With the next person who uses a certain prefix, I’ll pre-lose the will to live.

What is this fixation with pre?

It’s as if no one wants to commit to doing anything right now.

Everything’s in limbo, in the ‘before’ stage.

With invitations to pre-book, pre-register, and pre-order, rife in marketing.

Why not just ask me if I want to book, register, or order?

It means the same thing, but is sure of itself, and isn’t so irritating.

Recently, a company asked me if I’d like their delivery driver to give me a ‘pre-call’ when he would be thirty minutes away from my home.

‘No’, I replied. ‘A call will do fine’.

Oh well.

Time to pre-post this.

Are you busy today? Or are you simply being a busy idiot?

It’s not often I use a Gordon Ramsay expression to get a point across. Expletives just aren’t my style. However, during a recent Kitchen Nightmares USA, Gordon sat yet another wretched restaurateur down, and spooned out a label I’d never heard before.

Instead of calling the restaurateur a f*****g t**t as I was expecting him to, he called him… wait for it, a busy idiot. At last, a truism about our often pointlessly over-worked lives, had a name, and a hilarious one at that.

Now this restaurateur was indeed a busy man. Busy to the point of obsession. Moreover, he viewed his busy-ness as fundamental to the success of the business. Gordon, on the other hand, correctly identified his behaviour as busy idiocy, and the precise reason why the business was failing.

The fact is, the personality of the business leader can make or break the business. Unlike most employees, the top guy’s day-to-day remit is often the least clear. As a Mac operator, what will you do today? Operate the Mac, of course. And you, the CEO? What will you do? Er, stay busy, and keep everyone else busy, somehow.

What about you? Do you work in a busy environment, and achieve lots? Or is that environment one of busy idiocy, where you’re constantly wasting time and effort jumping through hoops, working on nonsensical briefs, placating egos, and achieving very little (at least not of the quality you’d like to, and are capable of).

To help you determine whether your professional environment is busy, or just busy idiocy, here’s a list of scenarios from both sides of the coin. It’s compiled with copywriters and advertising in mind, but could just as well apply to any profession:

• Are you clear about what you’ve been asked to write? (Busy.)
• Are you wondering what on earth you’ve been asked to write? (Busy idiocy.)
• Do you generally agree a realistic deadline for delivery of your work? (Busy.)
• Are you always told that the deadline is ‘screaming’? (Busy idiocy.)
• Do you generally leave work by around 6pm? (Busy.)
• Are you placed under pressure to work on into the night? (Busy idiocy.)
• Do you feel a sense of intelligent collaboration with your account team? (Busy.)
• Are you mostly second-guessing what your account team wants? (Busy idiocy.)
• Does the brief stay the same until the conclusion of the project? (Busy.)
• Does the brief keep changing as new information surfaces. (Busy idiocy.)
• Are you using solid facts and insights to generate creative work? (Busy.)
• Are you using creative work to decide what you’re trying to say? (Busy idiocy.)
• Is the client clear about the benefits of their product? (Busy.)
• Does the client expect you to tell them the product benefits? (Busy idiocy.)

I’ve no figures to prove it, but busy idiocy must be burning up millions of unnecessarily worked hours each year.

If it led to excellent creative work, it would be worth every one of them. But it does the opposite. Great creative is the pinnacle of clear, simple, incisive thinking which goes before it. When that thinking is sullied by muddle, egos, exhaustion and fog, also known as busy idiocy, what comes out the other end is often sullied, egotistical, exhausted and foggy, too.

Not the copywriter, not the art director, not the creative director, not the account team, not the planner, not the client. How many highly qualified advertising professionals does it take to spot an apostrophe clanger?

Too many, it seems. However, many passers-by will notice and, rightly or wrongly, consign the brand to second-rate.

In my opinion, rightly.

Unless your brand is perfect, flaunt the imperfection.

A few months ago, I developed an advertising idea for VisitScotland.

Specifically, it was aimed at persuading people to visit the Scottish highlands, where apart from an annual plague of midges, there is perhaps only one conceivable negative which might put many people off visiting: no, or at best, very patchy, mobile voice and Wi-Fi coverage.

My work celebrated this negative, turning it on its head, so it became a compelling reason to visit the highlands, using the endline Get away from all IT. One of the posters showed an idyllic mountain scene, with the headline No mobile, no Wi-Fi, no worries. Sponsorship of Virgin Trains’ quiet carriage on the West Coast Main Line, was another idea.

VisitScotland took the trouble to review the work, and write back with their thoughts, for which I am most grateful. Although they could see its merits, the marketing team found the idea too narrow for Scotland as a brand, which as well as the highlands, also offers richly cultural cities like Edinburgh, and Glasgow, where mobile coverage isn’t a factor.

If I was to argue the toss, I would say that the highlands, and Scotland’s other attractions such as its major cities, shouldn’t be advertised in the same breath as each other. Clinically speaking, they are two completely different products, and the reasons you might have for visiting one, are the polar opposites of those you might have for visiting the other. You’ll never arrive at a proposition which does both justice, so you are forced to pull your message back, until you have a statement which only tenuously applies to both entities.

I write this post from the village of Lower Heyford, in Oxfordshire. Like the Scottish highlands, it’s idyllic, and remote. More to the point, it is also a mobile blackspot. However, I didn’t come here to test my Scottish highlands proposition. I’m not here solely to relax. Thankfully, the cottage in which I’m staying has the assurance of a high speed landline broadband connection. Or, it did, until it stopped working on day-two. 

Suddenly, I am a reluctant member of my own target audience. One who had assumed he could have the best of the natural, and technological worlds, but ended up with only the former. This, you might imagine, would peeve me sufficiently to consign Get away from all IT to the bin. After all, who, these days, would purposefully go somewhere where they completely lose touch with their ‘online life’?  

Well, if you want to experience the Scottish highlands, you’ve no choice. You’re going to have to let go of all things digital and mobile for those one or two weeks away, so you may as well embrace it.

It’s this truth, the ingredient in all the most powerful propositions, which strengthens my belief that Get away from all IT is the right strategy for the Scottish highlands. Not to mention the Lake District, Cornwall, South Wales…

The ‘world’s greatest newspaper’ says thank you, goodbye, and sorry.

Yesterday, I bought my first, and by definition, last, News of The World. Perhaps you bought a copy too.

For me, it didn’t quite compare to the taboo of buying a second hand record by Gary Glitter (another of our nation’s fallen favourites). Nevertheless, it was a purchase I had to rationalise. Standing in the queue at my local Tesco Metro, I felt self-conscious, as if it were a copy of Razzle, rather than simply a newspaper, I was sneaking to the till.

I had come up with various reasons to part with my pound. My twelve-year-old son’s fledgling interest in journalism. The posterity of it being the last edition. Pure voyeurism. Proceeds to charity. A tinge of melancholy over the loss of a brand which, even if I didn’t subscribe to it, I accept was, in News of The World’s own words, ‘as central to Sunday as a roast dinner’.

I was also interested to witness the News of The World journalists’ own rationalisations on their paper’s demise.

At the top of the front page, they start with a USP of which Rosser Reeves would have been proud: ‘The world’s greatest newspaper’. Only ironic that it first appears on the publication’s last day of life.

From there on, the message is predictably trident-shaped.

The first prong jabs at some impressive history. The fact that the first edition reviewed a fresh new novel called A Christmas Carol, for example.

History lesson over (save the 48-page souvenir pullout), the second prong of rationalisation starts, aggressively based upon the News of The World’s achievements. How the paper, largely through the efforts of its investigations editor Mazher Mahmood (aka the Fake Sheik) ‘saved children from paedos and nailed 250 evil crooks’. [Update 02/08/11: we recently learned that the News of The World cruelly hacked into the phone of Sara Payne, whose daughter met her fate at the hands of one such paedo]

All seems plausible, and encapsulates the popular image of the News of The World, until the third prong: the rhetorical explanations for the mess in which they got themselves, of which we are all well versed.

Here, the message is of exoneration and blame.

Doubtless itching to write ‘it weren’t us, guv, honest’, the anonymous editorial enlightens us that ‘for a period of a few years up to 2006 some who worked for us, or in our name, fell shamefully short of those [high] standards’.

Fraser Nelson compounds this. The newspaper, he tells us, ’made a grave mistake, employing private investigators who used deplorable methods’.

‘Try to remember us with affection’, Carole Malone pleads, but not before tarring others as ‘the “dirty” journalists’ who were ‘dispensed with a long time ago’.

But affectionate memory may not be so easy.

One word sums up what the News of The World was about, and that is ‘investigation’. Mazher Mahmood, ‘Award Winning Investigations Editor’. Fraser Nelson, ‘Your insider in the corridors of power’. Carole Malone ‘Tells it like it is’.

Investigation was the name of the game. Ask any detective. Investigation often means the eliciting of facts and insights, by any means possible, legal or not. 

In any case, even if you accept it was solely the mercenary rotten apples who were to blame, were the News of The World’s other covert means of gaining scoops any less reprehensible than phone hacking? We may think of the Fake Sheik as comical, but he repeatedly used trickery, in the same way the phone hackers did, to embarass his targets, and vitally, shift more papers.

There’s also the uncomfortable feeling that, although the paper titillated 7.5 million loyal readers every Sunday, its staff, previous or recent, would not have thought twice about wrecking any one of those readers’ lives, should they catch wind of a misdemeanour. The loyalty, it would seem, was only ever one-way.

It’s regrettable that a paper with such heritage is now history itself. It’s unarguable we’ve lost a notable brand, even if its demise was part was of Newscorp’s cunning masterplan.

But The World’s Greatest Newspaper?

I’m just not buying it.

A brief guide to the copy brief. (As no one seems to know what the hell it is, these days.)

Before being able to sit down and write effective copy, a copywriter requires an equally effective copy brief. In other words, they need to know, precisely:

1. Who they’re talking to.

Also known as the target audience, or as David Ogilvy more perceptively put it, ‘the woman on your right at a dinner party’. If she’s already a customer, we can use our existing relationship as the pretext to communicate. But pretext fizzles quickly. Empathy is what keeps her engaged, and that stems from insights. So, how’s she likely to be feeling about us today? Hopeful? Bemused? Disappointed? Delighted? Or couldn’t give a damn? To be able to cultivate this relationship, the copywriter needs to feel they’re one half of it.

2. What they’re saying.

This is summarised by the proposition, which for the copywriter, is the most important sentence in the brief. The proposition articulates the main point we’re making, and therefore our reason for communicating (the clarity of which will also be appreciated by our time-poor audience). Finding the right proposition can be tricky, as it forces the brief-writer to commit to an opening move on the reader, with fear of rejection naturally uppermost in their mind. So it’s worth investing time to get it right. Because when the proposition makes perfect sense, the copy which flows from it invariably does, too.

3. Which information substantiates what they’re saying.

Once the proposition is in place, the points which support it need to be assembled. If this process goes smoothly, you can be quietly confident your choice of proposition was a good one. If it proves problematic, then it’s wise to revisit the proposition, as it could well be faulty. To be of use to a copywriter, the supporting ‘copy points’ should simply consist of a bullet-pointed list of relevant facts and truths, each of which should lead logically and seamlessly into the next, until your case is made.

4. How the person to whom they’re saying it, should react.

Often, we require some kind of response from the reader, and it is essential that the brief makes it crystal clear what this should be. If we’re the gas company, and we’re writing a meter exchange letter, for example, we need to spell out the mini customer journey which will take place from the moment the customer contacts us, right up to the point when their new meter is installed. Or perhaps we simply have a legal obligation to write about a housekeeping matter, such as a change to our terms and conditions. In this instance, we should be equally clear that no action is required, and that this particular journey ends here.

Once a copywriter has all the above information (and all makes perfect sense to them), they are in a position to write cogent, compelling copy.

Here endeth the copy brief lesson.

If big companies were happier, they’d communicate better.

There’s a tell-tale sign of discontent in any big company: bogies, affixed to the washroom walls (usually those of the closet, to preserve anonymity), by aggrieved employees.

 

Things are at an even lower ebb when the maintenance team, hastily dispatched to the scene by senior management, simply paint over the by now encrusted mucuses, rather than duteously scrape them off with their shave hooks, thus affording them a kind of pure brilliant white immortality.

 

Big companies can harbour a great deal of discontent, by which I’m mainly referring to the daily dose of destructive politics and oneupmanship in evidence. And it shows in their communications, which are often dull, confused, committee-produced, and vacuous.

 

When you try to align the basic tenets of creating clear, single-minded communications to what actually happens when a big company briefs its agency, you can see where and how the flaws occur. 

 

Who do big companies think they’re talking to?

Things start promisingly, with judicious (usually overly-so) identification of the target audience.

 

What soon transpires, though, is that the actual target is less ‘man in his forties, three kids, Mondeo driver, living in Slough’, and more the company’s potentially violent marketing director. Although in self-imposed exile from the project, they will go ape shit six weeks down the line, when they see the creative work for the first time, unless it miraculously hits their hitherto unspecified nails, precisely on their heads.

 

Worse, there are three other guys before him or her, all of whom have their own pet likes and dislikes about copy, and art direction: favourite colours, forbidden words (I was once prohibited from using the word ‘family’ because it might offend), a love of interrogative headlines, a detestation of interrogative headlines, and so on.

 

So the project grinds to a start amid fear, uncertainty, and second, third and fourth guesses about what will please, or displease, who. Meanwhile, the agency, the only people who could help steer the project back on course, get sucked in to the mayhem, preferring to pander to, rather than rail against, the client powers that be.

 

What do they think they’re saying?

To a creative, the most important ten or so words on the brief encapsulate the proposition. A clear, single-minded statement of what it is they are saying to the customer. In fact, often, an incisive proposition is really all creatives need to crack a brief.

 

The problem is, large companies rarely have the slightest idea what it is they are saying. To obfuscate this embarrassing fact, they attempt to incorporate their entire product portfolio (with ‘great prices’ and ‘excellent service’ added in for good measure), resulting in a quadruple-minded proposition, circa thirty words long.  Worse still, is when creatives are confronted by two separate propositions, one to please marketing director A, the other to satisfy marketing director B.

 

Oddly enough, big companies are quite adept at calls to action. They know what they want the customer to do (usually to buy something before such and such a date, to qualify for a ‘massive 10% off’). It’s just that they lack the empathy to hold their customer’s hand through a straightforward case as to why they should do it.

 

To them, the customer should do it simply because they are being asked to. In other words, they should be obedient, which of course, most people relish not being, especially to big corporations. For the past three years, a telecoms company has been telling me to come back to them, but not giving me a good enough reason to. So I don’t.

 

My message to major businesses.

If you want to communicate more effectively, it may sound trite, but try to become a happier outfit. Stop allowing projects to deteriorate into an internal, or company-versus-agency, power struggle.

 

Create a collaborative atmosphere from the top down. No matter how senior you think you are, get involved, and stay involved with the project from the start. View even the smallest project in the same way a small business would, with no room for wastage of time or money. Believe me, big company bickering wastes both in bucket loads.

 

Ensure you and your team know your product or service with boffin-like analism. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve asked an agency to request product information from the client, only to be told ‘they don’t know, we need to tell them‘. Boffins are a joy to work with. Ignoramuses aren’t.

 

Be honest about your proposition. Isolate the simple truth, and tell it clearly to the customer. Even if the truth doesn’t reflect well on your company, being honest does. In a recent project, a client’s main objective was to bury the truth (a price rise), rather than simply communicate it.

 

And don’t get hung up on ‘tone of voice’. As I recently pleaded with a client, who was agonising over her company’s ‘language’, the language is English, and the tone is clarity.

 

Lastly, or rather firstly, before your project starts, talk to your legal department about what your work can and can’t say. If you don’t, they’ll eventually get round to telling you, and your project may bite the dust as a result. Legal departments are often viewed as a pain, but that’s only because they are invited to become involved in the project at too late a stage.   

 

Above all, when you communicate, think only about one person. Not yourself, not your company, not your boss, not your shareholder. But your customer. They’ll be happier, and I promise that when the results come in, so will you.