My super power is fighting cheerleaderism. Here’s why I do it, and how you can too (Part 1)

My most common question to clients and potential clients is what I always thought was a simple one: “What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing?”

It’s strange and somewhat concerning to me that I almost never get a straight answer to this question.

I mean, they shouldn’t be trying to impress me. I’m working for them, or auditioning to do so. If anything, they should be glad to be blunt, frank and forthright with me.

After all, I’m not their boss! If they tell me what’s going wrong, I’m not going to use that info to fire them. I’m going to use it to help them.

Yet time after time, when I ask a client or stakeholder about the most pressing problem, issue or challenge they face, here’s the answer:

“We’re doing phenomenally well… We’ve just merged with/acquired X company and have plans to acquire Y company… We just received X million dollars in funding… We’ve released a new version of our flagship product and it has this killer feature and that killer feature, all based on our exciting new platform of blah-biddy-blah-biddy-blah… Etc., etc., etc.”

As a creative professional, I can safely say that this information is of less than no use to me. In fact calling it “information” at all is being kind. It’s promotional boilerplate, also known as PR, also known as bullshit.

And while I understand why you might relate it to your customers and users, or even to your underlings, I’m at a loss to understand why you would give it to a copywriter or art director and expect them to do anything with it.

Our job is to find out what’s going wrong with your business, so we can use our creativity to clearly define and solve that problem. If you tell us what’s going right with it, that leaves us no better off than before, and possibly worse off depending on how true it is.

And at the end of the day, Mr. or Ms. Stakeholder, who gets hosed? You do.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where I’ll tell you where the instinct to make this huge mistake comes from, and some concrete ways to fight it.

Dave Dumanis is a creative director, copywriter, and 25-year veteran of Bay Area advertising and marketing.

Why the way media shows creative pros is bass-ackwards

When you think of creative professionals, what do you think of? Probably someone pacing around and then having an idea, in a glorious “Aha!” moment.

That’s flashy and showy and makes for great TV (or a great TikTok). But it’s not how the best work gets made.

In fact, this myth hurts more than it helps. Too many newbies think that’s how it’s done. You sit at your desk and “think of a good idea,” good meaning clever and witty (if you’re a writer) or aesthetically pleasing to your own hipster sensibility (if you’re a designer).

Not a chance.

How we spend most of our time, and if you do it for a living you already know this, would be really boring to show on TV. It’s homework, otherwise known as research.

Of course, no one wants to tune into a half hour of someone doing homework. That would be the most boring TV show ever. But that’s what we do.

It’s the valuable questions that arise during the course of this research that often form the germ of an idea. But you have to be open to them, so when you think of them, you welcome them rather than dismissing them.

For example:

  • Why is a product selling well to Group A, but not to Group B?
  • Why do customers spend a bunch of money to subscribe the first time, but don’t renew?
  • Why is the key unique value prop being ignored, but the product is #1 because people like the font on the label?

Discover the answers to questions like these, and your next campaign will almost write itself. When you ask them in meetings, you’ll usually get a blank stare followed by “Can I get back to you?” from your stakeholder. That’s how you know you’re on the right track.

Being a creative professional, particularly a writer, is a lot like being a detective. You pore over the evidence for weeks, and then the answer becomes obvious “overnight.”

But poring over evidence, and asking questions, isn’t sexy. It’s the opposite.

That’s why we get paid to do what we do.

A quick and dirty tip to beat writer’s block

Writer’s block is nobody’s friend, but sometimes you just can’t avoid it. The deadline is too tight, or the assignment is out of your wheelhouse, or you’ve just had too much stress and too little sleep.

When that happens, there’s something that virtually always works for me. I hope it works for you, too. It’ll work better if you make sure you’re not hungry first. Stable blood sugar is important!

Here’s what you do.

First, study the background materials you’ve been given. The creative brief, white papers, slide presos, meeting notes, whatever documents your stakeholder gave you. Sometimes the creative brief sucks—it’s full of platitudes and cheerleadery statements that leave you worse off strategically than you were when you started. If that’s the case, give it a once-over then focus on the other stuff.

Then, and this is important, do not try to be clever.

Don’t try to be witty, or funny, or interesting, or special, or impress your old boss, your college professor or your girlfriend.

Just be clear. That’s it.

If you’ve really done your homework, studied up on who your audience is, why they should care, and your product’s “magic bullet” (value prop), this part should be easy. Write as concisely as possible. Make every word matter. Tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. Here’s the problem, here’s why your product solves it, here’s what you get out of it.

Note that if the problem is a familiar one, like hunger or thirst, you can skip to the middle, but never skip to the end. And sometimes starting at the beginning pays off, like it did with Snickers’ “You’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign!

Keep carving away at your copy to make it more concise, more to the point, more of a story–editing out anything that doesn’t truly contribute.

Make it shorter, and more specific, and clearer.

Eventually, you’ll find that this process literally results in wit, and occasionally even humor. It happens almost as a byproduct.

And that’s the magical contradiction.

Start with a quest for wit, and you’ll end up with nothing.

Start with a quest for insight and clarity, and the wit will come.

Don’t believe me. Try it.

Want to see a million dollars set on fire? Just drive down 101 and look out your window.

I don’t drive too much anymore. I hate traffic and I hate tailgaters, so I avoid freeways as much as possible. I find that nine times out of 10, a combination of CalTrain and Lyft get me exactly where I want to go, stress-free.

Whenever I do drive, though, I notice one thing, and it’s not the little old lady doing 35 in front of me or the venture capitalist yakking on the Bluetooth in his Tesla.

It’s the billboards.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but why the hell do companies spend thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars on out-of-home space, just to run terrible work in them?

They’re glad to pay for the media, but the creative is a complete afterthought. They’d rather save a few hundred bucks by hiring their cousin, or an intern who’s still a freshman in art school.

This is the most egregious case in history of being penny-wise and dollar-stupid.

What’s wrong with these billboards? Everything! For a start, many of them break the seven-word rule, which says billboard copy should never be long enough to cause an accident.

Then there are cheesy stock photos, copy that insults your intelligence, and “concepts” with no freshness or impact.

Throw in horrendous typography and color, and you’ve got an easy way to pour a fortune down the drain. All because the person in charge cheaped out on art direction and copywriting.

One thing you see all the time, just for example, is a headline set in type with a particular word crossed out and a replacement word “scribbled” above it. This is what passes for wit in Silicon Valley. I swear, a different pre-IPO startup does this every year and they all think it’s the most brilliant thing they ever heard of. This is because they thought it up in their incubator office at two in the morning when they were high on Red Bull and White Claw, which when mixed together make some kind of pink mythological monster that makes you write crappy billboards.

Then there are the city namecheck billboards, which think they’re cool because they mention something local like Karl the Fog or the Niners. Get out of my face with that stuff. I might be half asleep but I do remember where I live! Plus, you’re not giving me a clue what your new SaaS company does.

Bus shelter boards are bad too. These are billboards’ ugly stepchildren. They have all the same problems, plus they often include body copy of all things. News flash: Most of the people who see your bus shelter are driving by at 40 mph on their way to work. They’re not sitting there waiting for the bus and reading your body copy.

If I sound angry about all of this, it’s because some of the money used to pay for all that expensive media space should be going into the pockets of writers and art directors. That it isn’t, shows every day. These poorly crafted billboards are a hideous blight on the freeway landscape, and they don’t succeed in selling their companies to anyone except their own executive teams and a handful of Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. But maybe that’s exactly the point.

Dave Dumanis is a creative director, copywriter, and 25-year veteran of San Francisco Bay Area marketing and advertising.

Ever sold anything? That experience can help you write better copy than most copywriters.

First job I ever had, way back in high school when other kids got jobs flipping burgers or detailing cars, was telemarketing. If you were born after around 1980, this was a job that involved calling strangers who may or may not have previously expressed an interest and trying to sell them stuff, usually by reading a script.

Eventually, I became so experienced at it that I was offered a part-time job writing the scripts themselves. My boss even offered me a bunch of money to quit college and write telemarketing scripts full-time, which I stupidly declined.

Now. Buried deep in the scripts were the real heart and soul of telemarketing, responses to common objections. After all, anyone can sell to someone who’s already interested. That’s a no-brainer, a giveaway. The hard part comes when someone’s already got an excuse lined up. What you have to do is beat them to the punch–leapfrog them by already knowing the excuses they’ll probably use, and having a convincing response ready for each one.

Sometimes these canned responses, read in a fresh and convincing manner, worked and sometimes they didn’t, but averaged out, using them always worked better than not using them. The reason is that if people really didn’t want to buy anything at all, they would usually hang up the phone to get their time back. Sometimes they would do so politely and sometimes they would slam it in your ear. This was back in the Pleistocene Era, when landline phones were heavy and having one slammed in your ear really hurt! But if they were totally uninterested, what they wouldn’t do was stay on the line. That they were still there was a quiet challenge: Convince me, you bastard. Let’s see what you’ve got.

So what does all this have to do with copywriting? It’s about building empathy. You always want to start where your audience’s mindset is–join them wherever they are on the buyer’s journey. And you can’t do that if you don’t anticipate their likely objections, or as they’re called in marketing, barriers to adoption.

This is why doing your homework is so important before writing word one, and why it’s so important to do the right kind of homework. Listing the names of ten competing companies and their products, or memorizing a bunch of cheerleading boilerplate nonsense about how your own company’s product is the greatest invention since sliced bread, adds nothing to your strategic power and in fact is a destructive distraction. Yet many high-ranking marketing folks, some with Ivy League pedigrees and amazing-looking resumes, do exactly that. It boggles the mind.

Instead, do this: Anticipate the four or five most common responses your target would give if they chose not to buy. Typically these are linked to the classic four qualifiers abbreivated as BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline). Either they don’t have enough money, they’re not the right person, they don’t need what you’re selling, or it’s too early/ too late. Let’s take these in order and look at how we might counter them.

  1. If their budget is too low, play up how your product is actually an investment that will save them money over the long run. Or, do a limited-time promotion such as a price reduction (or extra bonus for the same price).
  2. If they don’t have the authority, talk about how this would be an awesome decision for their boss or their company to make, so they’ll be inspired to spread the word. Make your marketing go viral so it gets to the right person.
  3. If they think they don’t need it, demonstrate why they can’t live without it. While this can be done with the right copy and imagery, sometimes a demonstration video is worth 1,000 words.
  4. If it’s too early, set the stage with some thought leadership marketing or other high-level content-driven lead nurturing, so they’ll be prepared when it’s time to close the deal.

Dave Dumanis is a San Francisco Bay Area creative director, copywriter, and longtime marketing and advertising veteran.

Dude, does your company even “copywriter”?

A slow change is taking place on the corporate marketing landscape, so slow in fact that it’s nearly imperceptible unless you’re in it.

It used to be that the “client side” of the advertising business was filled with agency folks who’d grown tired of the rat race. The intense pressure, the endless pre-pitch nights, the revolving door of clients which, when they quit the agency, often resulted in jobs being hemorrhaged.

But then, a little at a time and often under the radar, the agencies that fed those second-hand (vintage?) creatives into the client side started closing their doors, or scaling way back. Google and Facebook, and their respective offspring YouTube and Instagram, were largely to blame, since they were vacuuming up more and more of the ad revenue that used to go to agencies.

As a result, the old agency-to-client-side funnel is gone. I don’t know where companies get their copywriters these days. It might be from university English departments, or viral video writing teams, or even from each other, but it sure as hell isn’t from agencies.

Apart from deteriorating copy quality, one result of this seismic shift is that fewer and fewer companies seem to know what a copywriter is even for. This is somewhat amazing to me.

As a matter of fact, I’ve been approached by marketing executives with jobs far above my pay grade and advanced Ivy League degrees to do everything from writing technical white papers and designing pitch decks to editing business letters. While it all pays the bills, and I can even do some of it quite capably, it’s not the best use of my talents. I can do so much more for you, if you let me–but first, you have to know what that is.

A copywriter is not:

  • A technical writer
  • A public relations (PR) writer
  • A content writer
  • A UX writer
  • An editor
  • A business article writer
  • A blogger
  • A ghostwriter or book author

A good copywriter might be able to do a few of those things. Indeed, I spent all of last year writing UX content! But again, if that’s all you hire a copywriter to do, you’re not taking full advantage of what’s in front of you.

A copywriter is:

  • Someone who develops ideas, and writes words, to make customers change their mind, take action, or both.

That’s what it is and that’s all it is.

I’ve seen it expressed before that copywriting is “selling through print.” That’s another good definition. If there’s no selling, it’s not copy.

If the copy is primarily designed to change people’s mind, it’s awareness advertising.

If the copy is primarily designed to get customers to take action, such as buying a t-shirt or renewing a subscription or accessing a gated article, it’s direct response or lead generation advertising.

And that’s what a copywriter gets paid to do. Nothing more or less.

Are there fewer such opportunities to deploy great copywriting? Well, some of the old ones aren’t as common as they used to be, print ads being a great example. But the world is still full of things that could have been made great by a writer, and instead are aggressively mediocre.

You see them every day. Pricey billboards lining Silicon Valley’s 101 freeway with janky headlines and concepts created by the CEO’s brother-in-law. Event booth signs and handouts that should have gone straight into the trash can, Home page copy (your first chance to sell your prospect on your product!) that reads like it was fed through Google translate.

Put your copywriter to work doing what she or he was born to do.

Writing great copy.

The only reason I wrote this is to attract new copywriting clients, but I’m betting you’ll read it anyway.

Did I lose you? No? Well, you’re far from the only one.

Does that surprise you?

After all, that headline is a big hunk of truth. I’m giving up the game before it even starts, revealing exactly what my secret hidden agenda is. Most people would say that’s kind of stupid.

But you see, that’s exactly what makes it work: surprise. No one expects truth in advertising, so when you use it, it’s like a secret weapon, catching everyone off-guard.

There’s just one catch: It has to be interesting. It can’t be just any old boring truth. And that means you can’t be lazy. You have to dig and dig until you find the truth that’s surprising, or disarming, or unusual and novel enough to get noticed.

This is what separates the pros from the amateurs. Amateurs might have a one-off idea that they think is clever, maybe involving a celebrity or a pun, but the tough detective work it takes to find that one special truth requires patience, persistence, and interviewing people with whom you share little in common.

But, you know, that’s what writers get paid for.

And if the one needle you’ve found in that haystack is sharp enough, that’s all you need. A whole campaign can come out of it, a campaign that will be far better than ripping off trendy fonts, photography styles or PhotoShop filters from the latest award winner, because it’s true and speaks to an actual human need.

If you don’t have that surprising truth, surprising either because no one wants to say it or no one truthfully can say it, then you’ve got a cute little dog-and-pony show designed to entertain yourself and your clients, but nothing more.

Let’s take the recent Groundhog Day Super Bowl ad that’s getting so much buzz. It’s truthful in so many ways. First of all, it literally ran on Groundhog Day because the Super Bowl happened to fall on exactly that day this year. Kudos to whoever tripped over that truth, which might have seem meaningless until they made the connection between the holiday and the famous movie.

Secondly, it speaks truthfully to the reason people buy Jeeps, their versatility. You can say a lot of stuff about Jeeps, their MPG is truly bottom-of-the-barrel, but one thing they do well is let you go wherever you want, and take whatever you want.

And thirdly, it’s got Bill Murray who as an onscreen presence is always deeply truthful, oftentimes to the point of making you cringe, since he was trained in the Second City tradition which values honest acting over cheap laughs.

If it weren’t for those three things, if it were just “let’s put an aging comedy star in a Jeep ad and put it on the Super Bowl,” you’d have nothing. And that’s what so many amateurs don’t get.

Do your homework.

Be a pro.

Be truthful.

Dave Dumanis is a San Francisco Bay Area creative director, copywriter and content strategist with decades of experience bringing complex B-to-B concepts to life. He specializes in daring, idea-rich cross-channel campaigns that get noticed and get results.

Respect the writer

I was having a conversation with my wife the other day, just yakking, small talk in the car like you do, and she brought up a website written by a client of hers. The client was not a native speaker nor writer of English, and apparently it showed. The site content was full of idioms that didn’t translate particularly well, grammar and syntax errors, and just plain tin-eared turns of phrase.

“They least they could have done was to hire an editor,” she said, “or a localization expert.”

I agreed that this was indeed the very least they could have done. “What they should have have done,” I countered, “was to hire a writer. Not an editor, or a localization expert, whatever that may be, but someone with a distinctive written voice who understands the power of the word, someone who can write relatable human conversational sentences that sound good and ring true. You know. A writer.”

This got me started on a whole rampage about how the writer is generally undervalued in society as a whole, about how, like milk or a quietly reliable friend, people don’t miss us until we’re gone; but I didn’t go on too long, since I didn’t want to spoil a quiet, meditative Sunday (which also happened to be my birthday).

It was neither the time nor the place.

But this is.

Look. We all mess around with computers in middle school, but not everyone claims to be a coder. We all mess around with frog dissection or test tubes, but not everyone claims to be a scientist. Would I stroll into your law office and claim to be a lawyer because I was on the debate team? Nothing would be more ridiculous.

But write one essay about your cute little labradoodle or what you want to be when you grow up, and suddenly and for all eternity, you’re magically a writer.

Not only that, but depending on your high-status managerial job and your expensive university degree, you get to tell professional writers, who’ve spent their entire life perfecting their craft, how to write, and edit and change their work however you see fit.

After all, you could obviously write it all yourself if you just had the time in your busy, busy schedule, plus you’ve earned the right by staying at the office until 7pm every night, most of it shooting the breeze with co-workers.

Let me give you an example of how destructive this myth can be.

Recently, I did a freelance job for a client. Nice enough guy, smart, sharp, CEO of a baby startup that’s doing quite well, paid me on time. He was detail-oriented but fair. Can’t complain about the experience at all. Then I took a look at the just-refreshed website whose copy I’d written, and was shocked to find it completely unrecognizable.

It turns out my client had rewritten it himself, or had it rewritten, from top to bottom, skillfully removing anything that sounded remotely like a human being, while inadvertently adding all sorts of stylistic errors, from basic subject-verb disagreements and dangling participles to replacing the word “and” with an ampersand.

Now, let’s be clear. It’s his company and his website. He paid for the domain, the hosting and the site design. He can damn well put whatever content he wants in there. That’s his right. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best choice.

Because when decision makers read that content, they’re going to question his judgment. If he posts substandard copy on his website, they’ll think, how is he going to keep my data secure? How do I know he’ll deliver on his contract?

And frankly, they might have a point.

It all comes back to this: Writing means something. It’s more than cutting and pasting a bunch of approved boilerplate, or turning a lot of technical buzzwords into something that vaguely follows the rules. It’s even more than explaining your amazing technological secret sauce, though that’s part of it. It’s telling a story in a way that’s engaging, compelling, and impossible to ignore or forget.

And that’s something only a professional writer can do.

Dave Dumanis is a creative director, copywriter, and longtime veteran of Bay Area marketing and advertising.

Video killed the creative star: Why the insane race to go viral is destroying your creative team and budget

A few months ago I interviewed at a super-hot startup. Among the five or six people scheduled to grill me that morning was the company video specialist.

This is a fairly new role popping up everywhere, apparently based on the information that video radically boosts the chances of social posts going viral.

The person lucky enough to fill this role is usually a fanboy who thinks he’s Tarantino because he did a five-minute short in college, or maybe an ex-radio jock or TV news reporter. He–it’s always a he–has access to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of expensive video hardware and software.

Well, I didn’t get the job, and I have a feeling it’s because the video guy gave me a lukewarm review. He asked me about my video experience. What he didn’t ask me about was my thinking experience.

Let me be very clear about this. Video specialists have no business having such a heavy hand deciding who’s going to be on the creative team and who isn’t. They have no idea what a concept is. They throw around words like “story” and “narrative,” but when push comes to shove, instead of taking the truth and making it fascinating, as a good filmmaker should, they make hackneyed PR videos with a few lame jokes thrown in.

The results are predictable. The videos get no traction, amusing though they might be to a few people around the office.

Now why is this? It’s because people are short on time. They want answers to their business problems. Answers that a jokey, goofy PR video won’t give them.

This presents a conundrum because only enormous companies like Adobe and IBM can afford to continuously produce the kind of content-rich videos that really go viral. It takes a lot of time, a lot of research, a lot of knowledge, and frankly a lot of real interest in the subject matter that your average film buff can’t fake.

But here’s the thing. You don’t have to produce the videos you post. You just have to find them. And there are relevant thought leadership videos out there that your audience wants to see, I assure you. They’re produced not by your competitors but by nonprofits, universities, think tanks and other organizations.

Save yourself a few hundred thousand dollars and post those videos, okay?

Oh, and that startup I mentioned? They just laid off half their staff. I wish I were lying.

Dave Dumanis is a 25-year San Francisco Bay Area copywriter, creative director and advertising veteran.

Creative agencies and departments, take this hint from Finland

Sanna Marin, the 34-year-old prime minister of Finland, made news this week when she recommended that her government seriously look into the benefits of a four-day workweek. (To be clear, this would be four days for the same pay as five days right now.)

Marin, a member of Finland’s parliament for four years and most recently the Minister of Transport and Communications, is hardly a novice when it comes to getting more and better things done in less time. Despite her youth, she’s deadly serious.

It pays to remember that just over a hundred years ago, really no time at all in a broad sense, people were regularly working 70, 80, 100-hour workweeks, and some of them were children. This was considered normal at the time, as was working on Saturday. If your boss was religious, you might get a break on Sunday.

What does all this have to do with creating for a living? Well, if you’re forced to stare at the same four walls and the same open plan office and yes, sometimes even the same faces for five nine-hour days straight, you might run into writers’ or artists’ block.

This is how we get campaigns that all look the same, even though they were created at different places by different people.

Instead of basing their work on problem-solving, and the inspiration that comes from getting to know your audience and your product, desperately bored creatives are forced to turn to the latest trends, scrolling through Ads of the World, Adweek, Ad Age, or that Super Bowl thing your client said they liked from five years ago.

Inspiration needs time.

Inspiration needs a chance to breathe, rest and refresh.

Inspiration needs a four-day workweek.

PM Sanna Marin proposes a four-day workweek for Finland. Smart creative groups should follow suit.

Dave Dumanis is a 25-year San Francisco Bay Area copywriter, creative director and advertising veteran.

Marketers need to stop ostriching on climate change

Many years ago, when my hair was mostly brown with a few gray strands instead of the opposite, my wife and I took a vacation in Asia. We went to Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and, because my wife wanted to see Bali, we stopped in Indonesia as well.

In order to get to Bali via the deal my wife wangled, we had to go through Indonesia’s capital city, Jakarta. I have to say that at the time, it struck me as unbelievably banal and boring, one of the dullest capital cities I’d been in.

I wish it were as dull and boring today. Instead, it’s rapidly sinking underwater. The cause? Melting polar ice caused by climate change.

If you’ve never been to Indonesia, I don’t expect this will mean much to you. You’ll probably file it away in a mental folder called “Things to be concerned about when I have time.” But if you have, it’ll be very real to you. A place that used to be land is now sinking under the ocean.

Now: What the hell does all this have to do with marketing?

As marketers, we’re in denial, to one degree or another. Our rationale up until now has been that we have to be, in order to survive. We have to think about billings, clients, briefs, quarterly goals. There’s only so much room in our brains.

But now, faster than we know, the situation is flipping.

Now, in order to survive, we need to not be in denial.

For example, if you’re in the marketing department of an airline that flies to Indonesia, its sinking into the ocean is a pretty big deal that’s going to cut into your business. The same is true if you work for an international company that markets to Indonesian businesses or consumers. Are you a designer, art director or copywriter for a concern that makes things in Indonesian factories, like clothing or sneakers? You might be in for a bumpy ride.

Because now, global climate change isn’t something we can ignore, or donate to once a year, or pay lip service to with products named Rainforest Renew and Coral Reef Sparkle.

It’s something that should factor heavily into every decision we make, every day.

Our survival depends on it, not just as marketers but as human beings.

Dave Dumanis is a 25-year San Francisco Bay Area copywriter, creative director and advertising veteran.