Sustainability Reporting on a Global Scale
Posted: August 29, 2011 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative | Tags: Buckman, business writing, green marketing, GRI, sustainability Leave a comment »
Here is Buckman’s new sustainability report which adheres to the strict guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative. Just one of many sustainability projects I have written over the past few years. When companies use the same global standards of reporting, it is much easier to see just how good they are at being corporate citizens. Here are a few pages. For the entire 48-page report (bless your heart), just click on the cover shot above.
Wordcracker: Copywriter
Posted: January 4, 2011 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative, Wordcracker, writing | Tags: Advertising, business writing, Copywriting & Creative, creative, freelance writing, marketing, Origin of copywriter, writing 1 Comment »An advertising writer is called a copywriter. But why? Why “copy?” The story starts a long time ago, even before advertising as we know it. While “copy” can mean an imitation or facsimile, it can also refer–according my trusty Oxford English Dictionary–to the thing being copied. A copy, then, can be “the original writing, work of art, etc., from which a copy is made.” We can find this usage as far back as 1481.
So what does this have to do with advertising writing? Plenty. Fast forward to the moveable type printing press and the printed newspapers it spawned. The manuscript written (and later typed) by the news writer was called a copy because, we can now deduce, it would soon be copied by the typesetter and printer. In fact, a “copy boy” was often employed to run the manuscript from writer to editor to typesetter. Eventually, the “a” was dropped, so a copy became simply “copy,” used in much the same way we use the word “text.”
So, you keep asking, what does this have to do with advertising writing? Everything! To pay the journalists and the pressmen and make a profit, newspapers sold advertising (why do you think advertising courses are so often buried in our colleges’ schools of journalism?). Someone had to write the verbiage–the copy–for the ads they sold. And the copywriter–and a title that differentiated him from the journalist or news writer–was born.
The unfortunate similarity of “copywriter” and “copyright” causes consternation for many. You’ve got to be a lawyer to deal with copyright issues, and that I am certainly not. In fact, I have a hard enough time just coming up with a company name or a snappy slogan that has the potential to be copyrighted. Try coming up with an original website domain, for example. It isn’t easy. Because of this confusion and because not that many people know where the word “copy” comes from in the first place, I prefer to say I am an advertising writer or a marketing writer. And when I am feeling particularly smug, I simply say that I’m a writer, knowing that it will evoke all sorts of romantic notions in people’s heads. That, of course, often backfires, and they ask, “Oh, anything I might have read?”
Probably not. Not yet, anyway.
Naming your shade of green
Posted: April 8, 2010 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative, writing | Tags: Advertising, advertising strategy, business writing, Copywriting & Creative, creative, green marketing, marketing, sustainability, writing Leave a comment »
When a person is born, the first thing we do is give her a name. A name formalizes the baby’s existence, gives us an easy way to make reference to her and provides a gateway to understanding and communication. Proper names are often given to inanimate objects, as well. It’s a way of humanizing them and making them seem more “knowable.” Give your third-quarter sales initiative a name, and people know you mean business. Suddenly, everyone has a name to rally around, a cause to champion, an identity to share.
The name of the game lately has been sustainability. Companies have been establishing their green initiatives and then formalizing them with a name or at least a theme.
That means some good, yet challenging, work for writers like me. Here are three such projects for high-profile companies.
1.
The first one is is for FedExCup and their effort to bring more sustainability to the game of golf, which by its very nature (or lack of it) isn’t particularly eco-friendly. Basically a golf course is a vast monoculture of grass and a lot of fertilizer. However, through this program, FedEx is working with an organization called The First Tee whose mission is to “impact the lives of young people by providing learning facilities and educational programs that promote character development and life-enhancing values through the game of golf.” It’s a noble goal. Even if a golf course can’t necessarily create a full-fledged sustainable ecosystem, it can help sustain something at least as valuable. Successful children. So how do you combine golf and the future in a name? Like this.
FedExCup Fore!Ever
2.
This next one is for the chemistry company Buckman. It is, no doubt, a challenge for a chemical company to go green. But Buckman is doing a lot to reduce its own environmental footprint and to help their clients do the same, reducing energy usage, water usage and waste in a variety of industries through advanced technologies. Buckman’s corporate color has always been green, so the name and theme for their sustainability initiative was a natural. Here’s the cover line and first page of copy from their just-published Sustainability Report.
3.
This last one is for International Paper. They just released a whole website based on this idea to showcase their sustainability efforts. Three of the sections there were written by yours truly: Carbon Footprint, Paper Sourcing and Recycled Paper.
There’s nothing unique or proprietary about “Down to Earth”. But it fits the general objective well, which is to provide straight talk on environmental issues and set straight some commonly held myths about pulp and paper. As I have said before, finding a unique name for your green campaign gets increasingly hard as more and more companies stake their claims. Better hurry.
Wordcracker: Solutions
Posted: March 5, 2009 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative, Language, Vocabulary, Wordcracker, writing | Tags: Advertising, business writing, Copywriting & Creative, marketing, Solutions 4 Comments »It’s everywhere, this word solutions, especially in business, advertising and marketing. And although folks are pretty fed up with it and there is discussion all over the internet about how it is overused, I’m here to tell you that solutions will remain a part of advertising communication. After all, the best answer to a customer’s problem is always going to be the solution.
The problem–and it is such a big problem that I actually had a client tell me to avoid the word entirely–isn’t so much that the word is overused. It’s that the word is misused. Too often we see the word as an end-all, as if it means something or everything all on its own:
We sell solutions!
Used in this way, the word is empty. Who doesn’t sell solutions? But more importantly, solutions to what? This is akin to saying, “We provide services!” The only difference is that a solution sounds like a service that actually works. Still, the hollowness rings.
We also see the word in a lot of company slogans and descriptive taglines:
Advanced software solutions
Okay, a little more specific. But is software the problem and you have the solution? Or do you have solutions in the form of software? If the latter, we still don’t know what problems are being solved or how anybody benefits. There’s just too much dependence on the word solutions as a substitute for more specific, concrete language.
While the examples above cry out for a ban on the word, writer’s like myself in the trenches of persuasive writing still depend on it, and I won’t give it up without a fight. Here is an example that shows what, in my opinion, is an acceptable and even advantageous use of the word:
We create crime-fighting software applications that prevent check fraud and eliminate identity theft, real solutions that can protect your bank and your customers.
Now the word solutions is out of the limelight but still helps us position the software as a product that fully solves specific problems.
Solution will always serve nicely as an alternative for other much-used words, such as service and product. But it can’t be used as substitute for substance or for the language necessary to communicate a benefit to the prospect.
Only in the presence of the problem is solution the solution.
What’s your take?
