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.

Method and madness

You know, the great copywriters all talk about how there’s no method to advertising. George Gribbin (the man who once wrote that his friend Joe was now a horse) has a particularly pithy how-to that goes:

1. With the help of your art-director, create a picture that will make a prospect look at the headline.

2. Write a headline that you are sure will make the prospect read the first sentence of copy.

3. Write a first sentence of copy that you are sure will make the prospect read the second sentence.

4. Continue this process until you are sure that the prospect will read the final word of the ad.

5. Make sure that the picture and all these words add up to a story that will make the prospect's mouth water for the product.

You don’t say, good sir!

If you scour memoirs and interviews and Ad Age and the Cutting Edge series though, you’ll find that it’s always a toss-up between lots of research, knowing the consumer’s mind, filling pockets of desire, understanding the deep roots of social subconsciousness, and the eccentric who shuts himself up in a room with a candle and an Ogilvy idol to produce greatness.

The practice has been in the industry to move towards more market research, more in-depth knowledge. I won’t say that this doesn’t work in America where the battles are fought on shelves and with subliminal packaging, wars waged across broad swathes of educated, sophisticated consumers in mature markets. (Yeah, right.) But when it comes down to the postcard press ad or the thirty-second tearjerker that invokes the ineffable, subtle magic of brand-building (which is not to say that packages and shelf-space don’t; I have a fantastic product with fantastic packaging and okay advertising that’s losing market share daily thanks to poor shelving), it’s all up to creative genius. Two words that should probably be banned for overuse, but then we’d all lose our jobs.

Creative genius—and use for it—does exist in Bangladesh. And consumer marketing is still at that wonderful stage where a good television commercial can actually spike sales, and a series of good television ads consistently shown, therefore, will lead to an uphill curve. But the telecoms have bought up so much television time, and their style of advertising is moving so rapidly towards the advertising-as-art (i.e. advertising as aesthetic achievement and not plague that’s killing Europe, that “creative genius” is still subsidiary to product differences. Pathetic product differences like price and distribution chains that we marketers should spit on! We don’t want people to love the advertising, we want people to love the product! We want them to ask for the fucking product till the stores store it, we want them to twitch their upper lips fretfully at the thought of consuming a lesser product that’s essentially the same but priced less!

I understand that the people should love the advertising for it to do its best. But when creative (creative!) agencies love the advertising as an end in itself, that’s when we’re done for.

What is art? Art is beauty or terror or the sublime or any number of things that exist for the sole purpose of existing. I'm using the word "beauty" in all sorts of ways in this post, but I mainly mean aesthetic pleasance or something which is at least aesthetically profound. Art is never functional. Functional things might incorporate art, like say an engraved sword which is a killing instrument with pretty pictures. Or a watch with jewels on the outside, which is a pleasing way to tell time. But there are no functional benefits to putting a diamond on a gun.


A gun's purpose is to shoot at people, an advertisement's purpose is to sell product. If I can murder with panache that's great, but I need be a murderer first and debonair second. Ditto with advertisements: I need to sell product first; if it's a pretty way of doing so, all the better.


But most human creations (as opposed to creations of God: the sun is infinitely beautiful AND enables photosynthesis!) strike a balance between form and function. The day we all have ass-gun watersprays in our bathrooms, the bodna will become a thing of beauty and a joy to see. We'll have bodna exhibitions at Alliance Francais and the musical band Bangla will sing songs about the joys of natural anal cleansing. Head Office will give away brass bodnas to their special clients. But nobody will use the humble plastic bodna in their bathrooms any more.

The whole advertising as function and advertising as art problem manifests itself thus. We all want to make beautiful advertisements. And since we’re in this business because we’ve failed as novelists, artists and filmmakers, we all want to cauterize our past letdowns and dreams of youth into middling achievement. “I was all set to be the next Kubrick but look at the way I present melamine plates, is it not a searing indictment of our fin de siecle obsession with imperialist household furnishings? Ay me!” But the point of advertising is that it’s meant to sell product, and we’re consistently failing to do so in the proper ways.

Our failures are threefold. Those who want to create beautiful advertising (where beautiful = countercultural, revolutionary, any one of fifty-seven superlative adjectives that agencies write on their manifestos, the worst of which was hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian, but that was one of mine and I put it in as a joke) do it terribly. I have almost never seen a good press layout. Most TV commercials are the same hodgepodge and they’re either Amitabh or Faruqi and not stylized for the sake of any sort of narrative purpose. They all suck. They’re all the fucking same.

Anyway, ads these days follow this type of thinking:

“Well, so we’re giving away three product units with the purchase of one. Let’s be totally LATERAL and OUT OF THE BOX and show three completely unrelated things. Like, instead of three soapcakes, we’ll show three eagles. Yeah, motherfuckin’ EAGLES. And then we’ll have a line of copy that says ‘Take it easy with our Super Offer’ and the guy reading it will be like WOW, I expected they’re giving away eagles but actually it’s soap, fuck yeah! And then he’ll realize that Take it Easy is an Eagles song and he’ll be totally awesomized!”

This example, which is not hyperbolic, illustrates all three problems.

First of all, the ad isn’t creative or beautiful in any way. It’s an inaccurate simile. “The three soaps lie on your basin like three eagles soar through the sky.” It might be, through various accidents of fate, well executed. I won’t count on it. But just because it’s pretty doesn’t mean it has any aesthetic right to exist.

Secondly, it’s not communicating the core benefit of the offer, which is that Company X likes you so much and wants you to be so clean that he or she is prepared to give you three soapcakes for the price of one. Instead, we get “three is a cool number.” (Seriously, just sit in on any brainstorming session.

Thirdly, it does not build the brand. Soap X might communicate its beautifying qualities, it might be the cheapest, wash the whitest, get rid of germs. Eagles do none of these.

Which is not to say that exceptions don’t exist. The Djuice free-running ad used an internationally current and popular stunt (B 13, Casino Royale), and the dialogue turns it completely Bangladeshi. What’s beautiful is how Bitopi’s Awrup and Tanvir manage to take a shitty product benefit and use its commercial as such a powerful branding tool. The ad becomes an ad for the Djuice life and fuck the free minutes. They also make the free minutes appear attractive but that’s secondary. I love the thought behind it so much that I won’t even go into Kisloo’s excellent direction of the commercial itself.

Obviously, there IS method to advertising. If there weren’t, all our advertising wouldn’t have been so predictable and banal. The method—controlling madness, if you will—is easy, since this industry does support people like me in relative comfort. Over the next few posts, I’ll try and explain how perfection, glory, art, effective sales results, are all possible. Not always easy perhaps, but possible if you put your mind to it.

But right now I must flee. Work needs to be accomplished and boy are we gonna to lateralize the fuck out of some milk packaging!

My Warid rant

I’m the real target consumer. I don’t watch television, travel within limited distances, I don’t read magazines unless someone pushes one in front of my face. But I am not yet thirty; I possess capital. Reach me and you’ve got revenue gold.

So let’s have a quick look, find out what the big spenders have been doing to get my money. Nothing, huh? Well why the fuck not!

Warid’s a lost case. I know of so many people who want to make the switch to Warid but aren’t doing so simply because they don’t know what Warid is offering. Our Mid-east mavens waited a whole fucking day to see whether their much-vaunted N-gen network and technology based strategy would work (remember how that’s all Warid execs would talk about in the months prior to launch?), and then jumped right into counting paisas. Trout and Ries should reunite into a suicide pact just so they can die and spin in their graves for this. And what counting paisas—do they not realize that 25 paisas for 15 seconds adds up to 1 taka per minute, which is a significantly more powerful proposition to own?

But why are they even going into price-based warfare (without in fact having the lowest priced package)? Word on the street says that Warid launched because they had to. Understandable, so did Hitler invade Poland. When you launch “because you have to” (flashback to the FM wars of 2006), you are expected to build your resources. Cover the whole country first, offer an unlimited data package, tell people about your wonderful post-paid package, something.

I’ll break out branding theory because the Bangladeshi telco squabbles have proven that the strongest brand wins. Banglalink owns the cheap call rates position. They’ve been trying to get into GrameenPhone’s “who else can love our country like we do” arena but people still lovingly know them as the cheap option. Aktel, which will suck your dick and sleep with your aged father for his second pulse, is the cheapest. They’re known as nothing really, except for their short-term gains of Joy, Power, Foorti, etc. They’re the “red and blue brand”.

Enter Warid, red and blue like Aktel, trying to own cheapness like Banglalink, and with Bangladeshiness-exploiting advertising like GrameenPhone. (Way to go Pakistan!) What do they do to distinguish themselves as a newcomer in a price-war-ridden telecom market?

Communicate call rates only! (And that too using Aktel’s color schemes.)

Add to that the one thing they share with Grandpapa Citycell. They have a shitty tagline.

Citycell: Because we care.

Warid: Be heard.

I mean, I have friends in Warid. I know for a fact that, at least as far as the Dhaka market goes, they have a superior product. Warid uses a different technology from the other GSM providers, has a better SIM card (did you see all those options?). They can upgrade and update their system without massive Aktelesque outages. They’re going to cover the country soon. As far as VAS go, Warid is what the Big Three want to be.

And hello, here’s a new cell phone company in a mature market where companies own cheapness, nationalism, all sorts of things, but nobody tried to position their cell phone brand as technologically superior. Which Warid fucking is to begin with!

The only product which tries to appeal to the tech-savvy is GrameenPhone’s Business Solutions campaign. It’s an incredibly weak campaign. GrameenPhone by its very nature cannot own both technology (unnecessary in their case anyway) as well as “covering every village with love and pride”.

And Warid sits on its ass, waiting and waging petty price-based skirmishes. While cell phone manufacturers, whose high-tech products are essentially useless without the service provider backbone, throw parties at the Radisson and connect the world with music and “the thump”. How could Nokia or Sony-Ericsson, who don’t even have offices in Bangladesh, whose markets and therefore budgets are limited by their product price, battle for a proposition that Warid should own?

Warid bigwigs, I know you guys Google your brand every day, so here’s some free advice. Read up on a bunch of case studies on how markets work and how brands have these things called “positions” which own “qualities” in the consumer’s mind. Look at how the Bangladeshi telecom industry has worked from 2005 onwards. Hell, retake Marketing 101 or—best yet—pay me lots of money to make your strategy for you.

And then, once you’ve done all that, go back to Tajwar Center and shout at your cronies: “We must own technology! Let us own information throughput! Let’s make it easy for the consumer to understand just what the fuck it is we offer because once we make the sale we can keep them!”’

I mean, you'd think they'd save the paisa ads for when the competition starts taking you seriously. And then you can move on to the CONSUMER!!!

Preamble to the greatest blog on Bangladeshi advertising!

Everybody in Bangladesh knows that telecomm companies have completely changed the advertising industry’s face. Marketing and advertising has gone from an arcane apiary to an all-powerful swarm. Cannibal bee-eating bees, gigantic and internationally affiliated; medium-sized bees, tiny design-oriented bees, sleek and fat media-buying bees, and so on. (I guess we’re all following the advice of the latest telecomm newcomer to Bee Passionate.)

This industry has created heroes, enriched thousands, introduced the concept of everyday marketing strategy to the world outside of Unilever (even when competent practice is far away for all). This babbling, foaming scramble for filthy telecomm lucre is beautiful as it is chaotic.

Like all things that are too good to be true, historical inevitability states that our gold rush for marketing competence is due for a massive crash. I agree with lessons of the ages, even though I may not learn from them. So, with the all-ratifying blaze of hindsight and the fart-lit matchstick of guesswork, I will tell you what’s wrong and what’s right with telecomm communication. I will predict its future. I will also tell you where Bangladeshi advertising is going, how to create good advertising for the Bangladeshi market, what it takes to create functional marketing communications in Bangladesh. I’ll use lots of industry jargon, accidentally namedrop famous creative directors and pretend like I really do know, like the rest of us in this industry, what advertising really is.

I’ll also try to update this regularly.