Writing better copy for you and me!

I’m sorry I’ve been away for so long, but I’ve had a lot of things going on in my life. I had typhoid and I didn’t get properly treated for it in Bangladesh, with the upshot that I am on unpaid medical leave in the US. This is good because I finally have time to think.

But I’m also very out of touch. I’m happy though that Warid produced a wonderful ad, the biriyani 20 FnFs one. I don’t want to go into the ramifications of 20 FnFs and I don’t know what Aktel or GrameenPhone or anybody else has done to counter that. Let’s let these telcos bicker amongst themselves and figure out how to generate revenue with the govt clamping down on mobile networks!

And a pity it is too, because this government was doing so well. I guess this is why we can’t have good things. But then I don’t even care that much because my phone used to be under Radio Foorti’s corporate package and, all of a sudden, Foorti’s incredibly generous CEO decided to report the SIM as lost (while I’m in America) and give it to someone else. Good for you, buddy, but this doesn’t absolve you of paying my outstanding salaries and provident fund payments. (Six months and he still hasn’t ponied up!). Sucks that such a great radio station has to have a CEO who’s sunk more ships than Nelson at Trafalgar.

But we’ll talk about radio stations and Today VS Foorti and all of that when there’s interesting news to report. (And boy, do I know of interesting news brewing!) Today, we’ll be talking copy.

I read a fantastic book, The Invisible Grail by John Simmons, and the point of the whole book is how we use stories and narratives and good writing to create great brand experiences. I studied Literature in college, so I wholeheartedly agree. So I thought about how important copy is, really; Simmons’s point is more overarching and about the nature of branding, but in Bangladesh, we spend so little effort into writing good copy that something needs to be done. As someone who does things, I did.

We tend to leave the writing of copy to the lowliest of the creative hierarchy, the copywriter. Not that the copywriter is disrespected; far from it. When I was putting together our new creative team, I chose the best Bengali writer that I know as copywriter. (We don’t have a fulltime English guy on our team because our brands don’t require it. I just beg and borrow from a buddy at our agency and otherwise do it myself.) But to get back to my original point: a copywriter, if he does well, is very soon promoted—especially given the dearth of good people in the industry right now—to supervision tasks where a poor wordsmith such as yours truly ends up having to go head-to-head against jaded art directors who refuse to make the logo bigger.

But we forget the giants whose shoulders we stand on, stumbling more often than not. David Ogilvy, the restaurateur turned celebrity copywriter. Bill Bernbach, the mail room clerk turned speech writer. George Gribbin. Leo Burnett. Or, to take another tack, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Sayers, Terry Gilliam, Salman Rushdie. The creative revolution of the 40s and 50s happened because of radical new concepts though, (and because of Bernbach’s idea of a more unified approach where art direction and copy met as one organic whole, I’m obviously oversimplifying here), and these concepts come from our copywriters.

And yet anytime a copywriter shows initiative, instead of patting him on the back and giving him lots of money, we move him up the ladder until he’s a battered soul. And the next copywriter has to start from Square One again.

This is why our great lines come from creative directors. (I too am a cursed CD, but I have the only team in Bangladesh, I think, where I’m directing people much smarter than me. But who cares about the superiority of their creative output when I’m the one making more money?) Battir raja Philips, Jotil mood, Jodi laigga jaye, Nam amar Mofiz, Lagba baji, Chaka chaka boom boom pah pah (OK, forget this one)—none of these were written by copywriters. All our tear-inducing nationalist ads? Nary a copywriter among them! You give an ad to a film director and he comes up with “Asmane pakha melo”, while the wretched copywriter gives us “It’s inside U”. Jesus.

This is endemic in our industry. This needs to be challenged, stopped, the cycle needs to reverse itself. But it’s hard to do when copywriters are constantly having to churn out press releases and other keranigiri instead of thinking up the next great print ad, the one commercial that will translate into television and radio (and why don’t we have a single good ad on the radio? Honestly, I understand that I’m tooting my own horn here, but the only decent radio ads I’ve heard are ones that I made) and of course sell lots of product. I don’t want your artsy fartsy shit, I want product to move so that the company makes money, which means that we make more money come evaluation time. (Chief, I hope you’re reading this!)

I guess the best grounding in copywriting is a four year course in great literature. We can’t afford that. We can, however, afford to not hire assholes who speak Bangla with an insufferable American accent and English even worse while they have no idea of parsing, spelling or grammar, and let’s not even go into rhythm and scansion. We can afford to hire people to oversee the actual English product while the ideas come from people who understand Bengali culture. We can perform exercises like one that I think taught me (being upper middle class and one of those assholes myself, though I don’t have an accent) more than any Trout & Ries book ever did: hang out with taxi drivers at a taxi stand for hours, listen to what their concerns are, and the rhythms of their speech. This is our speech, buddy. We speak it, but we can’t really listen to it unless we put on an anthropological hat and trousers of condescension (shirt can be Ecstasy, I don’t mind) and go see what the “other half” (hah!) talk like. Or just watch Bangla movies. My personal creative hero, my pal Tanvir, has been inspired more by Bangla movies than silent films, Shots DVDs and Milfhunter.com, though I don’t know if he knows it himself.

Point is, know what your fellow man is doing. Go and watch Off-Beat and then MacGuyver.

Anyway, I don’t think this blog post is very cohesive except as a sort of malformed rant against copywriters getting their own. Not to worry—all the best creative directors were once copywriters themselves, and I’m sure we’re in capable hands. But seriously, take up a goddamn pen and paper and listen. We’re constantly surrounded by beautiful turns of phrase that would take us by the imagination and lead us down pleasant avenues indeed if we only fucking bothered to fucking listen.

And now, the real meat of this post, Dhaka Adman’s 12 Rules to Writing Better Copy! (Rule 12 is actually an adaptation from an advertising buddy who has the best written blog out there. Plus it’s all about sex. Check it out: http://lovegotthetongue.blogspot.com)

1. Agencies tend to look inward, not outward. Share ideas with friends in other agencies.
2. You’re selling to your friends who aren’t in the industry and therefore won’t be wowed by your cleverness. The people who buy your brands care for your advertisement’s content and the emotional and rational connections, not witty puns and serif fonts.
3. Keep a list of phrases and lines that appeal to you, in whichever language, for whatever reason, be it rhythm, wording, whatever.
4. Open yourself to as many different types of media and entertainment as you can. Get passionate about a hobby or two, watch movies, learn to play an instrument, read a book, read comics. Read poetry, it always helps.
5. For the love of fuck, work with your art director!
6. Don’t compete with the best of Dhaka or Bangladesh. Compete with the best of the world. Always strive for a standard that’s unachievable now and soon it won’t be.
7. If you love an idea, kill it in as many ways that you can. Ask your friends to kill it. Keep on doing this until you come up with an idea that’s really difficult to kill.
8. Even the smallest advertisement you create will help in building the brand. Remember, a calendar is only twelve pages, but it stays on somebody’s desktop for twelve months. It is seen every day by that person and everybody who visits him.
9. Look to building the brand, not just creating a clever one-off advertisement. As Leo Burnett said, “We want consumers to say, 'That's a hell of a product' instead of, 'That's a hell of an ad.'” This applies most to print ads where it’s hard to resist being clever at the cost of building brand equity.
10. Always look for ideas that are extendible.
11. Always use the simplest possible words, and the smallest possible number of words, to express your ideas. Your customer’s time is the most precious thing in our profession. Edit, edit, edit, until every extraneous element is gone. (If this had been an advertisement, this point would have read: “Cut words.”)
12. The better copy writers know when copy is unnecessary, but the best ones can judge exactly how necessary or un- it may be.

And if this isn’t good enough for you, check out Elmore Leonard’s rules of writing. Or better yet, read one of his novels.