CHAPTER 7
Here’s one
I made earlier
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A
ctually, here’s five – all real jobs for real clients, although
non-disclosure agreements oblige me to change the
names to protect the innocent. These examples give a
peek into my thinking/writing process and show how it’s possible
to Make It Interesting no matter how unpromising the product or
brief. Incidentally, ‘peek’ is the right word. It’s just not possible
to comprehensively describe what goes on in my head as I plan,
write and edit. Nor can I say with any real confidence, ‘Here I’m
using technique X, and here it’s technique Y’. Copywriting just
isn’t like that.
Example one – Poster
The job
A poster created as part of a campaign designed to promote a
new brand of rum to sophisticated spirit drinkers. The brief
made a big thing about how this rum shouldn’t exist – at every
stage its creator, a gnarled old guy called José Fernandez – had
triumphed against the odds. Specifically I had to mention how
long this rum has been around (70 years) and somehow antici-
pate and overcome objections to the fact that it comes from
Venezuela rather than the more usual Caribbean. They also
wanted my suggestion for a strapline or signoff.
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94 brilliant copywriting
The piece
I started thinking about José (a real person, although now dead)
and what he might have been like. Clearly he’d had to overcome
all manner of obstacles to realise his rum-making dreams. So
he’d probably become pretty feisty and irascible along the way.
Hmmm . . . feisty . . . rum . . . spirits . . . spirited. Slap on some
alliteration and there’s my strapline:
Spirited stuff
Now for the body copy. First I need to set the scene, so I go back
in time as a way of establishing credibility:
Over seventy years ago Señor José Fernandez, the son of a humble
Venezuelan fisherman, set out to distil the finest rum.
Now I need some drama, so I want to mention the fact that José
had to overcome many difficulties:
Naturally his plan was met with derision on all sides.
The ‘naturally’ bit hopefully creates a bit of interest along the
lines of ‘Why “naturally”? I’d like to know’. Next I use a classic
rhetorical structure called ‘the rule of three’ (‘I came, I saw, I
conquered’) to list the main difficulties José faced. These sen-
tences all start in the same way (‘They said’) – the result is a
neat, parallel structure that builds in intensity. I try to use
these to highlight some appealing feature of the product or
brand:
They said,‘José, come to your senses! Rum comes from the Caribbean,
not Latin America.’ ‘HA!’ I said, ‘It comes from wherever it is made
with love.’ They said, ‘The heat of Venezuela will ruin your rum’; I
showed it produces an intensely rich and complex spirit that is a
wonder to drink. They said, ‘Rum comes from old, well-established
names, not upstarts without experience’; but now my shelves they
groan with trophies!
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Now it’s time to build up to the signoff line by really hamming
up the spirited angle with a brief homage to Monty Python’s The
Life of Brian (‘My legs are grey, my eyes are old and bent’):
I am an old man, my eyes are dim and my time is past, yet to my
critics I say,‘I proved you wrong, you sons of dogs and donkeys!’
Finally, a headline. I’ve done a ‘rule of three’ thing once, so I try
it again based on the idea of José having the last laugh:
They laughed at my rum. They laughed at me. They’re not laughing
any more.
Nice and balanced, and in keeping with the body text. A spot of
polishing and I’m done.
Example two – Direct mailer
The job
A straightforward low-budget mailer for a repro facilities manage-
ment company. Its purpose was to get trade customers to renew
their service agreement.The brief emphasised how the protection
offered by such agreements can save customers serious money
and thankfully came with plenty of relevant info attached.
The piece
I started thinking about ‘protection’ and – shame on me –
thought it might be fun to treat the whole thing as some sort of
public health leaflet on erectile dysfunction, incontinence and
STD awareness. Don’t ask. A spot of Internet research on the
type of language used in such things gave me the title:
Are you properly protected?
Your most intimate questions answered
By A Doctor MD
Here’s one I made earlier 95
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