Copywriting is dead. Enter the era of Semantic Philanthropy.

You’ve heard that TV is dead. Facebook is dead. Twitter — yep. Information era, cognitive era, content era, objectivity era, era of the six-headed giraffe-snake — all dead.

While you were busy reading about all of that stuff, trying to keep up with what the hell was happening through a near-impenetrable haze of buzzwords, copywriting as you know it died quietly in its sleep, cold and alone.

That is to say, it’s dead.

The ‘era’ in which we now find ourselves is that of the Semantic Philanthropist, and that’s how we should be introducing ourselves at dinner parties, first dates and to anyone else who feels socially obliged to listen. Alternatively, you can try ‘Semanthropist’ if you’re running short on characters or self-respect.

Now, we ex-copywriters are expected to take the humanitarian approach to advertising, meaning we have to leave people well alone to their ad-free paradise. Our sole function is to swaddle consumers in our words like cooing parents. We’re not allowed to sell them anything or to have noticed anything about their lives and how it should influence their purchasing habits.

So what are the basic principles of Semantic Philanthropy, and how do they differ from the ancient art of copywriting? Here’s a quick rundown of what we know so far:

No more Shakespearing, wordmakingupery, or lexicopoeisis

Thanks to marketers, the English language is distended almost to bursting point. There’s no longer room to go ‘spearing (until recently known as neologising) your way into history with some lexical abomination you cooked up on your way into work this morning.

If you can’t say it in words that predate the time of your writing, don’t write it. If your idea or stratagem is so mind-bending or ineffable that it defies any possible combination of the 170,000+ words currently at work in the language, seek the help of a doctor, shaman, or perhaps orchestrate a career segue into writing absurdist books for children.

Deep Empathy is the new Big Data

Entire job roles, departments, and agencies have been formed to try and make sense of the endless sea of information generated by our online activity. Their findings are at best debatable, and at worst, swinging perilously in a crevasse of uncertainty by a paper-thin shred of credibility. Data was never strictly the copywriters’ remit, and it won’t be now; philanthropy requires a deeper understanding that can only truly come from being immersed in the user’s viewpoint.

Rather than spending weeks, months, and thousands of pounds looking at what we can and can’t extrapolate from this Delphic mass of numbers (and skewing the results by spending unusually long amounts of time inactively visiting the sites we’re trying to evaluate), the new, humanist approach will be to huddle in a dark, quiet room and spend 8 hours a day immersing yourself in the life of your consumer. How do their eyes feel? What’s in their nightmares? Etcetera.

There will no doubt be some teething problems with this approach, but you’ve got to break a few eggs if you want to build a post-capitalist egalitarian utopia using words alone.

Consumers want real stories

Brand storytelling was a staple of the copywriting era. Old news. No one cares where you made your first t-shirt, how your mission statement was conceived, or what you claim your values are.

Consumers want real stories, of love, loss, heartbreak, adventure. But they haven’t got all day, so you’d best make it quick. The average human attention span now sits somewhere around that of a stillborn goldfish. So we need real stories, real fast. Let’s say 6 words. With 6 words we can swaddle those consumers with snap-experiences that leave them feeling cooed-at and completely unmolested by any soulless sales agenda (but if you can surreptitiously plant the seed for a purchase, more’s the better).

Here are some I dreamt up during my first weeks in the Deep Empathy Vault (brands shown in parentheses).

Nanny is old. Takes up space. (Hawthorns Retirement Communities)

Born. Child. Teenager. Adult. Dead. LifeBook™. (LifeBook™)

That last one might not get past the new regulatory guidelines, but as marketers we’re prone to test the fences, for better or worse. Like velociraptors or bewildered farm animals, it’s in our nature.

What happens now?

As yet details are pretty thin on the ground but no doubt the industry media will be flooded with updates over the coming weeks as ex-copywriters get to grips with our new place in the world. We’ll do our best to keep you in the know.

In the meantime, go away into that dark room and meditate on the life of your consumer. Breathe it in, taste it, debase yourself with it. Then come out and write some real 6-word stories, with no made up words, and subconsciously tempt your unwitting empathy experiment into buying yet another product they never knew they needed.

This is the future.