 2002 novel, Prague (set, of course, in Budapest), presents his theory of advertizing to “LWA’s” – Long Wolf Aspirants. Real Lone Wolfs, he explains, “don’t respond to advertising, but there aren’t more than a dozen of them on the planet.” But there is a huge market of Lone Wolf Aspirants, as Byron explains: “The key with LWAs is to exhort rebelliousness, excessive eccentricity, and antisocial or even pathological rudeness. These are what we call the ‘internal hallmarks fo the LWA’s self-assessment.’ So, like, for Pepsi, I wrote the ad – well, to be fair, it was a team thing – the one where the guy is leaning against the fence with his arms crossed and you can’t see any cola at all on the screen, the guy just looks really irritated, and he says, ‘Get off my back with that slick garbage. I’ll drink whatever I want, because I drink it for me, not for some Madison Avenue jackass who thinks he knows all about my so-called generation.’ And he holds up his fingers, like this, to put quotation marks around generation. And then he spits, and the screen goes blank and then you just see the Pepsi logo. Very hot.”