Idea poverty, time-sheet fascism, and the death of copy

There are many things killing copywriting, laments Dominic Mills – including a truth that no-one dares acknowledge.

If you’re a copywriter, what the hell do you do all day? A flick through a selection of last week’s newspapers reveals an almost-complete absence of copywriting.

Sure, there’s copy out there…but there’s not much writing. Most non-TV ads consist of a big picture, a headline or claim, a line or two, and then a load of T&Cs. The headline makes a claim or an announcement – ‘The Luxury World Sale’ from BA for example – and then there’s no attempt to add to it. That damn orangutan from SSE too. And posters…well, they’re pretty much just a trimmed-down version of an already-copy-free press ad.

The reality seems to be then that, in contemporary advertising, few words are devoted to the art of making an argument.

It’s a bit like meeting someone who tells you they’re a comedian. And you think: “Why don’t you show me you’re a comedian by telling me a joke. Then I’ll decide whether you are or not.”

Ads seem to focus most of their effort on ‘asserting’, and almost none on ‘showing’ or persuading.

When, for example, was the last time you saw an ad that used copy in such a compellingly entertaining way as this Lidl ad, below, attacking Morrisons? And so bang-on brand and strategy too. No pictures, but all words, all argument, all persuasion [with some fascinating science behind it too – Ed.].

The dearth – or maybe that should be death – of copywriting is clearly of concern to some people, not least the Direct Marketing Association, which last week launched a campaign to breathe some life back into the craft, including a census to find out how copywriters feel about the state of the industry today.

It’s a bold initiative, sparked off in the first instance by the dwindling number of entries to the Best Copy category in the DMA Awards. Now of course you can take the cynical line, and say this is just an effort to boost entries.

But actually it’s much more important than that. If advertising loses the ability to persuade, then it’s sunk. Judging by the turnout at a debate last week hosted by the DMA, and the social media generated as a result, it’s a concern shared across the industry.

One of the most concerned is the apparently unlikely figure of Patrick Collister. I say unlikely, because he is head of design for Google (a bit of a misnomer of a title, in fact, since one of his key roles is to help advertisers get the most out of the tech giant), and it would be tempting to think that Google is only interested in algorithms and doesn’t give a stuff about as anything as old-school as words.

But Collister is actually a copywriter by trade, and got his first job in advertising by taking a copy test. His first mentor at Ogilvy was the poet Edwin Brock, and it was by no means uncommon then for agencies to hire literary talent as copywriters: Salman Rushdie, Fay Weldon and Dorothy L. Sayers were among the copywriters who went on to achieve fame and fortune in the literary world. More recently, you could pick Philip Kerr, ex Saatchis, or Paul Burke, late of BMP.

So why does copywriting need a preservation order? The most obvious answers are cultural. One, we live in a visual culture, and the default position is to use imagery to do the heavy lifting and emotional manipulation.

Two, we are all short of time, and consumers can’t be bothered – or lack the mental capacity – to do anything more than scan copy. So why waste time making an argument that no-one will pay any attention to?

This idea of time poverty plays out in different ways too. Writing copy takes time, and in an era of rapid, always-on, multi-media connectivity, the notion that it is more important for advertisers to say something fast than it is to say something good has taken hold.

Second, agencies themselves are starved of time by cost-conscious clients, and time-sheet fascism means few clients are prepared to pay for the hours needed to craft good copy, or indeed to do the research on which to build an argument.

In this DMA film, you can see some of the old-time copywriters talk about the concept of the factory visit. It may seem extraordinary today, but not that long ago, clients would pick up the tab for their agency to take a couple of days wandering round their factory or office just observing stuff and talking to employees.

It was on just one of these factory visits to Audi’s plant in Wolfsburg that Sir John Hegarty noticed an old, faded, poster on the wall with the slogan ‘vorsprung durch technik‘. Without that visit, without that serendipitous sighting of the poster, where would Audi be today?

Others will cite a lack of education as an issue. This is not necessarily – although one can’t rule it out – education in schools, but education in the art of copywriting. As Collister said, when he joined his first agency the expectation on all sides was that he would be trained. Now agencies expect all their new staff to be fully trained, ready-to-write. This might be OK if universities and colleges were training copywriters, but they’re not, or at least not in sufficient numbers.

But the education argument can work both ways. One of the issues – you can call it the democratisation of talent – is that just as cheap video cameras means anyone thinks they can shoot video, so everyone thinks they can write. One copywriter says ‘track changes’, which allows everyone in the sign-off or approval process to suggest a new phrase or a new word, is the number one killer of good copy.

I agree that all these factors are killing copywriting. But I wonder if there isn’t another, more hidden issue – the truth that no-one dares acknowledge.

It’s that most advertisers, most of the time, haven’t actually got anything worth saying. Of course they still have to say something, but without anything meaningful or worthwhile, they hide behind bombast, assertion and imagery that, to turn a cliché on its head, isn’t worth any words, let alone 1,000.