During my forty years in the ad business, I’ve learned how ninety per cent of a copywriter’s life is spent proving to anyone who will listen that during the other ten percent of the time he can actually write. If and when you join an advertising agency, you will discover that most of your best ideas never leave the building; they will be bucketed with a regularity to make your head spin. What’s even worse, those creative ideas
which do see the light of day will, largely, be accredited to someone else – like the copy chief or the account director.
The fact is, if you produce something truly startling, everyone in the agency – from post room wallah to chief executive officer will want to bask in your glory; and they will dine out on the story of how they came up with your idea.
So advertising is, in every respect, uncompromising; it can reduce strong men to tears and even stronger women to booze and promiscuity overnight. Setting aside evenings for a few rounds of Russian roulette should, by comparison, be considered a pretty ordinary way of life. Free-fall parachuting and barbed-wire hurdling are a walk in the wild woods compared to a job in advertising.
But the first and overriding principle of advertising – and one you must have planted firmly in your mind – is that advertising is all about selling. All about moving product: whether that product be Dell computers or flat-pack shelving. Thus, if you’ve any aversion to the profit motive, or if the word profit leaves you with a nasty taste, you are most definitely backing photo recovery software the wrong horse. Fortunately for all of us, the copywriter doesn’t have to sell himself the way the average salesperson does. Face to face. Which, in my case, is just as well, since I look like someone who should really be playing piano in a bawdy house. Luckily, we copywriters do it behind the scenes on-screen or on paper and are, thankfully, hidden from a cold, hard world that isn’t noticeably falling over itself to buy our stuff. Additionally, whatever personal reservations you may have about it, the product is always king. At least, it always is when you are within earshot of the client. After all, he believes that his product is the greatest thing since the birth of the blues;
and because he is going a good way to providing your pay-cheque, you’d better think the same way.
Nearly finally, the conduct of advertising has changed more than somewhat in the last ten years or so. In the main, it is now researched, copy-tested, response-planned and generally antisepticised to a point where good old gut feeling and common sense plays little part. That’s what they’d like to think anyway. In reality, it still comes down to a couple of guys or gals like you and me turning their brains inside out in an effort to say something different about a product that they have said something different about every three months for the past five years.
We will, of course, discuss the value of research at a later moment. For the time being, however, let’s close this item on the writer proper with a deck-clearing exercise.
I cannot, under any circumstances, teach you to write. You either can or you can’t. You’ll know yourself whether it is the former by the way you continue to submit manuscripts for publication despite a roomful of previous rejections. You’ll know by the way you everlastingly criticize what you see written all around you – not only advertising, but also TV programmes, magazine articles, newspaper stories, and so on.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, you wouldn’t be reading this book unless you had a sneaking feeling that with a little encouragement you could write the rest of us out of the park.
Well, would you?
What I can teach you is this:
1. The principles of good copywriting.
2. The art of refining a complicated brief into a simple, but emotive sales message.
3. The techniques for developing creative concepts.
4. The nuts and bolts of radio and television work.
And this, I propose to do.
We will also discuss several dozen peripheral matters. Right now, though, a few specific thoughts about the advertising business might be in order. I include these because without a basic understanding of what makes it tick, the entire mechanics of copywriting will remain equally mysterious.
Stand by.
Post reproduced from:http://copywriting.blog.co.in/2010/11/30/the-copywriter-historycurrentfuture-3/
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