What makes an effective ad campaign — and can these principles be applied to social media?
It’s impossible to avoid being bombarded with advertising in London. As a copywriter working in London, it’s even harder to not stop and take notice. Like a surgeon holding his knife like a scalpel and listlessly cutting into his Sunday roast, it’s hard for a copywriter to avoid dissecting other people’s work.
I see thousands of posters every morning. Sometimes the copy is good, sometimes it’s very bad. Sometimes it’s short and sometimes it’s long. Sometimes, I’m only looking at an idea, three…
How effective is long copy?
The London Long Copy challenge is underway. For those of you who haven’t seen the ads yet, it’s a competition for copywriters and creatives based in London to design London Underground posters led by copy of between 50-200 words. Which isn’t much for a sales brochure, but it’s a hell of a lot for a great big print ad.
Who reads sales brochures anyway?
There are two schools of thought in copywriting. One: you get a little information in quickly. It’s better than trying to get it all in and…
Every client is different. Fact. Some clients want you to make their business look young and dynamic, attracting investors. Other clients want you to make their latest product offering sound irresistible — to the right people, of course. But what all clients have in common is that they’re looking for you to improve on reality in some way — to take a story and tell it better. That’s the name of the game.
When you’re dealing with SMEs and start-ups, companies that don’t have much of an image yet, companies with products you probably haven’t heard of, the temptation is…
Every good copywriter knows that simplicity is the secret to success. Getting the message across quickly and effectively is what copywriting is all about. I’ve had clients come to me with briefs for 4,000 word sales brochures. That’s longer than some undergraduate dissertations at university. “Who’s going to read 4,000 words,” I ask? The client looks dumbstruck. He’s even more amazed when I come up with a 100 word sales pitch that tells the customer everything they’ll ever need to know.
Simple Sales Copy
A brief description, followed by a call to action. That’s as much as most sales copy…
It’s the Don Draper effect. If you’ve seen Mad Men, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you work in this business, you know you’ve had to adapt. A couple of years ago, clients expected you to show up in jeans and t-shirt and a beard and they expected to tell you what to do. Now they expect you to show up clean-shaven, suited and booted, and ready to tell them how to run their business.
Mad Men is a pretty extraordinary show, not just because of the quality of the…
Straplines, headlines, taglines, slogans. Call them what you will, they’re what make the advertising world go round. It’s rare to find a good headline writer. That’s because headlines are hard to write. Anyone can fill a page with four hundred words, but how many people can catch an audience’s attention and sum up the product they’re selling in four or so words?
It’s more important to sound natural than to be clever.
F Scott Fitzgerald famously started out in advertising and came up with the slogan “we keep you clean in Muscatine” for an Iowa based laundry service. While he…
I’ve written before about the difference between professional copy, and copy you’ve just written yourself. “Everyone who can speak English and read and write thinks they can be a copywriter,” I said. But they can’t. The question is — why? What does a professional copywriter do that you don’t?
A good copywriter writes sales-focused copy.
What does that mean? Well, here’s an example. Client A comes to me with Product A, and it’s the best product ever (so he thinks). He’s already come up with a great description of Product A to use on his website. But nobody’s buying.
Let’s…
So, it’s April Fool’s Day. And along with the usual plethora of tech-related pranks (well documented by TechCrunch) this spoof by The Guardian really caught my eye. In my last post, I talked about negative campaigning in politics, and how only a campaign based on hard fact is good enough to go on the attack.
But how do you counter-attack a negative campaign?
The Guardian’s April Fools joke may point us in the right direction.
OK, so it’s an obvious spoof. But…