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.

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.

A Sharp Knife And A Sturdy Pan

Kitchen gadgets come in an endless variety. So many of them appear to have a singular purpose.

Empanada maker. Salad spinner. Spiralizer. Avocado slicer. Watermelon slicer. Tomato slicer. Apple corer.

The list goes on and on and on.

Yet when you begin to cook your own food, read recipes or pick up a book about the craft of cooking, there are invariably just two tools you must have (in addition to a stove/oven)—a sharp knife and a sturdy pan.

That's it. Two items can help you prepare the vast majority of food you'll consume.

Your ability to use those items to create something delicious then relies on the ingredients you use, your skill with them which is often based on experience and practice, and your imagination.

You do know you don't have to stick to a recipe word for word, right? Unless you're baking, and that's when the chemistry involved is more precise.

Advertising is the same.

You need art.

You need copy.

You need attention to craft and the ability to generate mountains of ideas.

Banner ads. Billboards. Brochures. Content marketing stories. Long form print. Online video. Radio. Short form print. Social media ads or posts. TV. Websites. White papers.

The specific medium doesn't matter. If you're a copywriter, you can write ads in any format. If you're an art director, you can design in any format.

The fundamentals don't change.

Only the way the "experts" pitch them to clients and make hiring decisions change.

The Gig Economy Is Killing Expertise

Someone asked me about freelance apps and crowdsourcing creative today. It's a topic that always pisses me off.

So this is more of a half-baked rant than anything else.

Finding freelance work as a creative professional is a hard hustle. In addition to doing outstanding work each and every time, you have to cultivate relationships and manage expectations. That way you can develop repeat customers.

Freelance apps and websites are making it harder.

More than that, they're undercutting the value of expertise.

Everything is reduced to a blind bid; and mostly at prices that would make even the any-minimum-wage-is-too-high crowd blush.

Hell. Fivver is predicated on the idea that you can get professional creativity for five bucks. And the offers on UpWork are ridiculous "$20 for a series of articles" or Of course there are crowdsourcing options like 99 Designs where only the "winner" gets paid.

Give away creative ideas for free? No. And you know what you can go do to yourself for asking.

As Don Draper said, "That's the job. I give you money. You give me ideas."

If you want my ideas, I get your money. Period. And it had better be more than the spare change in your pocket.

Outside the creative arena things are even more awful on the pay-scale front. Uber. Lyft. Task Rabbit. Takl. They're all digital plantation owners getting rich off the hard work of others.

Of course, that leads me down the rabbit hole to LinkedIn, Yelp, FourSquare and countless sites that generate revenue on content they get for free.

I'll be writing a lot more about this topic.

And as I do so, I'll be reminding everyone I can that no one buys the cow if they're getting the milk for free.

Creativity Requires Tenacity

Standing in my garden among several hundred onions and garlic, I gazed down at one of the many nemesis I had been facing. The current one was a bit of henbit (or lamium aplexicaule if you prefer) that simply needed to be removed.

Yes, I know, some folks like to eat it. I prefer to think of henbit as a yet another weed that needs to be removed from my vegetables, and fed to the chickens. I'd been at it for a couple of hours wdhen I'd spotted this weed. During that time, I became more and more disturbed by the pervasiveness of the weeds.

This particular piece of henbit was so large, and encroaching on my garlic, that I wondered how I hadn't seen it first.

Then I recalled the first ad I ever wrote.

After I read the creative brief (which I helped write - but that's another story for another time), I began work on the project with headlines.

I first wrote the most obvious and on-the-nose headline I could imagine, "We sell insurance and investment products, and you should buy them from us."

I started with the obvious, because it focused my attention on what the ad needed to convey. It was a conscious effort to reduce the creative brief into something more the length of a haiku. Plus, I knew it could only get better.

Then I started writing more headlines.

And more headlines.

Page after page of headlines on my legal pad. And I had a whiteboard filled with words that struck a nerve with me.

Most of them were awful. Just limp, little, half-formed ideas begging to be tossed in the waste.

So I started weeding. Pulling and cutting and getting rid of the ones that were just taking up space and getting in the way.

After the weeding, I had to plant. So I wrote more headlines.

Another page on the pad filled quickly.

As I wrote, I kept weeding until I had a dozen or so headlines that I thought were worth sharing with my Art Director partner. (Yes boys and girls, back in those days there were still copywriter/art director teams.)

When I showed him what I had, he looked at the one I had written at the top of my pad, and said, "That's brilliant. Why'd you bother writing more?"

The reality was, that I'd written that particular headline as one of the last ones. I just happened to like it so I wrote it at the top of a new page on my pad before showing him. Sure, I'd written a few more after; however, it was hardly the first one I wrote, regardless of how it must have appeared when I handed him a notepad with that headline at the top.

Just like the henbit that perturbed me, the headline we settled on to pitch to the client wasn't the first one. It just became more and more obvious as I weeded a lot of others out of the way.

I didn't stop at one ugly headline, any more than I'd stop after pulling one ugly weed.

I kept working until I'd found something worth writing.

The weeds will always return. There will always be more for me to yank, and feed to the chickens or toss into the compost bin.

And I'll be there, just as I was when trying to write that first ad.

Because I'm far more tenacious than any weed.