Editors. Hard drinking, hard smoking, hard to deal with. When I was just starting out as a journalist, my editor took ten seconds to finish his drink, stub out his cigarette, and offer me a few words of advice.
‘You’re a good writer,’ he said. ‘But your stuff won’t be great until it has a through line.’
It’s the best writing advice anyone ever gave me. And it’s advice I’m still using as a freelance copywriter today.
Whose through line is it anyway?
A through line is a single message, or set of messages, that’s repeated throughout your copy. Whether …
A client came to me recently and asked me how they could make their digital agency stand out from the crowd. I looked over their elevator pitch. It contained the following sentences:
- “We help people connect to the brands they love.”
- “We look at the world differently.”
- “We’re driven to help people genuinely connect.”
Sound familiar? That’s probably because you’ve seen these phrases everywhere already. So how do you stand out?
The answer’s simple: if your message is the same as everyone else’s, be different. If your message is too generic, be more specific.
It’s unlikely two people ever see …
I never cease to be amazed by the stupidity of very smart people: unfortunately, hard experience has taught me that business sense and marketing sense very rarely mix.
Of course really smart businessmen hire marketing professionals — because they realise they’re good at making money, not at selling things.
They don’t think hey, I can manage a million dollar business so I can write a strapline, they think — hey, I’m smart enough to manage a million dollar business, which means I can afford to pay a professional to write my strapline.
KFC, in the UK at least, is changing …
Can we talk about cliché for a moment, people? I’m not talking about clichés like “easy as pie” or, to borrow from Mad Men again, “the cure for the common…” because in actual fact, so long as these clichés aren’t overused, or displayed too prominently, cliché actually serves a purpose by reinforcing perceptions quickly and easily using an instantly recognized standard.
In other words, “easy as pie” can get your message across to your customer a lot more effectively than “our product is so much simpler to use than your competitors and we think you’ll love it” …
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 words, …
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 not being memorable at all. …
I was recently lucky enough to have a conversation with an entrepreneur who runs a hotel booking website. I talked to him about my own personal experience booking hotels in central London (hey, you do it a lot when you’re single) and I told him that I wanted the best possible quality at the lowest possible price. That’s the type of consumer I am. So it’ll come to you as no surprise that I googled “cheap 5 star hotels”. But why? Have you ever seen a single 5* hotel that advertises the fact that it’s cheap?
The fact is, what …
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 …
What do you do when your brand is worthless? What do you do when people who’ve bought your product and been burned by past failures to live up to expectations hate your brand so much they won’t ever touch it again?
You go on the attack.
There’s no point launching a ‘new and improved’ campaign — nobody believes those three trite words anyway. It’s not enough to win back people who don’t trust your brand. You could change the name. But if you’re a big company, that gets expensive.
So Domino’s Pizza tried a different strategy. They attacked their own …
I’m very impressed with Woods PR team. In case you haven’t spotted it yet, this is their simple response to all that negative publicity –
A while back, I suggested Tiger ought to try humour to deflect some of the criticism about his adultery. You know, give a lovely smile and a “who, me?” shrug of the shoulders. After all, anyone who’s ever read Robert Greene’s The Art of Seduction knows that rakish charm can be very effective — like it or not, he argues, women love a cad.
This response is better. Tiger’s a number 1 sportsman. Okay, so …