Photo: Josefin Ollermark
On 11 August 1987, I started my own company called Goddard Writing and I have been running the business ever since; that makes thirty years of writing headlines. How do you like this particular one? I hope you get the pun: I am referring to the advertising branch and in the photo I am holding a branch!
Actually, the first rule I was taught while studying copywriting at college was no puns! Puns are terrible! The temptation as a budding copywriter is to write a headline with a pun that you think is really funny or clever. The trouble is that half your audience will not get the double meaning and therefore will not find the headline at all amusing, especially if English is not their native language. So rule No. 1: Avoid puns!
What I learnt at college and in my first years at advertising agencies is that copywriting is about selling products and not about showing how clever the copywriter is. I learnt that it is easy to get attention (by holding up a branch, for example) but more difficult to get attention in a way that is relevant to the product or service.
Please forgive me for using a pun here but I couldn’t resist it after all these years of avoiding them. Now that I have gained your attention, allow me to reminisce a little about 30 years in a fast-changing branch.
My first ever computer back in 1987 was an “IBM-compatible” Amstrad: a bulky machine where you stored data on a floppy disk. Even in those days, Apple was popular in advertising and in 1991 I went on to buy the first ever battery-powered Macintosh Portable with a narrow fold-up screen. It cost more than US $7,000 at that time. In fact, it wasn’t actually that portable and weighed about 7 kilos (16 pounds) and was 10 cm thick (4 inches). It came in a thick case padded with foam. On a flight, I naively checked in my new portable Mac into the hold luggage thinking the thick padding would protect it. I happily watched my computer disappear down the luggage belt relieved that I won’t have the inconvenience of carrying it on board. When I retrieved the computer off the conveyor belt at my destination, I took it home and found to my surprise that it would not start. No amount of repairs could restore light to the screen or retrieve the data. That was an expensive mistake but I had never travelled with a computer on a plane before.
I can remember the fax was a fast means of communication in the old days. I used to fax urgent copy to clients including my hand-written proofreading changes that became barely readable for the recipient at the other end. I had to stand over the fax machine to make sure all the pages went through. And when the client had changes, I usually had to take them by fax, verbally over the phone or face to face at a meeting. There was no such thing as word processing with “tracked changes” in those days.
I had a client in Denmark called Novozymes for whom I used to write articles in their customer magazine. When the articles were approved, I used to copy them onto a disk and have them couriered to Denmark from Sweden via the hydrofoil from Malmö to Nyhavn in Copenhagen. (The Öresund Bridge was opened later in 2000 and killed the hydrofoil traffic.) There was no such thing as email for sending articles. I remember in the mid-1990s the first time someone was able to send a piece of text to my computer via a telephone line. First we had to make a connection and then the piece could be transferred to me. It took about 20 minutes just to set up the connection. Not soon after that we all acquired our own email addresses with that strange at sign. Now we take for granted the instant receipt of an email. In fact, we probably curse the large number of emails and spam we receive each day.
The 1980s and 1990s prior to the coming of Internet were the days of print. In the 1980s, there was a person at advertising agencies called a typographer whose job was to lay out advertising as mechanical artwork on boards. Sometimes when there were last-minute changes, the typographer would take a scalpel and cut out the incorrect text in order to replace it with the new typeset text. It would be glued onto the board with a toxic adhesive called Spray Mount. If you were really unlucky, some words or lines could drop off the board on the way to the printers and leave a gaping gap.
Today more and more advertising and editorial material is going online. Print has had its heyday and we live in an age of online news, content marketing and social media. The glossy customer magazine I used to work on for Novozymes went online in 2008.
Now we are used to reading or skimming through material on computer screens or phones. I hear that about 50% of people are reading web content on their mobile phones rather than on their computers. The format of these screens is forcing copywriters to concentrate their messages into fewer words. Nowadays a client will ask me for a web article of a maximum of 300 words whereas an article in a printed customer magazine could easily number 1,000 words.
At college back in 1979, there was a must-read book on the reading list by Marshall McLuhan called “The Medium is the Message”. So true. The medium determines how the message can be delivered and how it is received.
Indeed, I fear that I have written too many words here for the medium of a computer blog! Enough of this reminiscing about the good old days of print and paper. Instead, think of the present and all those trees my branch is saving.
By Peter Goddard