Yes, People Read. They Even Read Ads.

As a copywriter who cares about craft and nuance and style, I'm peeved every day.

Or every work day at least.

"There's so many words."

"Let's make it shorter."

"No one reads copy."

Yes. I get it. You're super busy and simply glanced at it. In a meeting room. With zero sense of context.

It wasn't a direct mail piece waiting in your box.

It wasn't a brochure sitting on a counter at the bank.

It wasn't a headline you stumbled across in your facebook feed.

It was a piece of paper.

Handed to you.

To which you are obligated to respond, because that's how you get paid.

So you glanced at it and gave a canned answer.

That doesn't mean "people don't read copy."

It means you can't be bothered to you.

I take care to make sure that what I write is both well crafted, and meets the business objective.

It's what I've done for 20-something years.

So take that moment when you're formulating your canned response to tell me no one reads, to actually read it.

Then we can have a conversation about the actual work. Not some learned fear of long pieces of prose that was developed as a result of reading too many Russian novels.