Words 101 Blog

Quite often we name things for our clients. We re-name their businesses, their products or services and, sometimes their children.

No, not really, although  some clients seem to place a similar level of importance to the re-branding, re-naming projects we work on.

In fact, there was one client  (a certain Mr Head),  who might have been wise to ask our advice before he named his son, Richard.  You can imagine how tough life at school would have been with the inevitable nickname, “Dickhead”.

Naming is not a random, “let’s thing of something wacky” exercise, despite some people may think. Nor is it  “loads of fun” as one friend suggested. Quite the contrary, we have a process, based on what the name needs to achieve. Like every project, we need to explore all the options and often come up with 100-200 ideas that will communicate all of the necessary requirements.

Here are a few issues we might need to address, very often with one word.

• The target market – who are they?
• What does the name need to communicate?
• What is the desired brand image/perception?
• Should it be descriptive, or not?
• Is it traditional?
• Or, should it be cool?
• How should it be positioned?
• Brand leader, or contender?
• Alternative, or mainstream?
• Affordable, or premium?

And, so on.

By the time we reach the presentation stage, we’ve usually produced a shortlist of 2-4 recommendations, and most likely identified what we feel is the clear winner. All will have a rationale as to why we feel this best represents the company/product/service. And, we’ll have ensured that the name is available both as a URL and a business name, if necessary.

These are just the starting points, of course. Every project has its own requirements and they tend to become increasingly specific the more they are analysed. For example, we named a new charity register last year, which was a kind of sub-brand of  a well known Australian charity.

It should have been simple, but among the key prerequisites included a need to create an entirely new name, one that should not be associated with the major brand.  It was to be aimed at women, but not excluding men.  It couldn’t mention the cause directly, because it would be a potential “turn-off” for a sector of the target market.  The client also wanted it to sound modern and progressive, without being too overt. And, it had to appeal to adults of all ages, from 17 to 70.

Easy? Yeah, right. Somehow, we produced a result that an entire committee agreed upon – eventually.

Then, there was the national industry skills council, which had a long, tedious and totally misleading name, one that made them sound like an insurance company. During our first meetings, when the issue was raised, the CEO declared that the name would NOT change. Clearly this was a sensitive issue internally.

Some months later, we had created a completely new name for the council and nobody was more proud of the new direction than the same CEO. These issues are rarely painless, but being able to re-focus an organisation and see them go on to enjoy a renewed enthusiasm for their business is very satisfying.

There’s no doubt about it, being asked to re-name anything is fraught with potential danger.  Highly charged emotions, frayed tempers, politics and indecision are often par for the course. Producing a viable list of names isn’t easy, but getting a number of people to embrace just one of them is frequently a very painful process and much more difficult.

So, when you see a really daft brand or product name out there, you can be sure it will have plenty of history. If it’s a real stinker, you can be sure it was chosen by a committee, probably a large one.

Posted by Ian Minter

Blame it on the way I was brought up in the competitive, back biting, do anything to win an award world of London ad agencies, a decade or two ago. Yes, it’s all different now – copywriters write online communications, because that’s where the (modest) money is. Back then, there were a lot of unwritten rules about what constituted good copy and what didn’t.

In truth, it was all a bit snobby and the emphasis was on being witty and clever. A double entendre was very acceptable, a thought provoking droll comment  even more so. The aim was to be ”clever” and witty – ideally both. Lack of cleverness was frowned upon and saying the bleeding obvious would attract sneers from every “creative” agency.

As everyone knows, the original VW Beetle ads created by Doyle Dane Bernbach changed the way we wrote copy forever. Irony, wit and charm were in, the self -congratulatory  claim was out.  And, as for puns and exclamation marks – they were regarded as the totally unacceptable, the written equivalent of farting in a lift.

This philosophy drove my creative directors, copywriters (including myself) to write to a set of unwritten rules (really, no pun intended, I assure you) that  would be admired by award judges and, in truth, other copywriters in the agency. Winning awards attracted more than kudos too – offers from other creative “hot shops” would ensure that you’d earn a higher salary and a more exciting job.

So, there was no shortage of incentives to stick to the “rules”. But that was back then, do any of those “rules” still apply? Nowadays I’m often writing for clients across the country that I’ve never met, clients who have no real knowledge about copywriting but, unfortunately, think that it means lots of painfully obvious puns and screaming exclamation marks to emphasise every headline or sub head.

Do I give them what they want, or try to set them straight?  It’s a hard one, because for me, reading a corny pun (how many aren’t?) is like hearing nails being dragged across a blackboard and an exclamation mark often infers “cheap”, rather than exciting.  I can write them, but it’s always going to be painful.

Posted by Ian Minter

Around April last year (2009), we received a telephone enquiry from a business consultant in IT. He wanted a quote for rewriting his company website.

His business, IT consultancy, sounded interesting – if you could make your way through the jargon (the design was already set, so we had to work around that). We gave him two options, one to simply re-write his website, another that included what we call a ‘mini-strategy’ – a brand strategic workshop, that allows us to then provide a tagline and more strategic creative direction. Many people don’t understand the importance of this (and don’t want to spend the extra money), so we were surprised when he chose the brand workshop option. To us, a sign that the person (or organisation) takes their marketing, and their company, seriously.

The workshop went well, and we found Jonathan thoughtful, eloquent and genuinely interested in his chosen field of work. We were impressed. Once it ended, we casually asked him a bit more about himself.

Suddenly, this slightly serious young man changed personality. His face lit up. He leaned across the table. His eyes had a glint in them.

“Actually,” he beamed, “my real passion is food.”

He then proceeded to spent the next half an hour enthralling us (no, I’m not being sarcastic – his enthusiasm was mesmerising) with his love of the technicality of cooking: how he worked at no cost at a Gordon Ramsey restaurant in London, just because he wanted the experience, how Heston Blumenthal is his absolutely hero.

He walked away with a spring in his step that he didn’t arrive with. He was serious and enthusiastic about his IT business. However, he clearly adored food.

So, when we discovered that our client, Jonathan Daddia, was a finalist in the 2010 series of Masterchef (we’ve never watched the series before), we weren’t surprised, but we were delighted.

He may not make it to the end. Whatever the result we found him terrific to work with – appreciative, clever and perceptive . He praised the subsequent creative presentation after his workshop, didn’t change a word of the first draft of the copy – and, he paid his invoice the same day in was issued – all a rarity in our industry.

Personally, I found him a very genuine individual – I think people ( TV viewers) are confusing what they call ‘smugness’ with quiet thoughtfulness and a dash of shyness. (This has taught me never to judge anyone simply on their tv ‘persona’ .)

Although we’d love him to win, there was a victory of some sorts the other night – he met (and then cooked for) his hero, Heston Blumenthal. Although I didn’t see the ‘cooking for’ episode (he may have lost his appetite for Heston, you know, never meet your heroes etc.), the night he met him, his face glowed.

Congratulations and good luck Jonathan. Highway 101/Words 101 hope you win. If a new career as a chef beckons, the IT industry would be poorer without you.

Posted by Dana Minter

I’m sure there are people who sing as they sit down to face the blank computer screen, itching to get words out, bouncing on their typing chair, struggling to contain their enthusiasm.  They are probably the same type of folk who leap out of bed in the morning, or sing “Oh what a beautiful morning” in the shower.

Don’t know about you, but this type of behaviour just isn’t natural in my book. They’ve either been reading too many of those self-help books and are taking them way too seriously, or they’re close to running on empty, just on the brink of a serious crash and burn. Trust me, something isn’t right.

I say this because I know that after writing words every day for 25 years, it doesn’t just happen. A blank page is still a blank page, that just stares back at you, unhelpfully.  No, words always seem to appear in fits and starts, sentences start to form slowly and after a while a whole paragraph seems to hang together. Then, after a while, the brain gets into the swing of things and knows where it’s going.  Eventually, words appear faster and the end is visible.

I don’t know how the thoughts are formed, or where the thread comes from. They just arrive in front of me and I watch as the process continues. When it’s over, the whole business can actually feel quite enjoyable, despite the painful, always difficult start.  What a funny way to make a living.

Posted by Ian Minter

What is copywriting, anyhow?

We call ourselves copywriters because we’ve worked in the ad industry for a long time and that’s what writers are called in ad agencies. And when we write words, we call it copy. So, we don’t really think about it, although it does seem to cause some confusion for some of our clients.

Many people don’t associate copy with words at all. One (ex) client seemed to think that we were charging him for copyright, at least that was his reason not to pay our invoice for copywriting his brochures.

Others ask for professional writers, scriptwriting services, creative writing or business writing, all of which is fine by us. Whatever anyone calls it, it’s all copywriting to us.

Yes, but what do they actually do?

Mostly, we take the information provided to us and turn it into writing, or words, that will convey information in an interesting manner – that will inform, sell, educate, persuade, depending on the project. Needless to say, a business document will be written quite differently to, say, a sales brochure. It’s our job to set the right tone and manner for the appropriate target market/customer.

However, we don’t just write words. Our agency marketing experience ensures that we tend to start with what we call, a creative concept, or you might call a “big idea”. This tends to dictate the overall direction for any given job.

Copywriters also write headlines that capture attention. This is a very specific skill, learned from writing print ads, posters and brochures that demand attention to be effective. Nowadays we could be just as likely to be using these same skills for writing websites, blogs or twitter.

Another “skill’ we copywriters take for granted is that we always try to convey information with the minimum number of words. Enough to convey the required message effectively, without ever being verbose. When writing, we assume that the reader may ( most likely will!) have a low threshold of boredom. So, we believe, in getting in there, making our point and getting out.

This is the opposite of the approach taken by clients when they write about themselves, or what they do. They take the view that the world wants to read the complete book on their specific profession, be it cement making or conveyancing. Unfortunately,  having an understanding of your job, doesn’t mean you’re the best person to write about it.

They’re very good, whatever they are

Sometimes our clients just fail to grasp what we do completely. We once worked for a very pleasant and intelligent lady who had been appointed the marketing person for a very large financial firm.  She had briefed us on many different projects over the course of two or so years, including brochures and a national print ad campaign, which had all proven successful.

We were about to start work on another project when she announced that she’d hired some professional brochure writers to work on the job, to help us out. We sat there nonplussed, before we pointed out that was exactly what we did for a living, so we didn’t really need “help”.  She seemed genuinely surprised, although I’m not sure we ever did discover what she thought our day jobs might have been.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether people understand what copywriters do, as long as they find us useful, and pay us now and then.

Posted by Ian Minter