Wordnut makes contribution to this year’s Judges’ Choice Award winner
Posted: February 22, 2011 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative | Tags: Advertising, advertising strategy, creative, FedExFamily House, video Leave a comment »The marketing firm Oden sent out a holiday card this year featuring a large QR code. Recipients scanned the code with their smart phones or simply visited the website provided and they were treated to this unique video, which won three awards at this year’s Memphis Addy Awards, including the Judges’ Choice Award. I helped with the script and the messaging. The real genius is in the painstaking stop-action animation and whimsical props, a collaboration of Bret Terwilleger and photographer Jerry Plunk.
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.
New Charmin commercial wipes some the wrong way
Posted: February 11, 2010 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative | Tags: Advertising, business, Charmin, commercials, Copywriting & Creative, creative, marketing, Slogans, toilet paper, writing 6 Comments »Medical commercials are bad enough. The ED commercials embarrass the devil out of me even as I wonder why anybody would have two separate bath tubs side-by-side. In a field, no less. But the new Charmin toilet tissue commercial? It just grosses me out. I’m talking about the one in which the bear mom examines the bear cub’s rear with a telescope. (Looking for asteroids, I assume.)
I have always disliked the overly cute bears and their butt-rubbing antics, but the newest spot is even worse. It goes into detail about how Charmin is stronger so it doesn’t leave bits of tissue you know where. Have any of us been all that concerned about it? Do you bring up this sort of thing to your friends? Can we not have some decorum? Can we not infer that a stronger tissue is good without going into details? Do we have to “draw a picture” for everything? On national television? Well, you might argue, it is a problem and they are in the tissue business. But something tells me they enjoy it just a little too much.
In fact, that’s where I really draw the line–at their new slogan: Enjoy the go!
Enjoy the go? Call me anal retentive, but that’s the last straw. And the last roll. Turn the other cheek? I don’t think so.
I’m switching to Northern.
Best Super Bowl Commercial
Posted: February 8, 2010 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative | Tags: Advertising, creative, Google, marketing, Super Bowl, TV commercials Leave a comment »This one. No idiotic beer parties. No supermacho car stuff. No people in it, either. Yet it is the most human by far.
When skill trumps experience
Posted: February 19, 2009 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative | Tags: Advertising, Copywriting & Creative, creative, freelance writing Leave a comment »Early in my career I had a potential client call me and ask if I had any experience writing package copy. You mean like “Net Wt. 12 oz.,” I asked? I was joking, of course, and went on to say that I hadn’t but thought I surely could. She said she needed someone with experience and hung up. I think it was for a paint remover.
More recently, I was approached about writing a brochure for a private golf club here locally. “Do you play golf?” the woman asked. The simple answer was no. However, I grew up playing on a par 3 course. I have a set of clubs. I know the rules and the lingo. I know my *?# from 18 holes in the ground. But in the end she went with someone who was a real golfer. Funny, considering that since then I have worked on projects for a major corporate golf sponsorship, an international golf tournament, even several brochures for a maker of golf clubs.
So my question to you is this: do you want a golfer or do you want a writer? A good promotional writer can write about almost anything, mold the message for any medium, and all the while make you believe he lives and breathes golf. Of course, I have limits. I describe, inform, entertain, persuade, and sell. If you need highly technical writing about molecules, say, or you want a writer to write in depth about quantum physics for an audience of scientists, then hire a technical writer or a scientist. Please.
Writers, graphic designers, anybody who engages in a creative profession or, for that matter, approaches his job with some amount of creativity are, by and large, a versatile lot. That’s why it is unfortunate when they are pigeonholed. For many people, their expertise actually holds them back, keeps them doing the same old things and keeps them from getting new challenges. To be creative you need the opportunity to face new challenges. It is often a new challenge that fosters the greatest creativity.
As a freelance advertising and marketing writer, I am a generalist. I know a little about a LOT of subjects. I learn what I need to in order to make the job a success. Write what you know. That’s not the same thing as write what you’ve always known. I learn all the time, on the spot. I work hard to know what I’m talking about, and better yet, to sound like I know what I’m talking about.
My only real expertise, then, is writing, itself. And as a freelancer, I can’t afford to be a duffer.
