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Cogswell woman mixes advertising, ND simplicity

Copy writer and ad designer Tami Rust says "North Dakota honesty" is one of her best critics.

Rust creates ads, billboards, brochures, and other marketing strategies out of her own public relations firm in Cogswell. She and her design partner in Michigan, with whom she does about 50 percent of her work, collaborate via fax and phone. Rust says working in rural ND, as opposed to the city, keeps her work grounded in reality.

"You can't try to be any more than what you are, because people here say, 'Yeah, right,'" she says. "You see what appeals [to your audience] here because you're out among so many honest people."

For the first four years of her marriage, Rust worked for Great Plains Software in Fargo Monday through Friday and only came home to her husband and their farm on weekends. In 1988, the "draught of the century" and the Rust's plans to have a family drove her back home to the farm permanently.

Rust was determined to hold onto her career while enjoying the comforts of rural life. She worked for Great Plains Software out of her home for two years until other businesses "started finding out that I was out here."

Eventually, Rust decided she needed more room for her business and rented office space in nearby Forman, where she still operates her firm. "That was one of the smartest things I ever did," she says.

One of the many benefits of working in rural ND, says Rust, is the creativity-inducing environment. "If something just isn't coming to me, I'll get in my car and start driving," she says. Rust jokes that she has a favorite stretch of road on which her most productive work is born.

"That's one of the really wonderful things about being in ND," she says. "It's a place where you can really get out and clear your mind if you need to."

Rust says her writing has changed somewhat since she moved home. Advertising, she says, involves a constant reduction of ideas. The simplicity of ND sets the right atmosphere for such work.

"We only have one or two paragraphs to work with," she says. "You're always reducing some complex thing down to its most essential. The longer I'm out here, the easier it is to see the essence of a business, or to reduce things to their most basic essence."