In these days of summer heat and relative calm, I am dedicating myself to doing some maintenance to my Facebook page. Nothing special, ordinary administration: remove a broken link, replace a YouTube video that is no more available, check that all posts are still in perfect shape, even after years. In doing this, I happened to repost, backdated, a post originaly published a few years ago. When you publish a backdated post, Facebook shows it back to your fanbase, but shows the date you chose instead of the actual publication date. Result? 34 shares and 212 reactions collected from the post, with a reach that far exceeded the number of likes to the page. All in less than two hours. Not bad.
But what was this very successful post about? Sales and Marketing, thanks to this advertisement by Crispin & Porter, miami advertising agency that today on the company website reports this beautiful presentation: “At Crispin Porter + Bogusky, our mission is to create the most written about, talked about, and outrageously effective work in the world”. A mission that should be everyone’s.
No wonder the work of a major American agency, with good people and a mission like this, has hit its mark. Especially because copy and visual work very well together to communicate exactly the advantage of marketing: tell stories, spark emotions, create experiences, engage. And to do that, you need a good story, as it happens here. You need to use that much invoked but also so much mistreated storytelling that is so fashionable today on social media, but that has always existed, even before it was called that.
Far be it from me to want to diminish the noble art of sales, certainly essential for every business. As I see it, marketing is nothing more than another powerful tool in the hands of the company. A tool that, if well used, also supports the seller’s work. So I don’t want to talk about sales, I want to talk about marketing.
This announcement is also reported in the volume “Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: The Classic Guide to Creating Great Ads” by Luke Sullivan and Edward Boches with the comment “A smart strategy can take the same message and make it work better”. And that’s exactly what a copywriter does: take a message and make it more effective. This is what we must always remember when creating a Facebook or Google ad, when we write texts for a website, when we create a landing page: be effective. And to be effective you have to be heard, then capture the attention of the audience. And to capture the attention of the public you have to say things with imagination, originality and freshness. So said Bill Bernbach (the mad man who changed the language of advertising). And so we have to tell each other every day, when we put ourselves in front of a blank sheet to create a copy.
But this ad doesn’t speak to copywriters, creative directors, marketers, art directors. They know what marketing does. This ad speaks to everyone else: business executives, small business owners, everyone who looks at marketing as the first resource to cut (“Those who stop advertising to save money are like stopping the clock to save time,” Henry Ford said). This ad speaks to those who sooner or later in life told a web designer “For the copy of the site there is no problem, I write it myself!” (and I assure you that so many good web designers every time they hear this phrase recommend themselves to all saints, because they know that their work will be more difficult. But not only this: they also know that the result will be worse). This ad speaks to whom at least once in his career he said “It’s not a big deal! I can do it too” by looking at a Social Media Manager, a Copywriter or a Graphic Designer.
Here’s what it takes: it takes imagination, experience, ability to synthesise. It takes so many attempts gone wrong. It takes so many hours to give birth to a sentence of a few words. It takes work. And it doesn’t matter if you are convinced that you know how to write in correct Italian, if you have been the author of a book or if for work you write technical manuals every day. It’s another job.
Because, as Pasquale Barbella says: “At this point you may want to know what we mean by ‘knowing how to write’. It is clear that anyone with medium capacity can, without excessive effort, hold the pen in their hand. With a few years of school and some good readings, you can even learn to master points and commas with a certain skill. Knowing how to write, however, is another thing. It means ‘being able to get read’.
