Category: Excerpts

💎 Mary Wear (the copywriter behind the line Make Poverty History) on her five copywriting rules

Some (until now) unwritten rules I set myself:

  1. Know when to shut up. The best copywriting isn’t always in the lines. It’s also between them.
  2. Know there’s always a fresh way to tell an old, old story. Stand-up comedians are brilliant at this, taking the most mundane subject — life — and retelling it in ways that make us laugh, wonder and think.
  3. Know your target audience. Not intellectually, but intuitively. Think like them, empathise with them, identify with them. Because at some level, the reader needs to like the writer.
  4. Know that we are all creative creatures. Everyone enjoys the quirks and whimsy of creativity. You don’t have to logic people into a corner, you can charm them into wanting to come out and play.
  5. Clive James said that humour is common sense dancing; Following the great advertising tradition of “borrowing’ from someone much cleverer, I would say that copywriting is persuasion dancing. So if it doesn’t dance, go back and do it again until it does.

Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD

💎 Rituals may have a benefit because they quell anxiety by giving sense of control

One study of free throws in basketball found that players were around 12.4 percentage points more accurate when they followed their personal routines before the shot than when they deviated from the sequence. Overall, the total success rate was 83.8 per cent with the exact routine, compared to 71.4 per cent without. 39 Superstitions and rituals can also boost perseverance and performance across a whole range of cognitive tasks, and the advantages are often considerable.

Excerpt from: The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life by David Robson

💎 On the core problem of Big Data

“I am not saying here that there is no information in Big Data,” essayist and statistician Nassim Taleb has written. “There is plenty of information. The problem—the central issue—is that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.”

Excerpt from: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

💎 You’ll never be a good writer of anything if you just sit in your office and stare at your desk

2. Leave the office

Before you even open your pad, open five other things You ears, your eyes and your mind.

You’ll never be a good writer of anything if you just sit in your office and stare at your desk. Your raw material isn’t in the office or in Groucho’s for that matter. It’s out on the streets. Look at pictures. Listen to music. Go to films. See plays. And more importantly look at people. They’re those funny things with two legs we’re meant to be writing about, remember.

It sounds obvious but it’s amazing how many people in our incestuous little business just spend their spare time with other people in this incestuous little business.

Get out. And observe.

For instance, the Castlemaine xxxx campaign would never have happened if my parents hadn’t sent me to Australia to make a man of me. This it conspicuously failed to do. But it did teach me how to get bitten by a wild cockatoo, how to cheat at poker, and fifteen years later how to write a xxxx ad.

Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD

💎 On the need to dig for concrete and specific details that appeal to the senses

Novelist Joseph Conrad once described his task this way: “by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see.” When Gene Roberts, a great American newspaper editor, broke in as a cub reporter in North Carolina, he read his stories aloud to a blind editor who would chastise young Roberts for not making him see.

When details of character and setting appeal to the senses, they create an experience for the reader that leads to understanding. When we say “I see,” we most often mean “I understand.” Inexperienced writers may choose the obvious detail, the man puffing on the cigarette, the young woman chewing on what’s left of her fingernails. Those details fail to tell – unless the man is dying of lung cancer or the woman is anorexic.

At the St. Petersburg Times, editors and writing coaches warn reporters not to return to the office without the name of the dog.” That reporting task does not require the writer to use the detail in the story, but it reminds the reporter to keep her eyes and ears opened.

Excerpt from: Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark

💎 On the importance of a spectacle in advertising

We want above all, throughout this brief historical overview, to draw attention to an aspect of advertising which is too often forgotten today: a certain openness, an innocence which we find in the earliest forms of advertising. It comes just as much from a liking for spectacle, for playing with words, for putting on a performance, as it does from a desire to sell. These two things are intimately bound together: the actual sale is only one element in the acting out of a shared event, which is infinitely richer than the simple two-way relationship of seller and buyer…

Excerpt from: Why Does The Pedlar Sing?: What Creativity Really Means in Advertising by Paul Feldwick

💎 How advertisings quest for professionalism led it to disregard some of its successful factors

The quest for professionalism was understandable, some aspects of it necessary and even admirable: a lot in advertising’s past had its disgraceful side. But along with the genuinely shoddy and dishonest practices, the new technical/ rational world of advertising also attempted to disown and deny qualities that have always been central to successful selling and brand creation — qualities of playfulness, subversion, popular appeal, ambiguity, the pleasures of the childish and the illogical, the carnival world of satire, eroticism, talking animals and general nonsense — everything that the emerging professional/managerial culture despised and rejected.

Excerpt from: Why Does The Pedlar Sing?: What Creativity Really Means in Advertising by Paul Feldwick

💎 On making the most of your deadline

Call me irresponsible, but I always wait until the traffic man, appears at the door, purple-faced and screaming for my copy. Then I write it. I find there is a direct correlation between rising panic and burgeoning inspiration. Incidentally, I’ve fully exploited this technique for writing the piece you’re reading now. My apologies to all at D&AD.

Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD

💎 10 things that marketers have taught us about Millennials

  1. Millennials like stuff.
  2. Millennials don’t like other stuff.
  3. Conveniently, all Millennia’s like exactly the same stuff.
  4. Millennials are completely different from every other generation, in that they were born at a different time. That much we can agree on.
  5. We can’t actually agree on when Millennials were born.
  6. Millennials will not persist with anything that doesn’t keep them interested. When writing for Millennials, you must be unceasingly entertaining.
  7. When writing about Millennia’s, you must be unceasingly boring.
  8. Millennials will immediately detect if you’re being condescending, the clever little scamps.
  9. You do not simply ask Millennials what they think, you ‘tap into their mindset’
  10. Millennials don’t like Apple. They don’t like broccoli either, but that’s kids for you.

Excerpt from: Eat Your Greens by Wiemer Snijders

 

💎 On giving the reader permission to believe

Despite universal cynicism towards salesmen in general and ads in particular, there’s a part of us that really wants to believe we’ll have more and better sex if we use a certain aftershave or hair conditioner. Unfortunately that part is patrolled by a beefy armed guard who can easily wrestle inanities like this to the ground. What our beefy armed guard needs is enough supporting logic to accept your premise and not look like an idiot. DDB’s advertising for Avis didn’t just say Avis tried harder; it said when you’re only number two you have to — or else.

Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD

 

💎 We can’t stand a mismatch between our actions and thoughts (Benjamin Franklin Effect)

because we hate cognitive dissonance: we can’t stand a mismatch between our actions and thoughts. So if we find ourselves helping someone out, we’ll unconsciously adjust our feelings for them. After all, we don’t want to feel we’re valuing someone who doesn’t deserve it. In one key study, students won money in a contest; afterwards, some were asked to return it because, they were told, it was the hard-up researcher’s own cash. In a subsequent survey, that group liked the researcher significantly more than those who weren’t asked to give any money back.

The implications are striking. Don’t suck up to your boss – make demands. Don’t shower your friends with gifts – ask to borrow their stuff.

Excerpt from Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done by Oliver Burkeman

💎 A Tip for Writing in the Active, not the passive voice (by Zombies)

There’s a neat trick – first suggested, as far as I can discover, by the American academic Rebecca Johnson – for identifying a passive construction in case of doubt. Try adding ‘by zombies’ after the verb. If you can do so, you’re looking at the passive voice.

‘Everyone loves by zombies’, America’s Got Talent, is recognisably not English. ‘America’s Got Talent is loved by zombies’ is not only a grammatical sentence, but probably true.

One of the oldest and most persistent writer’s tips is that you should prefer the active to the passive voice; or, in its extreme form, that you should always avoid the passive.

Excerpt from: Write to the Point: How to be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page by Sam Leith

💎 On exclamation marks (Like laughing at your own joke!)

‘Like laughing at your own joke,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald of this most gaudy of punctuation marks. He had a point. Overusing exclamation marks makes you sound hectoring and overexcited. That idea of laughing at your own joke – of paying yourself a compliment – has been there from the beginning. When they arrived in the language in the fourteenth century, David Crystal tells us, they were called the ‘point of admiration’ – and later, the ‘admirative point’ and the ‘wonderer’. It’s since Dr Johnson that we’ve had ‘exclamation’ – shifting the emphasis from admiration to the expression of strong feeling.

Excerpt from: Write to the Point: How to be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page by Sam Leith

💎 Information isn’t interpreted neutrally, but in line with our existing opinions

The Power of Confirmation

Three scientists, Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper, recruited forty-eight American undergraduates who either strongly supported the death penalty or strongly opposed it. They presented them with two scientific studies; one offered evidence regarding the effectiveness of capital punishment, and the other data showed its ineffectiveness. In reality, the studies had been fabricated. Lord, Ross, and Lepper had made them up, but the students did not know that. Did the students find the studies convincing? Did they believe that the data provided good evidence that should alter their minds? They did!

But only when the study reinforced their original view. Those students who strongly supported capital punishment thought the study that demonstrated its effectiveness was well conducted. At the same time, they argued that the other study was poorly executed and not compelling. Those who were originally against capital punishment assessed the studies the other way around. As a result, believers in the death penalty left the lab supporting capital punishment with more passion than ever, while those in opposition to it ended up opposing capital punishment with more zest than before.

Excerpt from: The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others by Tali Sharot

💎 On the creative benefits of thinking like a child

Einstein was a great fan of this technique. He said that: “To stimulate creativity, one muse develops the childlike inclination for play.” Researchers at the North Dakota State University agree. They conducted an experiment where they asked 76 undergraduates what they would do if college were cancelled for the day. The interesting bit was that half of them were encouraged to think as if they were seven years old. These students were found to give much more creative responses than the control group.

Excerpt from: Go Luck Yourself: 40 ways to stack the odds in your brand’s favour by Andy Nairn