D&AD

Copywriting Focus: Bittersweet – A Writer’s Life by Jon Sayers!

In the last part of our current series focusing on copywriting, Jon Sayers gives us an insight into working as a copywriter in advertising. It’s a long one so sit back. make a cup of tea and enjoy! Jon has kindly offered a prize (details at the end) for the best comments so please make your own contribution.

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Blog Chapter One.  The Diary

Tuesday, 1^st June. I receive an email from someone called Harriet McDougall at D&AD asking me to write ‘a blog piece of 500 words or so’ that could ‘give a graduate audience an insight into working as a copywriter’.  Flattered, I start thinking about which aspects of copywriting I might focus on.  My inbox fills up with other emails.  I move house.  I go on holiday.  I forget all about Harriet’s request.

Monday, 12^th July. A polite nudge from Harriet: ‘I was wondering whether you’d had a chance to think about the email I sent…?’ I call her up, apologising profusely.  I promise I will send her something in early August.

Tuesday 13^th July. I look at Harriet’s first email again.  More closely.  Harriet is asking a lot of questions: Just what does a good writer do?  What is so important about the role?  Do you need to work in a team?  How do you respond to arguments in the press that there’s a lack of good copywriters, and that writers are under-appreciated?  Do people understand what it is you do? And how – considering all of the other writing you do – did you begin writing for advertising?  Hmm, lot of ground to cover, I think.  My eyes glaze over.  I am all a-blog.  I decide to have a crack at it when I am on holiday in Cornwall.

Tuesday 27^th July. A miserable day in Crackington Haven.  Rain streaming down the latticed windows of our rented cottage.  I lift out my laptop, take a quick refresher glance over Harriet’s questions and launch into a rather grand-sounding piece about the inherent qualities and native aptitudes that are the prerequisites of a good copywriter.

Wednesday 28^th July. I read over what I wrote yesterday.  It’s awful.  I am so cringingly embarrassed and irritated by it that I no longer want to know myself.  I wonder whether I might be able to quietly drop myself without myself noticing.  I will have to start again.

Monday 2^nd August. Back home, I read over Harriet’s questions for the umpteenth time.  And now I find it is the last question that really captures my imagination.  I start writing a piece about how I got into advertising.  I am flying.  I am having fun.  The words are cascading onto the page.

Tuesday 3^rd – Thursday 5^th August. I go back to my piece several times and edit it and polish it.  I am extremely pleased with it.  It reads like the opening lines of an autobiography – the humble beginnings of a hugely important person.  There is only one problem. I am not a hugely important person.   I am not even a vaguely important person.  So who the hell is going to want to read it?  And what earthly use will it be to them if they do?

Tuesday 10^th August. The guilt is piling up.  What is the sentence I wonder for non-delivery of an article on copywriting to D&AD?  Banishment from Soho House and the Hospital Club?  Hmmm… reckon I could live with that.  But an eternal sense of shame at not sharing my experience with a new generation of young creatives?  That’s something I’d rather live without.  I ring D&AD to apologise to Harriet and beg for a little more time.  Accidentally on purpose I ring at lunchtime, so I can leave a message for her rather than having to confront her direct.  I go back to Harriet’s questions and puzzle over them one more time.

Thursday 12^th August.  13.00.32 BST. An email from Harriet:

Hi Jon,

Sorry I missed your call on Tuesday.  Ant passed your message along, but I was just hoping to catch up.  My internship is ending tomorrow (!) and it would be terrific to see your article before I leave D&AD.

I hope you’re well, and to chat with you again soon.

Best,

Harriet

Aaargh!  OMG etc etc.  There’s nothing for it.  I will have to produce something.  Anything.  Today.  Right now.  This minute.  In the shower, at last, I have an Idea.  ‘I know,’ I think, as the needles of hot water and Harriet’s deadline finally stimulate my brain into some sort of action, ‘I will imagine Harriet is interviewing me, Parkinson-style, on a chat show.  I will swivel around in a leather armchair, and gaze with rapt concentration into the middle distance as I try to formulate serious answers to the questions she will put to me, one by one…’

Blog Part Two……

Copywriting Focus: Bittersweet – A Writer’s Life by Jon Sayers (2)

This is the second part in the series of five titled Bittersweet – A Writer’s Life by Jon Sayers on working as a copywriter.

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Blog Chapter Two.  In the Green Room.

Just before my interview begins, while I am waiting in the green room, now that the wardrobe lady has straightened my tie, and the make-up lady has used a truckload of powder to fill in the lines, and cover up all the spots and blemishes, I reflect that there are maybe some useful insights to be gleaned from my ‘guilt-edged’ diary.  It goes some way to demonstrating a few different aspects of a copywriter’s everyday life: the pressure of having to write to order, the unfailing effectiveness of a deadline in producing a concept, the guilt, the panic. The procrastination.  The perseverance.  Not forgetting the alliteration.  Or the ability to throw away a whole day’s work without a backward glance.  And, of course, the need for a single-minded idea.

Part of my problem, I now see, was the number and wide-ranging nature of Harriet’s questions.  In any piece of communication, an ad, an article, a novel, I believe you need one overall theme.  I was lost without the ‘single most important thought’ I am used to getting on an advertising brief: the proposition that has been painstakingly produced by the client, the account director, and the planner (a good copywriter is always at least one third planner, by the way).  An overarching concept was required that would create one coherent piece of copy.  It’s like the old advertising analogy about throwing tennis balls.  Chuck someone one tennis ball and there’s every chance they’ll catch it.  Throw them two, three, or four all at once, and they won’t catch a single one.

And so, on to Part 3

Copywriting Focus: Bittersweet – A Writer’s Life by Jon Sayers (3)

This is the third part in a series of five titled Bittersweet – A Writer’s Life by Jon Sayers on working as a copywriter.

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Blog Chapter Three.  The Interview.

Harriet: So, Jon, just what does a good writer do?

Jon: (gazing intently into the middle distance and swivelling a little on squishy leather chair)  A good writer listens carefully.  Interrogates the brief.  Trawls it for nuggets of information, single words or phrases that can translate into really big, compelling, and immediate ideas.  A good writer will ask questions of anyone and everything – the account man, the client, his own imagination, the thousand-page-long consumer research document, Google, the view from the window, his own dirty fingernails, the family dog.  He will follow his nose, using a combination of instinct, imagination and intellect.  However, he will apply these tools consecutively – not concurrently.  Judging your work as you go along, as has often been said, is like driving with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake.  A good writer generates an abundance of ideas, before rigorously weighing them against the brief and then throwing most – or all – of them away.

Harriet: So… what is so important about the role?

Jon: As the writer, the buck really stops with you.  If there’s any flaw in the product, or its positioning, or the proposition, the writer is going to find it out, because you’re the one who has to write all the detail.  You’re the one who has to make the arguments that are going clinch the sale to the customer.  And while you are using words to persuade that imaginary person, you will see their scepticism in your mind’s eye and hear their objections in your mind’s… ear (!)  And you will have to find ways to convince them that, in spite of their doubts, they really want to buy the product or service you are selling, they really want to give to your charity, or they really do want to change their own behaviour.  A good piece of advertising copy appears to be a monologue, but actually it’s a dialogue with all the customer’s lines unspoken.

Harriet: Do you need to work in a team?

Jon: As a copywriter you are always working in a team.  It’s just a question of who your team mates are.  Creatively, I have traditionally flown solo through most of my career, experiencing only relatively brief periods when I was formally paired with an art director.  I have always, of course, teamed up with art directors as I’ve needed to.  And it’s usually very fruitful creatively, and enjoyable as well as productive.  But it’s not the only way.  It’s perfectly possible to generate creative ideas alone, and also to work on ideas with your account team, planners and, indeed, your client – even if you don’t bring them in on the earliest stages of your thinking.  An agency creative department often behaves as if it has a monopoly on creativity, and of course, the account management function often plays up to that idea, but every smart person in an agency knows that isn’t really so.  Some of the best headline writers in the business are account directors and planners.

Of course, all this depends to an extent on the culture of your agency and the kind of accounts you’re working on, but I guess I’m saying that in an ideal world you can modulate the degree to which you work in a team – and be selective as to who your team mates are and at what stages of the project you work with them.

Harriet: How do you respond to arguments in the press that there’s a lack of good copywriters, and that writers are under-appreciated?

Jon: With great delight!  If there’s a lack of good copywriters, I’m never going to be short of a job – and I will be paid well for my scarcity value!  Seriously, though, I think good writers are appreciated for just that reason.  There simply aren’t that many who can get a good intellectual grasp of the problem (or should I say ‘opportunity’?) as well as generating good ideas, and then developing well-structured arguments through body copy.  It is surprising to me how many copywriters can’t develop and sustain a logical argument over even half a dozen sentences.  There are many who have questionable ideas of grammar and punctuation, too.  But I have been surprised about this since I started out in 1984, so I don’t really know whether copywriting is a dying art or if that’s just one of those soapbox themes that comes up from time to time like ‘the youth of today’ having no manners or nobody being able to wait and save up for anything.  Get your hair cut.  etc etc.  In my experience, if you’re good at your craft as a copywriter – and that also means being able to adapt it deftly to different media, from poster and press to radio, TV and digital – you will get huge appreciation for it.

Harriet: Do people understand what it is you do?

Jon: People within the business do understand, I think.  You can get some clients who think they know better, but – unlike art direction – professional copywriting is a tricky thing to assess.  Everyone can write, after all – while they usually recognise art direction and design as specialist skills that demand specific aptitudes and training.  Clients will express an opinion about a piece of design or art direction, but they won’t usually try and redesign it themselves.  That’s not always so with copywriting.  Anyone who works in any kind of office has to do some writing every day, and you’ll sometimes get clients who want to have a crack at copywriting themselves.  But usually this goes away after you’ve won their trust.  They’re too busy doing their own job, and once they see what you can do, and see the kind of response they’re getting to the ads you’ve written – not just from their target audience, but also from their own colleagues – they’re happy to hand over.

Outside the business, of course, it’s another matter.  People often think that ‘copywriting’ is something to do with legal ‘copyright’ and assume you work in the Patent Office!  Then, when you explain your job to them, they will often say something like, ‘So, do you spend your whole day looking out of the window, then?’  Which is actually not that far from the truth!  The next question is usually accompanied by a worried expression: ‘What happens if you just don’t get any ideas?’  But the thing is, copywriters are in the job because they have the kind of mind that does generate a lot of ideas quite easily.  If you don’t have that kind of mind – and thankfully for copywriters most people don’t! – I could see it would be a worry.  But then I dare say I’d be worried if I had to answer the demands of their jobs.  Especially if it involved having a sense of direction, or being more than basically numerate!  The most annoying response you get when you tell people you’re a copywriter is ‘I’ve had this great idea for a slogan for British Airways/Budweiser/Coca-Cola, but I don’t want to send it to them in case they steal it from me.  What should I do with it?’  I always make every effort to answer politely.

Harriet: And how – considering all of the other writing you do – did you begin writing for advertising?

Oh, dear.  I see, after all, I have failed.  A quick scroll up before I even begin to answer that question tells me I have overwritten this blog by about half a mile.  A good writer can write to length.  Harriet originally asked me for ‘500 words or so’.  Can the ‘or so’ ever represent more than 50% of the main figure?  Doubtful.  But I do know it can’t be more than 300%!  I know.  I will send her the opening chapter of my Autobiography-Of-A-Nobody, ‘How I Got Into Advertising’, as an alternative.  It’s only 572 words.  And, who knows, she might prefer it…?

Blog Part 4: The Autobiography

Copywriting Focus: Bittersweet – A Writer’s Life by Jon Sayers (4)

This is the fourth part in a series of five titled Bittersweet – A Writer’s Life by Jon Sayers on working as a copywriter.

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Blog Chapter Four.  The Autobiography.

June 1984.  I am fresh out of drama school.  And clean out of work.  I know I can’t get an acting job without an equity card.  And I can’t get an equity card without an acting job.  (Yes, you work it out…)  My brother, who left university a year ago, has recently started working in advertising.  He is making commercials, cool new mates, and by all accounts – mostly his own – a small fortune.  (Well, it is the mid-eighties.)

My girlfriend is applying to JWT for a job as an account executive.  ‘Here, you can have this’ she says, handing me something called a copy test.  It has ten questions in it, most of which I will find myself remembering years and decades later:  ‘Write a press ad for the potato as if it were a brand new product.’  ‘Write the first two-hundred words of a Mills & Boon romantic novel and make sure they make us want to read the rest.’ ‘Dame Edna Everage and Arthur Scargill [the miners’ leader] are stuck in a lift.  Write their conversation.’ Oh, yes, someone has had a lot of fun putting this together.  And now, in spite of myself, I find my imagination picking up where they left off.  But oh no, I’m going to be an actor, aren’t I?  I’m going to inherit the mantle of Olivier, become the saviour of Shakespearean acting in the closing decades of the twentieth century, a smooth-voiced smirker in a tux, jabbing the air with my best actor trophy to emphasise my thanks to my leading lady, my director, my producer and everyone else who knows me.  I take the copy test home, and think about it.  A  lot.  And dream about it.  And put it in a drawer.  And try to forget about it.  And carry on writing to repertory companies, begging for an equity card that is beginning to seem as rare as one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets.  I scan the small ads in The Stage for profit-share plays I might audition for.  I sing and dance and act for stony-faced panels of auditioners.  I play the silhouette and back of Hugh Hefner in a TV commercial for The Sunday Times.

Meanwhile, a family connection, who is Head of TV in an advertising agency, very kindly arranges for me to make a voice tape.  ‘Out-of-work actors need to make radio and TV commercials to survive,’ he says.  He picks me up in his big, swish car and drives me into the heart (the groin?) of Soho.  He’s got hold of four TV and radio scripts for me to record.  In the studio, he chuckles as he reads through the sheaf of scripts in his hand before I go through to the other side of the glass to record them.  ‘These guys have more fun and make more money than anyone else in the business,’ he says.  He is referring to advertising copywriters.  Afterwards, he takes me to lunch in an Italian restaurant.  Old-school, elderly waiters in white jackets dip and glide around us as if moving to the music of silent violins. My host invites me to join him in an aperitif I have never heard of, Punt e Mes.  As I sip the dark brown liquid, served with its traditional slice of orange, and experience its bittersweet flavours spreading on my tongue, I think that perhaps I will complete that copy test after all.

To be continued….

and so onto Part 5.

Copywriting Focus: Bittersweet – A Writer’s Life by Jon Sayers (5)

This is the final part in a series of five titled Bittersweet – A Writer’s Life by Jon Sayers on working as a copywriter.

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Blog Chapter Five.  The Interview II (The Plug).

No interview would be complete without the book plug.  One of the other kinds of writing I do outside advertising is writing children’s books, and the first of these has just been published.  My friend Paul Middlewick, advertising art director, designer and illustrator, saw the shape of an elephant on the London Underground map when he was in his teens.  People often ask what he was ‘on’ when he saw it.  He does like a glass of red wine, does our Paul, but the simple answer is he was ‘on’ the tube.  And he was bored.  So he saw an elephant, and went home and traced it, and then over the years, he found over thirty more animals, and now he and I have just produced our first book, ‘Lost Property’.  You can get a glimpse of it (and the animals) on our website: www.animalsontheunderground.com

It’s a book that appeals not only to children, but to advertising creatives, too.  The animals have even featured in advertising campaigns – to promote the work of IFAW, and London Zoo.

We have printed off a first limited edition of 1,000 and in shameless imitation of another blogger on this site (a good copywriter is a good thief), I am giving away two signed copies – to the senders of the best responses to this blog.

Jon Sayers, formerly a Senior Copywriter and Creative Director at Publicis, is now an independent writer, teacher, radio producer and voice artist.

If you’d like to read the other posts in this series you can also read Simon Veksner, John Simmons and Orlando Warner’s take on working as a copywriter.

Fanny Khoo: For Love or Nothing

We all have to start somewhere, and everybody’s journey up the design industry career ladder is different. However, there is one vital ingredient in the career of the successful designer: Love for what you do.

Here, Fanny Khoo of Me and Mister Jones recalls her own beginnings, and discusses the twists and turns in the love story between the designer and their work.

I remember how I got involved with design. It started with a capital A – Art. At that time, more than a decade ago, Art was still for the foolish or the rich who supposedly could afford to ‘play’ around with this medium, until something better comes along.

read more…

Copywriting Focus: Come On In, the Waters Warm by John Simmons

What do you really know about Copywriting? Over the next couple of weeks we at D&AD will be featuring articles by the best in the business, keen to share the insider knowledge on this under-valued discipline.

This week, John Simmons shares his love of word-play, and offers free copies of two of his books: 26 Ways of Looking at a Blackberry and The Invisible Grail to the best responses.

read more…

Just Like Selling Ice to the Eskimos… rehabstudio on Getting Your Foot in the Door

It’s that time of year again. The hats have been flung, the diplomas collected, and you can barely hear for the sound of several thousand creative hearts beating up a nervous cacophany… the new wave of graduates is here.

Competition for work is hotter than ever, and experience is everything. But how to get your foot in the door? Tim Rodgers- founding partner of rehabstudio has some words of wisdom to set you on your way…

We are an agency of around 25 people, so the people we bring in need to be fairly awesome and have lots of super skills.

Every day we get a bunch of portfolios and CVs into the studio. Some of them for jobs we’ve listed; others looking for the chance to come and do a show and tell or asking for a work placement. The majority of these don’t get through, including many of the talented ones – so we’ve decided to give you guys some pointers on how to get noticed… read more…

Copywriting Focus: The Write Path by Simon Veksner

What do you really know about Copywriting? Over the next couple of weeks we at D&AD will be featuring articles by the best in the business, keen to share the insider knowledge on this under-valued discipline. This week, Simon Veksner of BBH talks about the death of the traditional copywriter…

Interested in becoming a Copywriter?

Well, you’re too late. The job no longer exists.

The Advertising Copywriter, defined as a person with a degree in English Literature who smokes a pipe, wears a tweed jacket, and is employed by an advertising agency to pen long-copy ads for Hartington’s Marmalade while secretly working on his novel, is extinct.

But actually, that’s a good thing. Because the work we do now is much more exciting. read more…

D&AD’s Rough Guide to Industry

Download D&AD’s ROUGH GUIDE TO INDUSTRY

At D&AD, we like to see that the creativity coming out of the art schools and universities has the chance and opportunity to shine.  We link industry with
education, helping industry find talent and
recognising the best talent.

If you’re looking to get into the creative industries, you’ll need to know who’s out there. This ‘Rough Guide’ to the industry will help you get started.

We quizzed some of the biggest industry names about the inner-workings of their work-places, finding out their company’s ambitions, how many employees there are, and what they look for in a potential employee. Chock full of advice, we want to help you to get a sense of the great organisations and personalities in this industry- as well as finding out where they like to hang out!