For those of you who are only satisfied by salacious revelations from my private life, here’s a bombshell. I bought this box of pepper over the weekend.
I was looking for whole peppercorns but I was in a rush so I didn’t read the box properly. I just looked at the picture of whole peppercorns and thought ‘does exactly what it says on the tin.’ Of course it turned out to be ground pepper. Bloody Ronseal.
Which goes to show that readers often pay a lot more attention to the pictures than they do to the words. So make sure your pictures count.
Categories: Copywriting
Tagged: Copywriting, pictures, reader, words
We’re re-launching the Carphone help site in a couple of weeks. In preparation for this, I’ve been writing and re-writing reams of copy. And one of the things I’ve been trying to do is make it more amusing. We had a survey of the current site done you see, and a common piece of feedback was that it was dry and lacked personality.
This is a mobile phone retailer’s help and support site remember. Humour isn’t exactly a natural bedfellow. And corporate humour is a very difficult thing to pull off. If you make cheap beer it’s just about possible, but there are thousands of terrible attempts for every half decent ‘Carlsberg don’t do nightclubs’ gag.
A big part of the problem is that anything even remotely risqué is bound to offend someone. And the last thing you can afford to be is offensive. Which traps you in the tricky region between cracker jokes and coming up with something genuinely witty. Regular readers will realise I’ve got no chance of the latter.
The following example illustrates the problem eloquently. I needed to write a strapline for a page explaining what happens if a customer isn’t at home to receive a delivery. I wrote:
What happens if I’m not at home when my delivery comes?
We’ll break a window to get in.
Naturally I was delighted my effort. I strode over to my fellow copywriters to show them my good work and was met with the snotty, short-sighted and probably entirely correct response that I couldn’t write that in a million years. Our target audience is not 20-something drinkers of Danish lager. It’s absolutely anybody, and there’s always a risk that one of these people might get the wrong end of the stick and start taping up their windows using methods unseen since the blitz.
In the end I settled on ‘Don’t worry – we won’t break any windows’, which isn’t nearly as funny (though I’m aware my first idea was hardly something to have Jimmy Carr fretfully turning over to the cold side of the pillow).
Ultimately I hope I can persuade the company that the (slightly) edgier tone is the way to go. I’ve been working a lot on our tone of voice over the last few months, and I think it’s the companies who take the risks that manage to develop a real ‘personality’. There’s a big difference between saying ‘let’s be spiky and out there’ and actually meaning it.
This post doesn’t really have a conclusion. It just goes to show the travails I’m going through to bring you the funniest mobile phone site in the world. Hopefully I’ll be able to bring you a more considered solution in a few weeks’ time.
Categories: Copywriting
Tagged: being edgy, humour, tone of voice
I’ve reached that stage that most bloggers seem to get to. The stage where they realise that writing a new blog every few days is pretty hard work, and give up.
This lack of self-discipline is pretty disappointing, but I can console myself with the fact that not I’m not the first blogger this has happened to. What I’m planning to do now is to concentrate on quality, not quantity, and write a few decent posts each month, rather than kidding anyone that I’m the kind of blogging king who’s going to be knocking out three posts a day.
So keep checking back for more thrilling insights into the glamorous world of this hard-living, rule-breaking, self-deluding copywriter. Just don’t check back too often.
Categories: Copywriting · Social media and the web
Tagged: blog, laziness
