copywriter

It’s time for creatives to take a long, hard look at how we got here

Why did you become a creative professional? A copywriter, designer, art director, creative director, video/film director? An ad person, in other words?

At the deepest psychological level, why would you voluntarily join such an unstable, unpredictable, unappreciated, and often scoffed-at profession?

I know why I did. And I’m not proud of it.

I hasten to add that I am proud of the actual work I’ve done over the years. Of helping to grow my clients’ businesses. Of getting paid to solve tough business problems with insightful solutions. And yes, of adding some thoughtful, well-crafted, and occasionally even funny lines to the business environment we all live in.

But between the pandemic, the insane unemployment numbers, and the continuing transfer of advertising dollars from thousands of venues to Google and Facebook, I believe it’s worth looking at how we got here, so we can see a little more clearly where we’re going.

Like all my compatriots of a certain age—like you, in all probability—I spent a lot of my formative years in front of the TV, and that TV was always trying to sell me something.

Sometimes that thing would even include a picture of the very characters I saw on TV, which seemed vaguely magical, as though the characters had somehow popped out of the TV and broken the Fourth Wall.

For example, a cartoon leprechaun would sell you cereal, and when your parents bought the cereal, there that leprechaun would be, right on the box. To a two- or three-year-old with a still-developing brain, this passed for a religious experience.

And where was those parents, by the way, when all this was happening? Either taking care of even younger kids and doing housework, or working, or attending night school, or simply finding themselves—as the TV also encouraged them to do. So they plopped the kids in front of the magical babysitter, where they then would be sold even more things that had pictures of TV characters on them.

Cut to several years later, the small child grew into a larger child and then a college student, who on some level, albeit dimly, realized the profound power and influence that advertising had held over his life.

In fact, many were the times, between parental divorces and separations and constantly changing schools and moving houses, when advertising characters had seemed more like friends than people did.

But what if that power could be reclaimed?

What if, after 20 years of advertising wielding immense power over a person, that person could turn the tables? What if they could wield that same power over not just other people, but the advertising profession itself?

And so, we learned to use Macs and design software. And brand voice and tone guidelines, and creative briefs. And video editing software. And whatever else was necessary so we could do this ourselves, instead of having it done to us.

And now, here we all are. We’ve mastered this craft which previously mastered us, so congratulations to all of us.

The problem is, it’s now a craft without a venue—just Google and Facebook. We’re like carpenters who can design and build wonderful imaginative chairs, suddenly transported to ancient Japan where everyone is expected to kneel on the floor at mealtimes.

So what do we do now?

In the short term, I imagine some of us will become Instacart shoppers, nurses, grocery store stock clerks, Amazon warehouse workers, and other essential employees. I myself made such a temporary transition just after 9/11, when agency jobs were tough to come by. I catered, tended bar, waited tables. I didn’t mind it, to tell you the truth.

But in the long term, something deeper has to happen. We need to focus on using our incredible creative potential to build something new.

Not to sell cereal, or beer, or the latest SaaS/cloud solution, but to sell ideas that change the very way we live, the way we see each other, the way we see fundamental things like money and time and human relationships and our place in the universe.

Call it anti-propaganda, or advertising in reverse.

Who’s going to pay us to do that? For a while, maybe no one. In that case, we’re going have to do it for free, building the world we want to see.

Meanwhile, to survive and support our families, we’ll do our old creative professional jobs as well as we can—for as long as they exist.

But that won’t be forever.

My super power is fighting cheerleaderism. Here’s why I do it, and how you can too (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this post, I talked about the disturbing trend of marketing stakeholders and clients reflexively responding to questions about their marketing problems with a lot of positive rah-rah nonsense that’s not only not helpful, but actually harmful to the strategic and creative process.

In this second part, I’ll list several possible reasons for this trend, a trend which invariably results in wasted money and bad marketing—and then follow them with a pathway to reversing it.

Here are the reasons why cheerleaderism might rear its ugly head:

  1. The stakeholder is in sales, or a sales-related position, and is so used to pumping up their company that that’s how they answer any question.
  2. The stakeholder has bought the fictitious line that thinking and acting positive all the time, and making positive statements all the time, no matter how terrible the situation, is the road to success. It isn’t. It’s the road to denial.
  3. The stakeholder just has a psychological need to please and impress people, even people whom it absolutely will not benefit them to impress.
  4. The stakeholder is simply not a very clear thinker. They are possibly the victim of 12-hour days, the stress of working for a volatile boss and driving in traffic and raising a family, the mental cloudiness of certain substances commonly used to alleviate said stress, etc.

Any or all of these may be true, but the result is always the same: When a creative professional asks the legitimate question, “What marketing problem are we solving here,” the response is either a blank stare or a bunch of positive-sounding but unhelpful gibberish.

Now, here’s what you, as a stakeholder, can do about it:

  1. Be candid. When a creative professional or strategist is smart and curious enough to probe, answer their questions openly. In other words, tell them what the damn marketing problem is. There must be one, or you wouldn’t have hired them. What are you paying them to fix, exactly? This is not the time to be Mr. Rogers and pretend everything’s OK when it’s not. If you’re not straightforward, you’re not “saving face” or “making the company look good” or “being a loyal employee.” You’re simply hurting yourself and hurting your company.
  2. Be proactive. If your copywriter or art director doesn’t ask you where your business is falling down, tell them. Don’t wait for the question. With some people, you might be waiting a long time. Tell them exactly where the holes are in your business model. Do you have renewal and customer success issues? Are there lead nurturing gaps where prospects show interest at first, then fail to engage? Is there a high price point that can’t be moved, so you need to show more value? Do your own homework, then be brutally frank. Remember, the first step to solving a problem is acknowledging that you have one.
  3. Be humble. This is not the time to talk up your product. You’re not trying to sell it, and the creative professional is not a sales prospect or a user. Don’t boast and brag about how your product is the greatest thing since sliced bread and creams the competition, or about all the great numbers you made last year and plan to make this year, or all the new demos you plan to crush. Instead, everything that you’re unsure, insecure and secretly freaking out about? Let it all out. That’s what we’re here for and who knows, we might even be able to help.

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

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.

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.