What can a copywriter and a web developer create together?

Part 1: The discovery

A coder and a copywriter. It’s not a common pairing in the creative industries. We break the cycle of copywriter-art director, designer-developer that you typically find in most agencies or creative partnerships. It’s a novelty. It’s exciting. It’s disruptive. For real. Not client disruptive, where they want to launch a new flavour of water, dye it neon green and call it Chernobyl Bilge. That’s disruptive too. But not in a good way.

No, this is a good kind of disruptive, and the industry is ripe for a bit of upset now and then.

But there’s just one question, what do we actually do together? What can we create? How do we fit the pieces of this particular jigsaw together? What happens next?

I am writing this Medium post, partly to figure it out in my own brain but also to put across an alternative view to others within the creative industries on the new ways of working. Where are the opportunities and possibilities?

First of all, a copywriter and a web developer have complimentary skill sets. There’s no doubt in my mind about that. We’re both problem solvers, but we solve different kinds of problems. Copywriters solve messaging problems — we figure out where the human value is in a product or service, what is going to really grab the attention of the right group of people and then we go write messaging around that idea. Web developers solve functionality problems. In short, they make things work. They find the bugs in concepts, builds, and apps then patiently problem solve until everything is functioning beautifully. The best web developer’s work is invisible — you don’t notice it, because the digital product that you are using, simply functions beautifully.

So, there’s complimentary skill sets — shaping messaging, brand strategy and making stuff function beautifully. Awesome.

It seems to me that there is an obvious point at which these vital skillsets naturally converge, and that is creating meaningful interaction and digital experiences for the end user.

Sometimes, during projects, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that whatever you are building, be it a website, an app, marketing material or packaging — this is going to be used by someone. There will be a human interaction, a visceral experience which can either raise the consumer up to new heights of joy, or cause endless disappointment and/or despair. Obviously this is a little simplistic, they could also be thoroughly uninterested, which is far worse than either joy or despair. After all, the opposite of love is not hate, it is blind indifference. Digression aside, an interaction will occur and you can never be quite sure how it will be received. Because humans are weird.

So if we focus on facilitating meaningful interactions and experiences which cover all digital touchpoints for a brand, then it makes sense to adopt the lean startup approach of prototyping, testing and improving iteratively. This is in contrast to the traditional approach across the creative industries, which is launch products to great fan fare with a polished, multi-platform advertising and marketing campaign, only to find the market research was useless.

This leads me to an interesting concept — lean creativity. Can we prototype, test and improve creative output using an iterative method like tech startups? Now I’m super excited about this, because whilst A/B testing can be useful for copy and design, it has limited value for one crucial reason: it doesn’t provide the why. Why one piece of copy flops whilst another produces shit hot conversion rates. Why one audience prefers one logo, but a different segment prefers another. The why is crucial to iterative improvement.

Without prototyping, we never discover the why.

Without understanding the why, how can we improve our work? How can we know whether we are polishing a gem or a turd?

Times are changing; the startup method of trialling concepts, failing fast and moving forward is spreading out through tech into other industries. The creative industry as a whole, but particularly advertising, marketing and design need to take note and learn lessons from the tech firms.

In short, us creatives need to learn from the developers, and vice versa. Collaboration is key, with designers, with product managers, with entrepreneurs; in short those with a vision and those with the skills to create it must collaborate from the outset in order to create the best work.

We can’t afford to work in virtual silos anymore.