The Case for Great Copy Online
Copywriters. Content marketers. Pencil magicians. Call them what you want. Chances are you’re underestimating them.
Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.
To be fair, though, it’s (probably) not your fault. This, for instance, is how one big-shot copywriter advertizes his own services: “You could write sales copy yourself, or you could get back to work that matters […]”
A necessary evil. That is often the standard perception of copywriting. Not as an opportunity to attract new business; not an effective way to represent yourself and your services; not a versatile tool in the branding toolbox; not a communicative screwdriver to connect all the disparate elements of your organization.
Rather: a hurdle to be cleared. So, best get someone else to do it.
Don’t get me wrong. Unless you’re a capable writer yourself and have the time to put in the effort that most writing takes, it’s often a good thing to get someone else to do it.
What I’m talking about is whom you get to do it.
Even in the field of content marketing, which one might expect to be a bastion of great writing, the actual crafting of content is often subordinate to the work that follows (i.e. reach). Expanding the potential reach of the content far outweighs ensuring that the content can navigate the far reaches asked of it.
Consequently, even here any amount of copywriting is typically outsourced, which shouldn’t, in theory, be as a perilous an option as it sadly often is — but that’s a discussion for another day (my upcoming article, actually, if you’re interested).
From the never-ending Facebook carousels on your wall and the 5–15 seconds unskippable YouTube ads to that full-screen time-delayed pop-up-tarpaulin which eclipses just about every other website out there like an over-weight, overly-zealous Secret Service agent diving in front of the US President before, out of nowhere, he’s zoinked in the toupé by a rogue golf ball, poor writing is ubiquitous.
Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.
Just as the rest of the modern world, you’ve been forced to endure a plethora of ads regurgitating the same old home shopping tropes and sales-points in a vain attempt to hawk a product you either don’t need or have already bought, because when you spent five minutes last week googling the pros and cons of pineapple on pizza, you failed to realize that that simultaneously constitutes a not-so-secret mating ritual call to any stale pizza-and-take-out remarketing campaign out there, cluttering your inbox and/or feed for the (un)foreseeable future with lurid (or worse: generic *shudders*) offers for pineapple pizza.
In reality, though, more often than not, the problem isn’t actually the volume (informational inundation is, after all, the status quo of the Internet); the problem is quality, or the lack thereof.
The business of advertizing, in spite of its aging pedigree, the prevalence of social media, the data mining, the occasional security leaks, and a multitude of other non-invasive and quite-so-invasive ways of luring information out of any target demographic, has, surprisingly, not actually improved much over the century.
On the contrary.
In an often misguided search for quantity and scale-up, copywriting and content marketing winds up drowning in the dregs of its own unreachable ambition.
The line of thinking goes something like this: In the sea of advertizing content that is the Internet and social media, how best to stand out to anyone bold enough to surf its rippled surface?
By making waves.
And how to make the biggest, most noticeable, unavoidable, must-try, have-to-buy, one-time-exclusive-offer wave that is bound to catch any casual consumer’s attention and force them to whip out their wallet before anyone can say Titanic?
Icebergs. The bigger, the better.
I didn’t say it had to make much sense. As a matter of fact, what I’m trying to say it that is doesn’t make sense.
Rather than focusing on creating content that’s viable on its own merits, the vast majority of time, money, research, and effort is spent chasing the illusive white whale that is consumer prediction and targeted advertizing in the vain hope that you’re lucky enough to strike the consumer in the exact right spot of their consumer journey with an adequately generic piece of content that might just happen to be something they’re looking for.
In other words, well-crafted content that’s capable of attracting consumer interest on a basis of substantiality is tossed aside in the favour of mass-produced nontent intended to hijack a surfer’s time on the web.
What is true, however, is that the digital spaces we traverse on a daily basis are, indeed, much like interconnected bodies of water. They bob and weave almost as if by a will of their own, and if there is any journey that encapsulates the spirit of our current social media age (like Roald Amundsen’s journeys defined the age of exploration or Magellan’s that of the age of discovery) it is the adequate parsing of information and consumer acumen required to navigate social media that defines our present.
Which is to say, whether a millenial, a boomer, a centagenarian, or a baby, there is no one alive in the modern world today who hasn’t come across uninvited advertizing. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, everyone has come across poor advertizing. And needless to say, poor, uninvited advertizement runs the risk of antagonising the consumer, which is the anathema of any ad.
Or, well, of most ads.
Advertizing may of course be poor for a whole variety of reasons. But to single out one of the most ubiqituous ones: a lack of relevancy. And depending on the context, relevancy in terms of both advertizement and content creation can be further divided into different areas of meaning.
One is the aforementioned pizza example, where remarketing ads are irrelevant because of poor targeting. Another and far more expansive has to do with human connection and interpersonal relationships (you know, what the Internet and social media is supposed to be about). A third, and most pertinent in our case, is related to the growing average level of digital and advertizement literacy online.
Over the past century, most of us have become quite good at detecting when we’re being sold to, and social media has only made us better at this.
This is why good copywriting matters.
Mastering the craft and theories of great writing may be reserved for the few, but enjoying it is for the many. Just like good music or good food, good writing is something we all recognize when we see it, in part because it’s less a question of knowing good writing from bad than it is feeling it.
Because sometimes, a few blessed sometimes, a cool ad or a great piece of content stands out, and it catches your attention. Whether you want, need, or have even heard of its product/service before, something about it makes you not skip it or close it or scroll past it.
Maybe it’s an inventive YouTube ad for William Painter sunglasses that you don’t need but nevertheless still want? Or perhaps a big corporation doing something boldly human? Or, say, that Neil Gaiman Masterclass ad? Or maybe it’s just a silly and (mildly speaking) colorful ad for the Squatty Potty.
Regardless of what the context is, where the content appears, and what its ultimate purpose is, great copywriting catches the reader’s or viewer’s attention by being something speaking to someone — not a generic piece of nontent trying to reach everyone by saying nothing.
One of the more fundamental reasons why copywriting work is underestimated is precisely because of its egalitarian nature.
Writing, much like any other artform, such as painting, sculpting, figure-skating, is something most people can do. Some are bad at it; some are okay at it; a few are even good at it. Being great, however, regardless of the field, takes effort and determination.
Which is true of any vocation, artistic or otherwise. In order to master a craft, you have to, well, master the craft, and no one is born with innate mastery.
In other words, my brother is a carpenter. He builds houses for a living. It would be absurd for me to assume, much less attempt, that I could build a house without the necessary skill, tools, and know-how. The results would be, quite literally, ruinous.
Sadly, the same can be said of the vast majority of copy clogging up the Internet, ruins where there could be mansions.
Please don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.