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It’s amaz­ing how often I hear some­thing to the effect of “No one reads copy these days.” Now, of course, being a pro­fes­sional B2B copy­writer by trade, you might expect me to have a hang up about copy. I also encounter the related belief that we are all writ­ers. I write. You write. It’s stuff we all learnt at school. How hard can it be?

Today, it’s all about the pictures

We are a more visual cul­ture than ever before. Each of us spends seri­ous qual­ity time in front of one screen or another every sin­gle day. Over the years, adver­tis­ing has become more visual and less wordy. Online video is still grow­ing expo­nen­tially. And mil­lions of peo­ple restrict their thoughts to bursts of 140 char­ac­ters or less.

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I came across this quote from George Lois and it got me think­ing…”Cre­ativ­ity can solve almost any prob­lem. The cre­ative act, the defeat of habit by orig­i­nal­ity, over­comes every­thing.”

I’ve got a nag­ging feel­ing that mar­ket­ing automa­tion is giv­ing today’s mar­keters a num­ber of bad habits. Don’t get me wrong, I’m truly bought into the tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits of auto­mated plat­forms — com­mu­ni­cat­ing at the right time based on expressed and behav­ioural data, iden­ti­fy­ing qual­ity leads and rout­ing them appro­pri­ately to sales. And once the mar­keters have got to grips with the plat­form, they deliver greater effi­cien­cies, speed­ier exe­cu­tion, more con­trol and in-depth mea­sure­ment.

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Look­ing back on my youth, I used to pride myself on my abil­ity to remem­ber all of my friends’ tele­phone num­bers and every uni­ver­sity lec­ture that I had over the course of a week. Now, such feats of mem­ory are no longer required of my brain – my mobile devices and online ser­vices remem­ber and man­age these tasks for me.


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Bit of a depar­ture. Shape + Colour has a post point­ing to a lovely bit of motion design illus­trat­ing the UN Dec­la­ra­tion of Human Rights.

Take a look:

If many in our indus­try are to be believed, copy is some­what of a optional extra when it comes to mar­coms. Or maybe a nec­es­sary evil. To be tol­er­ated as long as it doesn’t exceed 30 words or so. Of course you see this most in adver­tis­ing which has become increas­ingly image-led over the years. Direct mail still resists, bol­stered by the moun­tains of evi­dence that copy dri­ves response. And then there’s web.

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You know how it is, some­times when you’re try­ing to come up with ideas you get stuck. Just plain old-fashioned stuck. Every­thing you think of comes back to the same worth­less thought you had an hour ago. You can see only one route to a solu­tion and frankly it’s head­ing nowhere. And, of course, the dead­line isn’t get­ting any fur­ther away.

While I cover a cou­ple of ways out in Cracked, there’s a really use­ful one that wouldn’t fit in: oblique strate­gies. Orig­i­nally oblique strate­gies was a card deck cre­ated by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt to help jog the mind when the fog of work pres­sure descended (details here).

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Don’t say I never give you anything.

You can now down­load your free, gratis, for-absolutely-no-money copy of Cracked: a small guide to big ideas. Orig­i­nally cre­ated as a printed book for inter­nal and client use, Cracked is a guide to cre­ative prob­lem solv­ing. In it I cover some ways to approach mar­ket­ing prob­lems, a bit on audi­ences and then a bunch of cre­ative tips, tricks and tech­niques. I’ve refor­mat­ted it for screen and it weighs in at 472Kb.

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The Independent’s media sec­tion today has a fea­ture on “Why we don’t make good ads any­more” – you can read the online ver­sion here.

They’ve inter­viewed the usual adland sus­pects (Frank Lowe, Mar­tin Sor­rell, John Hegarty, Trevor Beat­tie etc). The premise behind the arti­cle is that ads today aren’t as good as they used to be – in the days of the Milk Tray man, Hovis bread deliv­ery boys, Smash and all the oth­ers that make up the pan­theon of golden age greats. The respon­dents are some­what divided. Frank Lowe’s com­ment reads as a lament for times past, the oth­ers tend to crit­i­cise the lack of time that per­vades the indus­try and are split on whether online is cre­ative enough yet.

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