💎 Mary Wear (the copywriter behind the line Make Poverty History) on her five copywriting rules

Some (until now) unwritten rules I set myself:

  1. Know when to shut up. The best copywriting isn’t always in the lines. It’s also between them.
  2. Know there’s always a fresh way to tell an old, old story. Stand-up comedians are brilliant at this, taking the most mundane subject — life — and retelling it in ways that make us laugh, wonder and think.
  3. Know your target audience. Not intellectually, but intuitively. Think like them, empathise with them, identify with them. Because at some level, the reader needs to like the writer.
  4. Know that we are all creative creatures. Everyone enjoys the quirks and whimsy of creativity. You don’t have to logic people into a corner, you can charm them into wanting to come out and play.
  5. Clive James said that humour is common sense dancing; Following the great advertising tradition of “borrowing’ from someone much cleverer, I would say that copywriting is persuasion dancing. So if it doesn’t dance, go back and do it again until it does.

Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD

💎 You’ll never be a good writer of anything if you just sit in your office and stare at your desk

2. Leave the office

Before you even open your pad, open five other things You ears, your eyes and your mind.

You’ll never be a good writer of anything if you just sit in your office and stare at your desk. Your raw material isn’t in the office or in Groucho’s for that matter. It’s out on the streets. Look at pictures. Listen to music. Go to films. See plays. And more importantly look at people. They’re those funny things with two legs we’re meant to be writing about, remember.

It sounds obvious but it’s amazing how many people in our incestuous little business just spend their spare time with other people in this incestuous little business.

Get out. And observe.

For instance, the Castlemaine xxxx campaign would never have happened if my parents hadn’t sent me to Australia to make a man of me. This it conspicuously failed to do. But it did teach me how to get bitten by a wild cockatoo, how to cheat at poker, and fifteen years later how to write a xxxx ad.

Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD

💎 On the importance of a spectacle in advertising

We want above all, throughout this brief historical overview, to draw attention to an aspect of advertising which is too often forgotten today: a certain openness, an innocence which we find in the earliest forms of advertising. It comes just as much from a liking for spectacle, for playing with words, for putting on a performance, as it does from a desire to sell. These two things are intimately bound together: the actual sale is only one element in the acting out of a shared event, which is infinitely richer than the simple two-way relationship of seller and buyer…

Excerpt from: Why Does The Pedlar Sing?: What Creativity Really Means in Advertising by Paul Feldwick

💎 How advertisings quest for professionalism led it to disregard some of its successful factors

The quest for professionalism was understandable, some aspects of it necessary and even admirable: a lot in advertising’s past had its disgraceful side. But along with the genuinely shoddy and dishonest practices, the new technical/ rational world of advertising also attempted to disown and deny qualities that have always been central to successful selling and brand creation — qualities of playfulness, subversion, popular appeal, ambiguity, the pleasures of the childish and the illogical, the carnival world of satire, eroticism, talking animals and general nonsense — everything that the emerging professional/managerial culture despised and rejected.

Excerpt from: Why Does The Pedlar Sing?: What Creativity Really Means in Advertising by Paul Feldwick

💎 On making the most of your deadline

Call me irresponsible, but I always wait until the traffic man, appears at the door, purple-faced and screaming for my copy. Then I write it. I find there is a direct correlation between rising panic and burgeoning inspiration. Incidentally, I’ve fully exploited this technique for writing the piece you’re reading now. My apologies to all at D&AD.

Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD

💎 Why saying you’re a sceptic or realist doesn’t communicate what’s intended

It’s worth being particularly careful of boastful self descriptions; or, worse, boastful self-descriptions that appear to be neutral or even self-deprecating. It’s the equivalent of giving yourself a nickname like ‘Dutch’ or ‘Ace’ and hoping it sticks. You are asking to be bullied. Some are obvious. If you describe yourself as a ‘maverick’, a ‘cynic’, a ‘reprobate’, a ‘provocateur’, a ‘wag’, or similar, you are on a sure course for others to apply less flattering descriptions to you.

But others are subtler: ‘sceptic’, ‘realist, “radical or “progressive’ are all essentially boasts masquerading as statements of fact. ‘Sceptic’ says: ‘I’m the sort of person who thinks critically about what I read or hear.’ Since everyone presumably aspires to do just that, you’re trying to say you’re cleverer than those around you. ‘Radical’ means nothing at all, in this context, except that the speaker thinks that there’s a particular disruptive bravery to his her political persona – which is a judgment for others to make.

Excerpt from: Write to the Point: How to be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page by Sam Leith

💎 Talk is cheap. Saying you’re trustworthy or high quality is useless

It’s for this reason that banks always used to build such impressive buildings. In the days before governments began to insure banking deposits and simply let banks collapse – such days seem a long time ago now – depositors needed to think hard about where to place their money. If they deposited their savings with a fly-by-night operation, nobody would come to their aid when the bank collapsed. Customers realise that crooks planning to run off with the money or gamble it away do not first clad their branches with bronze and marble: they’re in for the long haul instead. This is one reason, too, why you will pay more at an established shop than at a market stall if you buy a product about which you lack inside information about quality and durability. The established shop will still be there to refund your money in the case of a complaint, and that very possibility gives you an assurance that a complaint is less likely to be necessary.

Other economists have used Spence’s theory to explain enormously expensive advertising campaigns with no informational content.

Excerpt from: The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford

💎 How saying it strange can make it more memorable

Say it strange

Why did Apple say ‘Think different’ and not ‘Think differently’? Why did they follow this with ‘The funniest iPod ever’ rather than something like ‘The most enjoyable iPod we’ve ever made’? Why does Aleksandr the meerkat – spokes animal for price-comparison website comparethemarket.com – say ‘Simples’ and not ‘Simple’? Why did 7UP promote itself as ‘The Uncola’? Why did Budweiser decide ‘Whasssup”’ was the perfect way to build their brand? We’ll tell you why: they’re all examples of a linguistic quirk used to create a mighty meme. By twisting language just, a little they achieved maximum memorability. It’s a powerful technique but be warned, it’s easy to get wrong.

Excerpt from: Read Me: 10 Lessons for Writing Great Copy by Roger Horberry and Gyles Lingwood

💎 The full text of the 1996 Apple Think Different ad

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Excerpt from: Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards by Yu-kai Chou

💎 On how humour boosts trust

In one study, researchers Alan Gray, Brian Parkinson, and Robin Dunbar had pairs of strangers sit together for five minutes and watch a movie clip. Half watched a blooper reel from a popular TV comedy—one that had been pretested to get lots of laughs. The rest watched an emotionally neutral clip—think a nature channel documentary, or the lesser-known “Fifty Shades of Grayscale.”

When researchers asked participants to write a message to the person they had just met, the pairs who had watched the blooper clip disclosed significantly more personal information. And when a panel of observers watched these pairs converse, they rated their reactions between the blooper clip pairs as 30 percent more intimate than the ones between the pairs who had watched the neutral clip.

Excerpt from: Humour, Seriously: Why Humour Is A Superpower At Work And In Life by Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas

💎 Three rules for writing (do you know them?)

I suppose if I had to pick a favorite rule, I would paraphrase a man with a particular genius for scattering the alphabet on the page, W Somerset Maugham: there are three rules for copywriting. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Excerpt from: Copywriting Is…: 30-or-so Thoughts on Thinking like a Copywriter by Andrew Boulton

 

💎 On steering clear of the thesaurus when writing copy (simplicity)

Likewise, Roddy Doyle’s quip about keeping your thesaurus in a shed or behind the fridge – ‘somewhere that demands travel or effort’ – is a handsome piece of copywriting advice. Doyle’s belief that the word you think of first is most often the best is reinforced by the kind of anxious copy that reads as if every word has been ground through the synonym sausage machine.

Excerpt from: Copywriting Is…: 30-or-so Thoughts on Thinking like a Copywriter by Andrew Boulton

💎 How a little friction can aid memorability

Next Diemand-Yauman wanted to see if the same effect would true in a more realistic setting. He took the study to a high school Ohio in the United States) and tested 220 students. He screened classes for those where the same teacher had been teaching at least two classes of the same subject and difficulty level and with the same learning material. The experimenters took all the worksheets and PowerPoint slides and changed the font. (The experimenters did not meet the teachers or the students or visit the class.)

Classes were randomly assigned to either a disfluent or a control category. The disfluent classes used material that was switched to one of these fonts:

Resttonschweler

Monotype Corsiva

Comic Sans Italic

In the control classes, no changes were made to the fonts. Teachers and students didn’t know the hypothesis that was being studied. They didn’t know whether they were in a fluent or disfluent group. The Material was taught the same way it normally was taught. No other changes were made in the classrooms or the instruction. Students in the disfluent condition scored significantly higher on their regular classroom tests. On a survey asking if they liked their course or course material, there were no differences in these preference ratings. There was no difference among the different disfluent fonts.

Excerpt from: 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter) by Susan Weinschenk

💎 On self-praise being no commendation

Self-praise is no commendation. (If I say I am the best copywriter in Britain, you wouldn’t listen, if Dan Wieden said so, you might be fooled into believing it.) Also, raw statistics are more convincing than polished opinions. (A car that does 68 MPG sells better than one that’s “outstandingly economical”.) Beware of adjectives. They don’t always do what you think. (You’re all concerned about kitchen cleanliness but would you fancy a snack bar called “The Hygienic Café”?)

Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD

💎 Advertisers would do better to fear indifference than alienating consumers (real people don’t much care)

  • When it comes to ads, though, remember that real people don’t much care about them. So negative effects are rare.
  • We know of no evidence of any advertising that has had a negative effect on sales.
  • Don’t worry about ‘alienation’. Negative effects among existing buyers but not new buyers or vice versa won’t happen; we can’t think of any examples.
  • So don’t hold back from bold, provocative ideas through fear of alienation. You should be much more fearful of indifference – and that’s wonderfully liberating creatively.

Excerpt from: How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up by Les Binet and Sarah Carter

💎 On the tendency of marketers to exaggerate the amount consumers change (social trends)

Marketing and advertising people can talk a load of nonsense at the best of times. But if you want to hear them at their worst, ask them to talk about social trends. The average social trends presentation is a guaranteed mix of the obvious, irrelevant and false.

Recently, we were listening to a conference speech about changing lifestyles’. Life nowadays is faster than ever, said the speaker. We work longer hours. We have less free time. Families are fragmenting. Food is eaten on the run..

We’ve been listening to this bullshit for 30 years. And it’s no more true now that it was then. The inconvenient, less headline-worthy truth is that people have more free time than ever. Economic cycles wax and wane, but the long-term trend in all developed economies is toward shorter, more flexible working hours. And longer holidays. People start work later in life and spend much longer in retirement. Work takes up a smaller percentage of our life than it used to.

Related myths about pressures on. family time are equally false. Contrary to popular belief, in developed economies parents spend more time with their children these days. Not less. Research shows the amount of time families spend eating together has stayed remarkably constant over the years, As has the amount of time they spend together watching TV.

Excerpt from: How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up by Les Binet and Sarah Carter

💎 Titles and headlines are critical (frame the message)

Read this paragraph:

First you sort the items into like categories. Using color for sorting is common, but you can also use other characteristics, such as texture or type of handling needed.. Once you have sorted the items, you are ready to use the equipment. You want to process each category from sorting separately. Place one category in the at a time

What is the paragraph about? It’s hard to understand. But what if I give you the same paragraph with a title:

Using your new washing machine

First you sort the items into like categories. Using color for sorting is common, but you can also use other characteristics, such as texture or type of handling needed. Once you have sorted the items, you are ready to use the equipment. You want to process each category from the sorting separately. Place one category in the machine at a time.

The paragraph is still poorly written, but now at least it is understandable.

Excerpt from: 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter) by Susan Weinschenk

💎 On the benefits of brevity (sell your idea or your dream in 10 to 15 minutes)

Let’s put this in perspective. Abraham Lincoln inspired generations in a speech that lasted two minutes. John F. Kennedy took 15 minutes to shoot for the moon. Martin Luther King Jr. articulated his dream of racial unity in 17 minutes. Steve Jobs gave one of the most famous college commencement speeches of our time at Stanford University in 15 minutes. If you can’t sell your idea or your dream in 10 to 15 minutes, keep editing until you can.

Ideas don’t sell themselves. Be selective about the words you use. If they don’t advance the story, remove them. Condense, simplify, and speak as briefly as possible. Have the courage to speak in grade-school language. Far from weakening your argument, these tips will elevate your ideas, making it more likely you’ll be heard.

Excerpt from: Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to Get From Good to Great by Carmine Gallo

💎 All speeches have three versions (before, during, ideal)

“There are always three speeches for every one you actually gave: the one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.”

-Dale Carnegie

Excerpt from: 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter) by Susan Weinschenk

💎 Diane Dors on why she ‘rebranded’ (Diana Fluck)

Among the film’s cast were three people who would all go on to become famous – in one case, notorious. The first was born Diana Fluck in Swindon; she had changed her name because, as she later said, ‘what would happen if they put my name up in lights … and one of the bulbs burst?’ She had chosen the name Diana Dors, and very soon was being touted as Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.

Excerpt from: Elizabethans: How Modern Britain was Formed by Andrew Marr

💎 On the similarities between comedy and advertising (in particular on leaving enough space for the audience to be involved in the interpretation)

So all humour, however broad and however universally understood, is implicit rather than explicit: an explicit joke is either not explicit or not a joke.

All good comedians, all good storytellers, all good makers of advertisements, entice their receivers into willing and constructive collaboration It’s a skilful, delicate and difficult thing to do – particularly in advertising where the pressures of committees and cost tend to favour the ‘explicit, the ‘unambiguous’, the ‘message that just can’t fail to be understood.

But the measure of a good joke is much the same as the measure of a good advertisement (judging it now purely in terms of its communications effectiveness). Has it asked enough, but not too much, of its selected audience? Has it allowed that audience to see something for itself? (Whether, in the case of the advertisement, what the audience comes to see is the most persuasive and relevant thing is clearly another question.) So the principles of humour and the principles of commercial persuasion are very close.

Excerpt from: Behind the Scenes in Advertising, Mark III: More Bull More by Jeremy Bullmore

💎 We are more likely to remember concepts if they are presented to us as pictures rather than words (the picture superiority effect)

A PICTURE SPEAKS A THOUSAND WORDS

We are more likely to remember concepts if they are presented to us as pictures rather than words.

For example, one study of discharged emergency room patients provided half of the participants with text-only instructions to properly care for their wounds, whilst the other half were given both text and cartoon depictions of each step. Three days later, 46% of patients given illustrated instructions demonstrated perfect recall of the prescribed techniques, compared to just 6% in the text-only condition.

UNSEEN OPPORTUNITY

By adding pictures and visual context into your goals, meetings, or even briefs, you can help others digest and retain

Excerpt from: The Unseen Mind by Ogilvy UK

💎 On flawed marketing language leading to flawed assumptions about how ads work (actively engage)

Finally, there are the words with inbuilt flawed assumptions. Step forward all those plans aiming to encourage ‘active engagement’, make ads more ‘persuasive’, ‘force reappraisal’, ‘strengthen the brand-consumer relationship’, ‘drive brand loyalty’, and so on. These words all sound harmless enough, but the assumptions and principles built into them are flawed. That means they knock marketing effectiveness off course. By and large, people don’t want to ‘actively engage’ or have ‘strong relationships’ with brands, advertising or even ‘consumer generated content’. And they don’t need to for marketing to be successful. Communication can work without ‘persuasion’ or ‘reappraisal. In fact, it needn’t actually ‘communicate’ much at all. And as we’ve said before, brand loyally is loudly an irrelevance.

Excerpt from: How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up by Les Binet and Sarah Carter

💎 It’s better to express claims as facts (since facts are more believable than claims)

2. Since facts are more believable than claims, it’s better to express claims as facts.

In advertising, claim is often a euphemism for lie. Many of these euphemised lies are specially constructed to wiggle past lawyers and network censors. You can’t say your peanut butter has more peanuts, not without a notarised peanut count, but you can say someone will be a better mother if she serves it. At your arraignment all you have to do is plead Puffery. All charges are dropped. Puffery forgives everything. To lawyers and censors, it’s okay to lie as long as you lie on a grand enough scale. To everyone else, a lie is still a lie, and it’s almost always transparent. That’s why, instead of just asserting that BMW was a good investment, a BMW ad used the car’s high resale value to prove the point. And it did so, not by comparing the car to other cars but to other investments people in that target audience might make: “Last year a car outperformed 318 stocks on the New York Stock Exchange.”

Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD

💎 On concise sentences (and “globs of verbal fat”)

Several kinds of verbiage are perennial targets for the delete key. Light verbs such as make, do, have, bring, put, and take often do nothing but create a slot for a zombie noun, as in make an appearance and put on a performance. Why not just use the verb that spawned the zombie in the first place, like appear or perform? A sentence beginning with It is or There is is often a candidate for liposuction: There is competition between groups for resources works just fine as Groups compete for resources. Other globs of verbal fat include the metaconcepts we suctioned out in chapter 2, including matter, view, subject, process, basis, factor, level, and model.

Excerpt from: The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker

💎 If you’re transparent about the efforts that you’ve undertaken to create your product people will appreciate it more (The Labour Illusion)

While Kayak.co.uk searches the Web for your flight from London to Lanzarote, the site gives you a real-time update of the work it’s performing (now searching Iberia … now searching Aer Lingus … ). Research shows that waiting can increase satisfaction if customers get the impression that work is being done on their behalf during the delay. This “labor illusion” is so powerful that it leads customers to prefer services that make them wait to services that provide the same quality immediately.

Except from: Happy Money: The New Science of Smarter Spending by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton

💎 The power of admitting imperfections (The pratfall effect)

And finally, imperfection can be aesthetically pleasing in its own right, as the success of Dove with its ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ shows. The Japanese even have a word for this – wabi-sabi – a view that celebrates the allure of the imperfect and incomplete. The wobbly line, the cracked leather, the faded patina – all draw, rather than repel, us.
Standout, empathy, attractiveness and trust – these are all qualities that define successful brands. So maybe it’s time for brand owners to embrace the power of imperfection.

There are advertisers that get this, and their ‘bravery’ is rewarded by more powerful communications than their perfect ‘everyone looks awesome’ adland competitors. Think of the overweight construction worker pole dancer (Moneysupermarket), Southern Comfort’s Whatever’s Comfortable’ beach hero, or the sweating women in ‘This Girl Can’. Their imperfections draw us to them. The brands feel more authentic. And we trust them more because of it.

So where are the ‘flaws’ in the personality descriptors that we craft for our brand definitions? We seem terrified to consider them – tying ourselves up in knots and qualifications to avoid any chinks of vulnerability or imperfection. Aspirational yet accessible’, ‘Strong but warm’ – we’ve all written them.

Excerpt from: How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up by Les Binet and Sarah Carter

💎 Why advertisers should fear indifference (rather than alienation)

Early in the ‘Love/Hate’ Marmite campaign, an ad showed a couple on a first date going back ‘for coffee’. After eating toast and Marmite in the kitchen, the girl returns to the sofa. They kiss. Her boyfriend retches violently at the Marmite taste.

Most people in research thought it was hilarious. But older Marmite users didn’t. You could say it ‘alienated them. But the ad ran. And the older users changed their view when they saw how popular it was. In fact, it turned out to be the ‘lift-off’ ad of the now-famous campaign, awarded for its creativity and for its results. Market research overestimates people’s resistance to change and boldness, and underestimates ‘herd effects’.

Alienation worry isn’t just wrong, it’s also dangerous. Because it can kill the bold, penetration-gaining ideas that you need for brand growth. So relax: it’s actually quite hard to win friends and alienate people.

Excerpt from: How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up by Les Binet and Sarah Carter