First, get your story straight.

I’m frequently asked my opinion on communications, marketing and advertising. I’m usually loathe to give advice for free. (Like you, I prefer to be paid for my expertise.) When it’s friends or family or colleagues I’ve worked with closely, I tend to be a bit freer with it than my bank account would prefer.

Lately, there has been a trend in the questions. Whether from start-ups or established companies looking to grow, the questions have basically centered around, “Where do I start?”

Sure, they’re phrased a bit more specifically e.g.:

·         I’ve got a business plan. When do I need to think about marketing and advertising?

·         We’ve done well for years, but business is slowing down. How do we turn that around?

The simple answers are:

Start thinking about your story when you start thinking about your business.

AND

Advertising to capture new customers is the only consistent way to grow a business.

If you’re just starting, communications must be part of the business plan. If you’ve been in business for years, communications must be constant and consistent. I’ve often argued that the three most important conversations you have when starting a business are with an attorney, an accountant and a communications pro.

You need to be sure you’re doing everything according to the law. You need to be sure you’re ready to take on the financial needs ahead. And you need to be sure you have the right story to tell the right people to actually have revenue.

So what’s the story you need to tell? Answer one simple question: Why are you in business?

Answering that question will be the seed of your brand voice. It will be the ur-statement that grows into everything else you do. It will shape the language you use. It will define how you describe the benefits to your customers. It will determine whether others will care about your company enough to give you money.

More than that, it will help you focus your decisions as you grow. Because it will be the defining piece of how you talk about and share your company.

I can point to companies that only had a good story and became huge (Theranos comes to mind). I can also point to companies with superior products that no longer exist because they had no story or changed it so frequently that no one knew what they hell they represented other than making money (looking at you Yahoo! and Blockbuster).

If you’re thinking about where to start, it’s with your story. It’s with why you’re in business.

If you’re not thinking about it, why the hell not? It’s more important to your short-term and long-term success than you can possibly imagine.

Timesheets Killed Advertising Creativity

The moment you sell your services based on the amount of time it takes, is the moment you lose all ability to control your value.

By reducing ideas and deliverables to a finite number of hours, there was an immediate timetable place on how much longer there would be outstanding creativity and career longevity in the advertising industry.

The pace of that slide was increased by the consolidation of the advertising industry into a few holding companies.

Holding companies beholden to shareholders. Shareholders who like more hours worked at lower wages.

The easiest way to reduce agency overhead—because agencies only really have human capital—is to reduce salaries. That means less experience. And that means less creativity.

Yes, I know. All that youth has been specifically trained in tasks. They know how to run the machines and the widgets and the gizmos.

They don't have the first clue about how to use any of that technical expertise to actually solve a business problem.

They've not been shown what that looks like.

And there are no elder stateswomen/men to serve as mentors.

So the work becomes more technical and less creative.

And we all suffer.

Even Picasso knew that experience was the ultimate master of craft. He stated it simply as, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

Every Company Needs A Copy Chief

Writing, and more specifically copywriting, is more important than most people imagine. To put it bluntly, it is the foundation of every company's growth.

It's the foundation because it's how a company presents itself to customers, constituents and consumers in the world at large.

Yet most people treat it as a fungible item and assume that a basic grasp of speaking the language is enough to qualify someone to weigh in on copy. I've lost count of the number of times I've received feedback that starts with a variation of, "I was showing this to the receptionist/call center/woman who is currently married to me ..."

Oddly though, those same people never have a chance to comment on the creative brief, analyze the data or meet about the marketing strategy. Nope. But a pulse is all that's required to comment on the outcome of all of that input. 

With so many commenting on a company's voice, that voice becomes fragmented. 

Call centers don't have a unified script.

CEOs slip from talking points into narcissistic, company-killing diatribes.

Print ads don't work with TV spots don't work with online video don't work with corporate websites. And that leaves out the wonderful world of social media where there are constant public failures because of the wrong message/tone/moment.

To help ensure that a company's copy (aka The Brand Voice) remains clear and consistent, there should be one person at the top of the food chain who is concerned about every syllable, every comma (regardless of whether it's serial or not) and every call to action.

That's the only way to ensure that a company's most valuable and most undervalued asset can be appropriately handled.

Forget asking the call center/receptionist/spouse-du-jour about the latest email marketing efforts.

Ask the copy chief.

Then pay close attention to the answer. 

Pride Of Authorship

I write a lot of ads.

Some of them aren't ads as most people think of such things. They're direct mail pieces, or emails, or web banners, or web pages, or infographics, or articles (aka content), or brochures, or something else that isn't popping to mind.

I treat each one as crucial.

I take care to craft copy that makes sense, fits the "brand voice" and flows in a way that should interrupt, inform and induce action with the audience.

I am careful with the construction of the words, the flow of the thoughts and the point I'm trying to make.

I am not, however, the sort of copywriter who treats his work as inviolate.

If there are suggestions to improve it, make them. They might be better than what I had written.

What you shouldn't do is rewrite my work and pass it off as mine.

If you rewrite it, own it.

Then deal with the consequences of crappy copy.

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.