In my experience, very few people grow up wanting to be copywriters.  They are normally in other professions and for whatever reason they are exposed to an opportunity to change their careers and become copywriters.

I have been fortunate enough to work with an ex-Glasgow welder and ex-jackaroo, a potential MI5 agent, a waiter and an RAF pilot, and they have all been exceptional and successful copywriters.  I think one reason why people drifted into becoming copywriters is because, before now, there was very little written on the copywriting process.

So it was quite difficult to choose a career doing something that very little was known about.

Most books tend to celebrate the results of great copywriting, i.e. award annuals etc.

But there are very few books, if any, apart from this one, that accurately portrays the process of arriving at a solution to a brief.

Nick and his students take us on a journey that occurs every day in advertising agencies all over the world.

Nick does sound like he absolutely loves his work and why wouldn’t he, there is no greater feeling as a creative director than seeing a great idea emerge from a creative team and knowing you have played a part in guiding the team to that solution.

Enjoying the copywriting process is vital.  One of the agency’s I worked for as creative director had a simple work ethic “Do Great Ads and Have a Laugh”, and we did.

About the only thing this book can’t teach you about copywriting is imagination.  That is totally unique to you.

You can learn the craft of painting, the choice of brushes, mixing paint, techniques, materials, colour etcetera, but that doesn’t make you a great painter. What you do with those skills is what makes you a great painter.

Copywriting is no different.

By the time you get to the end of this book, you will be equipped with all the skills, disciplines and knowledge that are necessary if you want to become a successful copywriter.  How successful is up to you.

I have no doubt that this book will be responsible for encouraging and discovering a whole new generation of talented copywriters.

I would like to congratulate Nick for presenting the art of copywriting in such an accurate, simple, entertaining and powerful way.

The brief Nick gave himself for writing this book would have been extremely difficult.

But like all good copywriters, he answered the brief perfectly, with outstanding results.

Don’t just read this book, absorb it, and most importantly, take advantage of it.

Ron Mather
Creative Director

NDT: The hardest part of writing body copy, or any other writing, is coming up with a compelling opening sentence. The best stories hook you in with their introduction. With The Anatomy of Body Copy as our guide, the difficulty should be significantly lessened. What does it say our introductory copy has to do?

STUDENT: Expand on the headline promise and prove it right.

NDT: The introduction can be as short as one sentence and as long as three of four paragraphs. Copy has to be as long as it needs to be. There are no rules to copy length (besides the media space). If it’s good copy, the target audience will read it no matter how long or short it is. To quote Bill Bernbach:

It’s not how short you make it: it’s how you make it short. 5

Another thing, can you see why we need the headline before any body copy is written?

STUDENT: The headline dictates the theme of the copy.

NDT: And the direction. And the tone. And the style. And all those “ands” are repeated for added emphasis. So let’s write the first sentence.

STUDENT: APPLY THE HANDS-ON APPROACH TO FAIR TRADE.

When you buy at Oxfam you help the Bangkok Women’s Cooperative have a better life.

NDT: We’ve got to start somewhere; so don’t be shy to write. We’re not going to come up with the great opening line the first time. The more you write, the more likely you will come up with a compelling line. What’s right about …

When you buy at Oxfam you help the Bangkok Women’s Cooperative have a better life,

… is that it does expand on the headline. What’s not right about it?    more

NDT: Deconstructing the creative product can give new insights and understanding of the way the copywriter arrives at decisions. Perhaps my favourite book on the subject is The Copy Book 3, a collection of very edifying essays by thirty-two of the world’s best copywriters on how they write their copy. But the one essay that went beyond educational to enlightening, was penned by Richard Forster 4 who takes the reader along the same line of thought he travelled to write an olives ad for Sainsbury’s.

Our case study is a twenty-page brochure that I wrote for Triptych apartments. And I want you to uncover the principles behind the creative decisions taken along the way.

STUDENT: What method do we use?

NDT: If you cast your mind back to Copywriting for Print, you’ll remember that it’s important to ask the right questions. Because today we’re going to reverse roles: you will be the inquisitors and I will have to rationalise the work in question.

You’ve all got your copy of the Triptych brochure in front of you, now take it from the very beginning.

STUDENT: What was the client objective?

NDT: To position Triptych as a whole new way of living.

STUDENT: What were the insights that led you to Redefining The Art of Living as the communication strategy?

NDT: In the interviews with the client, it was clear just how passionate he was about the merging of architecture with art, community-centred spaces and sustainable technologies. He was also very proud of the fact that he was able to put together a once in a lifetime team of designers that included a world-renowned artist, a celebrity landscape designer and some other major players in the architectural and interior design worlds. I realised I was dealing with a stakeholder who knew what he wanted. What I needed to do was tap into his energy and express his passion and vision as if written by his own hand.

STUDENT: Is that what you mean when you say copywriting is like method acting?    more

NDT: Today, we’re going to write a sound byte of such resonance that we not only capture but also hold the imagination of our listeners for the full 60 seconds.

CLASS: MURMURS

NDT: I want you to bring the house down in the theatre of the mind.

STUDENT: What’s theatre of the mind?

NDT: The imagination.

STUDENT: Theirs or ours?

NDT: It starts in yours and ends in theirs as a memorable, sensorial imagining.

STUDENT: Radio can’t do that like television can.

NDT: Unlike print and screen media, where the eye the primary focus, in radio it’s the ear. Which means complete freedom of imagination. You can create unlimited worlds on radio. In fact, radio is only limited by your imagination: you can afford to have a Philharmonic Orchestra performing live on Mars in radio, whereas television would cost you billions of dollars.

STUDENT: So why is print and television given more importance then?

NDT: I don’t want to get into the old spiel about radio versus visual media, but I will say that radio is arguably the most difficult medium to write for.

STUDENT: Why’s that?

NDT: Because you don’t have photography to support your words. And unlike print, you can’t go back and reread what you didn’t get the first time.

So then, what is the first thing we do?

STUDENT: Look at the brief.

NDT: No.

STUDENT: Aren’t you contradicting your self? All along you’ve been stressing the importance of the brief before you do anything else.

NDT: You’re right. I admit it. But radio isn’t photographs and moving images, and we’re deeply influenced by the image. I don’t want you to read the brief before you reprogram your thinking to sound only. So let’s do that now. What are the elements of sound?

STUDENT: Music.

NDT: Yes. What else?

STUDENT: Noises.

NDT: What do you mean by “noises”?

STUDENT: You know, birds chirping, cars vrooming, I don’t know, babies crying. Like that.

NDT: Good, there’s a technical term for that, does anybody know it?

STUDENT: Sound effects.

NDT: Right, you write it in your script as SFX. Ok, so we’ve got music and sound effects. What’s the third element?

STUDENT: Voices.

NDT: Ok, we’ve got our set of writing tools. Now do you remember what I said about writing pictures?    more

NDT: When you’re writing a commercial for television or cinema, often the best place to start is at the end. From here, you can go anywhere: the middle, the beginning, whichever comes naturally.

STUDENT: How are you supposed to know the ending?

NDT: Think poster. A great poster articulates the message to its very essence, which is a single-minded concept expressed with a few select words and the right picture. Once you’ve got that, then screen narrative ideas can be more readily visualised to set up, suspend and resolve the concept.

STUDENT: What do you mean by ‘suspend’?

NDT: It’s that essential element that makes the story gripping. In cinema language it’s called ‘tension’. And it’s what holds your attention. You want to know what happens next. You want to know why the protagonist acts in a particular way. You want to know if he or she can overcome the seemingly impossible odds. And you’re willing to suspend your disbelief in order to find out.

STUDENT: How can you do all of that in just 30 seconds when a movie has 90 minutes and more?

NDT: Single-minded simplicity.

STUDENT: I’ve seen a lot of commercials that are simple but boring.

NDT: There’s a difference between simplicity and simplistic.

STUDENT: What’s the difference?

NDT: It’s easier for me to demonstrate it. (DRAWING A HALF CIRCLE ON THE WHITE BOARD) 

NDT: What does this image suggest? First thought.

STUDENT: A circle.

NDT: See how the mind fills in the rest of the narrative?

STUDENT: What’s the narrative here?

NDT: In this case, the instant suggestion of a circle, which then can be interpreted as a particular symbol or message.

STUDENT: Like infinity.

STUDENT: Or refresh the web page.

STUDENT: Yeah, or a coffee stain.

(LAUGHTER)

NDT: That’s simplicity. Or as 1 Issan Dorsey said when asked what is the essence of Zen art: “Nothing extra”. more

NDT: Let’s take the worst case scenario for writing a website: the structure has been established; the concept has been decided; the design has been created; all it needs now is for the content provided by the client to be turned into engaging copy that reflects, reinforces and relates all of the above. And the Project Manager has hired you for the job.

STUDENT: What is the best-case scenario?

NDT: The Project Manager brings you into the team before structure, concept and design have been developed. This is the ideal situation because of the high level of interconnectedness between the technical, the design and the content.

STUDENT: So why are copywriters not involved at the beginning of the project?

NDT: A very good question. This is just my own opinion, but compared to advertising agencies (where copywriting has matured into an art form since the Bernbach creative revolution in the sixties), web copy is still in the generic age. It just needs somebody like Bill Bernbach to bring web communication to the state-of-the-art level that has made many advertising copywriters and art directors legendary.

STUDENT: Until that person comes along, how are we going to be able to raise the standard of web creativity?

NDT: There are plenty of books written on the subject of web writing that provide excellent guidance in developing websites from start to finish; one that I recommend highly for writers is The Choice Guide to Web Writing That Works 1

What isn’t available on the shelves as far as I know is a book that demonstrates the process by which we use the craft of copywriting to breathe life in what is too often generic copy. Our purpose today is to get into the nuts and bolts (or rather, tone and rhythm) of writing that makes web copy sing.    more

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