In this column, I’ll provide some stories, taken from my somewhat
checkered career as an ad agency/writer, president, and account
executive. I filled those positions, or to be more accurate, occupied
them, over a protracted period of time - something in the area of
twenty-five years.
I hope you’ll find them amusing
and/or enlightening. I do now but I didn’t then. It’s nice to be able
to refer to most of them as memories.
Of course I had some good times too. But they weren’t nearly as funny.
The all-new-better-than-ever-same-old-thing
Many years ago I started writing in self-defense. I ran a fairly
successful advertising agency and found that I was constantly in the
middle of a serious conflict between my writers and my clients. The
conflict was always the same:
The clients complained that the
writers didn’t give them what they wanted and the writers complained
that the clients just didn’t understand advertising. As with most
conflicts, both sides were right and both sides were wrong. The clients
weren’t communicating very well and the writers weren’t listening very
well.
I took the coward’s way out. I started writing my own
copy. Then I learned a great truth. To be a good commercial writer, you
have to be as concerned with the message as you are with the quality of
the writing. It doesn’t matter how beautifully the words are strung
together or how cute or “off the wall” the concept is; if it doesn’t
communicate the message, it simply isn’t good writing.
I
spent more time learning the client’s business, asking questions for
clarification, making notes and less time writing. Surprise number one
was that the clients didn’t request nearly as many revisions as they
used to do. Surprise number two was that the quality of my writing
didn’t suffer. If anything, it got tighter, cleaner, crisper. Life was
good.
Several years ago I started writing for clients I met on
the Internet. I bought the idea that I saw expressed on writers’ lists:
This is a “new medium”; things are completely different; you need a
fresh new perspective on writing. I studied web sites and on-line
magazines. I read every piece of spam that oozed its way into my
mailbox. I educated myself in the “ways of the web”. And everything
started to bother me. I got defensive about my copy. I got annoyed with
clients whom I felt were over-editing my work. I raged against having
grammatical errors and poor syntax inserted into my copy. Life was not
good any more. So I took a step back. That’s when I realized it’s the
all-new-better-than-ever-same-old-thing.
[BB]
Clients weren’t
criticizing my writing because they thought they were better writers
than I. They were looking at my writing under a microscope because it
wasn’t communicating their message. They didn’t know why, so they
started looking for flaws in the mechanics of the writing.
So let me give you one man’s opinion of what’s really different about writing for web clients:
The writer is in so much of a rush to boot up the word processor and
get the job out that the basics of handling a writing assignment
properly are forgotten. Asking pertinent questions takes longer because
it’s done by email instead of on the phone or in person. Briefings are
relegated to a few lines of text in an email and, as such, are often
incomplete.
What’s the answer? The answer is a
question. It’s a question you need to ask about everything you write.
Ask the client. If you’re writing a piece for self-promotion, or even a
piece of fiction, ask yourself. It’s such a simple question that it
covers a huge variety of factors to do with positioning, branding,
top-of-mind awareness and all those other swell buzz words and phrases
we know and love. It’s just one short question and you shouldn’t type a
word until the client has answered it to your (and believe it or not,
his) satisfaction. Here it is: “What do you want someone to do or think
differently after reading this copy?”
Until you have the
answer, you don’t know what questions to ask, never mind what words to
write. Many clients have trouble with the question because they haven’t
really addressed it. The answer may not be complicated but it can’t be
overly simplified either. An answer like “Buy more product” needs to be
followed up by the question, “Why aren’t they doing that already?” Then
you can start getting somewhere.
This approach involves a few
extra emails but it results in fewer revisions, less nit picking,
better client relations and the most important thing of all, RESULTS.
Apply that question to everything you write and you will experience the
same blinding flashes of the obvious that I did . . . and do.
If you’re already using this technique, thanks for being patient and letting me describe it. I needed to read it again myself.
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