There are so many ways change and communications are related. And a corollary of this idea is that if you want to create a big communication, you need to find a really big change to champion.
That may be easy if you’re Martin Luther King, but what if you’re a mid-market soap brand?
What sort of change can you go for?
So not the kind of change that goes 10% off all cocoanut formulations this July. How about we’re going to change the relationship of women to their feelings of self-worth?
This is the task Dove sets itself and the size of its ambition for change means people always get its communication.
What are the big, ambitious, hairy goals you’ve set to change with your product good or service?
Have a look there and you’ll be on the path to some great bits of communication.
Tim Riley was one of people who was kind enough to give me some coaching and critiques when I was trying to land my first job in advertising.
Years later he also sat down with me over a cup of tea at the Landmark hotel to help me sort out the content and aims of the Copycourse.
You might know his work from, amongst other things, the most clicked on Sainsbury’s ad for 2014, based on the true story of when the Germans and the British started playing football on Christmas day, from behind the trenches. See above.
He also penned the following words of advice on writing copy (below). Almost two decades old, and coming from a pre-digital age, it still stands up for its no-nonsense tonality, and humility.
“I have a confession to make, and it’s an unusual one for a copywriter. I don’t like writing copy. This isn’t as much of a problem as you might think, though. Because the truth is, nobody likes reading copy either.
People buy magazines to read the articles, not the ads. You’re lucky if people notice your work at all. So I always try to make the headlines tell as much of the story as possible. (Consequently, I end up with some very long headlines.)
Occasionally though, there’ll be ads where writing detailed copy is unavoidable. What do you do then? You get somebody to help you. When I was a junior at BMP, there were three very good writers, Alan Tilby, Dave Watkinson and Alan Curson, who were patient enough to read through my copy and suggest improvements.
Never was this more eloquently done than when Al Tilby looked at what I’d written, carefully tore it in half, then in half again, and let the pieces gently flutter into his wastepaper bin. ‘You can do better than this,’ he said. I did. The other way I learnt was by reading old ads, over and over again.
One I always admired was the Health Education poster: ‘This is what happens when a fly lands on your food.’ I liked the way the writers, Charles Saatchi and Michael Coughlan, made the story so compelling with such a deadpan, factual style.
In 73 words of copy they use only one adjective. (And the one they do use, ‘runny’, is a killer.)
Old ads aren’t the only things you can read for inspiration. Given a poster to do about Michael Jordan, Andy McKay and I found an article about him in an old copy of American Esquire. At one point, the author described Jordan’s game as ‘an ongoing dialectic with Isaac Newton’.
Once we’d looked up ‘dialectic’ in the dictionary, it was a short step to ‘Michael Jordan 1 Isaac Newton 0’. But perhaps the best advice on actually writing copy comes from an ad. It was written for VW in 1962 by, I think, John Withers. Underneath the headline, ‘How to do a Volkswagen ad’, the copy concludes: Don’t exaggerate.
Call a spade a spade. And a suspension a suspension. Not something like ‘orbital cushioning’. Talk to the reader, don’t shout. He can hear you. Especially if you talk sense. Pencil sharp? You’re on your own.”
Creativity often starts with asking what’s so obvious about something you’ve stopped noticing it. Just getting clear about the bleeding obvious is an amazingly refreshing exercise.
Here’s Michael McIntyre on the obvious things in the world, looking at things like eye glasses with fresh un american eyes. Enjoy.
One of the recurrent issues when writing for corporations is the avoidance of anything that might look like a problem. Anything “negative” frequently provokes a squeamish response from the writing team who are sometimes programmed to say only “positive” things. Yet without the negative there is no positive, it’s all a slushy mush. And you’re never going to move or inspire anyone with mush.
But pain is a flip side of pleasure, and communicators need to work with both.
In a musical parallel, J.S Bach’s aim in his church scores was to move and inspire. So he gives us the most searingly beautiful aria from the St John Passion, where dissonant chords, tucked away in the music for fleeting moments, provoke subliminal anxiety that gets resolved later on. This becomes the motor of inspiration.
Howard Goodall’s brilliant analysis of Bach’s music could equally be applied to dealing with a piece of writing. It is especially true in writing for professional services that there are nearly always problems or a lingering pain that triggered the need for some kind of solution. Problems needs to be there, not in your face, but definitely in there, and woven in. Without problems, there’s no need for anyone to buy a product that solves a problem. Without the pain, or passion, (which means pain), there can be no inspiration.
And if you’ve never heard “Zerfliesse miene Hertz” before, you’re in for a treat.
Darwin’s vision of man and ape as separated only by a few millennia meant that essentially we were on the same footing as animals. This implicity challenged relationships such as father son and holy spirit. It’s hard to be a creative thinker without upsetting people because when you spot new symmetries you disturb existing ones.
Sex is can be done without lots of dialogue, why shouldn’t an ad work that way too?
One of the smart things about this spot is that it communicates the joy of sex with a condom rather than the dangers without one. By being positive it’s more memorable. And because most of us would rather see bunnies than genitalia in an ad, it’s hugely enjoyable to watch.
