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.

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.

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).
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.
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.
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.