Copywriting doesn’t always have to be simple
As I plunge deeper into the miserable collapse of body and mind that is my 30s it appears I have become something of a ‘sneerer’.
I sneer at my mate who just bought a Topman bobble hat that makes him look like a unicorn was sick on his head. I sneer at people on the bus who smell of Nandos and existential despair. I sneer at the fact that my wife’s only source of news is the Daily Mail entertainment app.
I’m not sure how I became such an brazen arse, but it has taken hold faster than Taylor Swift grabs hold of an entirely unsuitable and uninterested boyfriend (my wife told me that would be a good metaphor but I’m not sure what I just said).
But while this is undoubtedly a character failing a man with my haircut can ill afford, I do stand by it at least in terms of my view on a certain trend in copywriting. And that trend is a ceaseless push towards the excessively simple.
Every form of writing from journalism to fiction even to personal correspondence has been accused of a ‘dumbing down’, and while that term seems a little flimsy and reactionary I can’t help but feel copywriting suffers from a not dissimilar affliction.
If I were to create a ‘word cloud’ based on the most frequent amends we are asked to make to our copy then a.) I would be the worst kind of marketing wanker and b.) I am utterly convinced that ‘make it simpler’ would be the dominant instruction (followed closely by a demand for copy to be ‘punchier’ and erroneous apostrophe inclusion).
And while I entirely appreciate that we must make our copy as clear and accessible as possible I can’t help but feel clarity has been mistaken for a kind of intellectual numbness.
There is a terror throughout marketing of alienating our potential consumers and this fear manifests itself in thinking a little too hard about questions of personal taste, overly broad socio-demographic assumptions and, of course, supposed intellectual capacity. Will people ‘get’ what we’re saying?
The only word for it is patronising. The mistake is that in marketing to the masses we aim our message not to the median or above but instead to what is rather shabbily perceived to be the most basic degree of human understanding and interest.
And that leaves copywriting as a mere practice of ‘deboning’ marketing messages, mushing them up and making them ever-so easy to swallow while rendering them hopelessly insipid.
Perhaps I am being desperately naive but I always chose to see copywriting, and marketing in general, as a medium that challenges. The history of marketing and advertising is full of examples in which the profession has demanded more, in terms of thought, feeling and action, from our audience. As copywriters should we be inspiring our audience to recognise and question more about their lives and needs or should we be slopping out only the most comforting and digestible of messages?
I’m not saying we all write our next billboard with a literary flourish or with impenetrably ornate prose, merely that the next time we are asked to simplify our copy we ask whether we are helping the message to persuade or placate our reader.
Now if you’ll excuse me, a colleague has just walked in with an especially garish jumper and I absolutely need to get my sneer on.
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Andrew Boulton is a copywriter at Together Agency. Until today he thought that Taylor Swift was a boy.