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.

So is copy dead? Here are three reasons why I think copy is more important than ever before:

1: Every word has to count

The optimum length for an email is around 150–200 words (that’s about the length of this post up to this point). Of course today, readers scan first and read later (or not at all). This means that elements such as subject lines, headlines and subheads must work really hard. More than this, slight variations in the wording of calls to action can have a massive effect on your results. So it pays to get it right.

2: Online engagement is still mainly text-based

From white papers and ebooks through to blog posts, tweets and video scripts – words are the foundation that underpins everything else. Having a professional understanding both of advanced tech products and the ability to use language to persuade people to buy is key to success.

3: People buy people

Ultimately in B2B people buy into other people. Forget the myth of the rational sale. In the real world that’s all it is, a myth. Typically in today’s B2B sales, there are reasonable, and potentially eye-watering, amounts of money involved. Customers want the reassurance of knowing they are buying from people who care, who understand them, who they can trust. In the absence of a real, live actual person, this will need to be done through copy. So the ability to make the dry, rational stuff into human, engaging stuff is pretty valuable too.

So far from copy being dead, it is alive and kicking and coming out of an agency near you.

Ladies and gentleman, I give you the copywriter.

But, at what cost?

When talking to marketers, their approach to creating a new campaign is often to replicate a program, swap out the header graphics and change the calls to action.  Really, is that what’s going to engage their target audience? Surely one lead generation program can’t simply be re-purposed. What about audience insight and understanding? Who are they, where are they in the buying cycle, what are their needs from your content and what’s your unique proposition that’s going to excite them?

We need to get back to the fundamentals of defining the creative and business requirements of a campaign. Only then do we develop creative concepts that will support these requirements and deliver the best piece of marketing communication possible, whilst at the same time defining the optimal contact strategy for implementation through marketing automation. It’s my belief that effective campaign execution can only be realised through a combination of left– and right-brain thinking.

So, if you find your automated campaigns are delivering less value for you over time, maybe it’s time to take a step back and breath some creativity back into your campaigns. You never know, it might just work…

I also used to enjoy getting stuck into long articles and curling up with an 800 page novel. Truth is, these days I find it challenging to read a lengthy online article without following the multiple links embedded within the page, the lure of checking Twitter, my netvibes news feeds and my multiple email accounts. Apparently, I’m not alone – there is a perception out there that the internet is changing our brains (and not always positively), how we consume information and retain knowledge. In effect, Google is becoming a replacement for our long-term memory and almost as quick at retrieving information (take a look at the new Google Instant).

Pancake People

Back in 2005, the playwright Richard Foreman wrote a piece about ‘Pancake People’, and it’s even more pertinent today than when he wrote it:

“I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance – as we all become “pancake people” – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.“

Earlier this year, a client told me that people don’t read web pages anymore and that much of the beautifully crafted copy that we had produced was a waste of time. Instinctively, I fought back against this statement and zealously defended our work. After all, producing content and publishing web pages is one of the reasons we’re in business. However, there have been a number of articles lately that have re-ignited the discussions and changed my mind as to how the internet is altering the way our brains work and, therefore, the way we consume information.

Have we reached a point predicted back in 1985 by Max Headroom where blipverts will be the most effective way of getting our marketing messages across to our target audience; where high-speed, concentrated, high-intensity commercials lasting about three seconds are used to subliminally brainwash the masses?

We may not have reached that point yet, but changing trends in media consumption must have some real implications for marketers. Is the long copy ad dead? Will technology decision-makers no longer have the time or inclination to value whitepapers? Do we need to fundamentally address the taxonomy and content hierarchy of our websites? And, do we need to establish new measures of audience engagement? After all, a page view doesn’t mean a page has actually been read…

Bite-sized payloads of marketing gold

If the answer to any of the above is “Yes”, then we need to ensure that we’re producing concise marketing messages that are laser-targeted at our audiences. Let’s not create reams of written content that languish on our corporate websites. Instead, let’s embrace the notion of creating more engaging formats of content and distributing it in bite-sized payloads to the platforms where our audiences are spending their time. So that means featuring content on services like Scribd and Slideshare and finding new ways to feature content on publisher websites. It also means making your blog one of the primary destinations for your marketing messages. After all, the content changes regularly and is generally mercifully short.

Thank you for reading to the end of this post. It must have been difficult not to follow any of the embedded links or checking the status on your social universe… I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Take a look:

Look at the usability studies and you’ll see that effective web copy is a case of less is more. Unfortunately many designers seem to take this as an excuse to design layouts allowing not 30 words, but 30 characters of copy – even on highly complex products. Rather than helping to structure the message, all too often copy is seen as the stuff that simply replaces the lorem ipsum in the design.

This is nuts.

It’s copy, more often than not, that visitors to a site are looking for. It’s copy that sells products, services and ideas. Copy is a core part of the experience. This is especially so in B2B where complex arguments must be communicated efficiently, powerfully and elegantly.

This is not a call to have endless scrolling copy on every page you serve. Good copy can achieve its aims in surprisingly few words.

So just as an experiment, on the next site you create – start with the copy.

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).

It consists of over 100 cards (or as the deck terms it “Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas”) and the idea is that when you get stuck you pick a card at random and consider your problem in light of what it says. And they are oblique. So flipping my own deck at random gives me, “Go to an extreme, come part way back.” Now of course, if you are stuck that might be just the help you are looking for. What is the extreme consequences of the problem? What would be an extreme solution? How far back would we need to come to create a workable answer? Work that train of thought until it goes no further and then select another card.

While there are a few such creativity decks around, for me oblique strategies works because it doesn’t try to solve the problem for you. It still gives you room to think. And it can take you off in unexpected and useful directions.

You can still buy the physical deck (it comes in a lovely understated black box) and costs £30. But you can also download it free as a widget for Mac, PC and Linux.

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.

I’ve licensed Cracked under Creative Commons which basically means that you can do what you like with it as long as you credit me as the original author and offer the same rights to anyone you pass it (or derivative work) on to. Click the license badge on the front cover for full details.

Take a look, see what you think. There’s a clickable email link on the last page where you can get in touch and let me know your thoughts. And, of course, if you want to see any of this stuff put into practice, you know where to come. Enjoy.

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.

These kinds of articles are not new. Each generation of creative seems to feel a need to talk up the dumbing down of the latest crop of work. More recently there has been a flurry of rants as traditional adland has seen digital begin to eat its lunch and many creative directors find it difficult to adjust to a world where many people really, really don’t like TV ads (and where they can almost totally avoid them should they so choose).

There is also the widespread perception that good work = awards. And, of course, some awards highlight some very good work. But, personally, I fear that many awards create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy – established creatives awarding work that they would like to have created (ie traditional advertising). I remember some years back being on a judging panel where the discussion got round to “Is this an (insert awards’ name) kind of ad?” and to what would get the best reaction at the awards’ night dinner. This can’t be healthy.

Of course things are changing (it was ever thus). There has certainty been a shift in the kind of work that gets us most interested these days. It doesn’t tend to be the big ad campaigns so much any more. It’s the difficult, gnarly problems that need clever, elegant answers. It’s the left-field, asymmetric creative strategies that refuse to fight on a level playing field.
It’s the ideas that are not only media neutral (or any of the other buzz terms) but which seek to create new media and forge new connections.

Time, as many in the Independent’s article point out, is an issue. We don’t have the luxury of long, draw-out development anymore. But is this such a bad thing? I don’t know. Yes, I love to see beautifully crafted work that’s had oodles of loving care taken over it. But on balance I’d prefer to beat a competitor to the punch with something quick, dirty and effective. Better still, I’d prefer to get in early and set the agenda for a product or category. All the kerning in the world won’t match up to benefits like these.

Everything these days is in beta (as Russell Davies commented some time back). The days of 100% finished, totally locked down creative campaigns are history. Instead, today’s communications are messier, trickier and more interesting for it. Creatives might make fewer good traditional ads any more but with so many opportunities to do something better and faster I can’t say I’m going to lose sleep over it.