Sophie Dennis

Dear Michael Wolff,

You are right. Advertising needs good writers. Like you, I get frustrated by bad writing. I get frustrated when my clients care more about how their stuff looks, than whether the words are right. I get frustrated with the ‘communication professionals’ my clients hire, whose job it is to sell stuff and sell it through words, seem so bad at them.

And yet, I can’t agree with your article in USA Today “Michael Wolff: What ad biz needs are writers”.

Here’s why.

(In no particular order because I’m busy, which means, as I’ll tangentially explain, that I do not have time to write something great for you.)

• A lack of good writing isn’t why advertising isn’t working anymore, though I expect it isn’t helping.

• Writing well is hard and takes more time than people think. If people can communicate their ideas faster and more effectively through a powerpoint slide than a memo, perhaps they should.

• That doesn’t mean that there aren’t times when conveying ideas through the written word wouldn’t be superior. If only people were able to express those ideas well in words. Which often they aren’t.

• Writing is not “print”.

• Facebook is writing. Twitter is writing. Good writers thrive there. Brevity is the soul of wit and all that. You don’t get much briefer than 140 characters. Just ask @stephenfry. Maybe all the good writers are too busy updating their Twitter accounts and getting rich self-publishing to take the advertising shilling? (No, probably not. But I digress…)

• Content isn’t just words. Photos are content. Visuals are content. Video is content. This often involves words even if they aren’t expressed as blocks of letters.

• Steve Jobs was a Great Man, but that doesn’t mean he was universally right about everything, in the world, ever. Maybe he was right to judge his advertising agency on the quality of their writers (I certainly would) but “Steve Jobs did it this way, so it must be the right way” is ridiculous. And getting tiresome.

• I love words, but I’m not sure “text-heavy copy” is ever necessary. Did I mention brevity is the soul of wit? The mark of great writing is usually fewer words. (Just as great code is often less code.)

• The most powerful ideas are those that are simply expressed. Nike “Just Do It”. BMW “The Ultimate Driving Machine”. The genius here is not really the writing, but the process of boiling down the mess of brand and message and desire to its simplest possible expression. That’s what great writers do. And that takes a lot of time, and you don’t have much to show for it. What? three words, maybe four. How long can it take to write four words? I can type 60 words in a minute…

• Dangerous, in a world where the value of your job may be measured by volume (like the programmer, judged on how many lines of code she commits a day) and you can’t measure a slogan’s impact in Facebook likes.

• Which doesn’t leave much room for those who stare out the window all day, in search of just the right four words.

• Which leads me to think…

Perhaps the problem is really, as you say, that “the bureaucrats have taken over from the creatives”. In that world of big data, creative work is being judged on quantitative metrics. “If you can’t measure it, how do you know it’s working?” is becoming “it can’t be working if we can’t measure it”. Dangerous.

Is that why advertising isn’t working anymore?

Perhaps it never did and now we just know it, thanks to the bureaucrats metrics?

I suspect we just don’t like adverts that much. I suspect we never did. We just didn’t have much else to look at during a three minute break in Coronation Street. There was an opportunity for a great piece of creative advertising to grab us. But there is so much amazing creativity out there now. And it is so easily accessible. Even during a three minute break in Coronation Street. We are no longer so thirsty for it that we will drink the sand at the end of the advertiser’s mirage. Will more, better creativity and great writing in advertising fix that, or are all the great creatives just working elsewhere, because that’s where the audience have gone?

Just a thought.