copywriting tips

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.

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.

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.