Monthly archive: September, 2011

Are copywriters really marketing’s stunted children, unable to see the great, big, strategic marketing picture?

The Ad Contrarian suggests that stereotype is bullshit (and does so using words I approve of), and he’s taken aim at one of my pet marketing industry peeves:

As a copywriter, one of the things that has always fried my ass is the assumption on the part of a certain type of account person or planner that I need them to hold my hand or I’ll wind up wandering out into traffic and getting myself hurt.

The nonsense goes like this: creatives are silly little emotional children who can’t be trusted to think straight and need grown-ups to show them the shining path.

It’s all complete and utter bullshit. I’ve been in the ad business for over 200 years and without question the best strategists I’ve met have been creatives. Better than planners. Better than MBAs. Better than CMOs.

He then eviscerates one of those buzzword-laden articles that plague most industries (but none worse than the marketing world), and while his article is right on target, it’s also pretty damned funny.

Funny, that is, when a badly planned campaign is ruining someone else’s day.

When it happens to you — when a client’s marketing “pro” produces a disastrous program, excluding creative folks from the process because “we’re not planners” – the effect on your revenue stream renders it a little less amusing.

Recently, a client’s inexperienced marketing head outlined an astoundingly bad promotion; the plan called for a monthlong run, but front-loaded the rewards so there was literally no reason to participate after Day Two.

The benefit to the client?

Almost zilch.

Fortunately for my readers, this isn’t just another inept client whine; it’s a reminder that copywriters must have an overall vision of their clients’ marketing efforts.

You have to see the big, strategic picture.

You need to be a marketer.

Otherwise, you’ll never be more valuable to your client than the next word jockey. And you won’t see the runaway train headed your way until it temporarily flattens your career. (The same applies to journalists/fiction writers/poets, who — in a fast-changing universe — cede control of their careers at their own peril.)

In my growing role as marketing consultant,  I’ve recently worked with copywriters who were unwilling (or unable) to step beyond the word jockey role, and in none of those instances was I overjoyed with the results.

If I regularly limited myself to the role of mindless word jockey, I could never have derailed the impending promotional disaster I mentioned above, or transformed it (carefully — handling incompetent colleagues is like working alongside live ordinance) into a worthwhile promotion that is — even as we speak — working.

Here’s more thought fuel: planners often live in the past, and massive quantities of data are turning many of them data blind, and the results are often campaigns that were (at best) safe several years ago.

The modern creative person is in a unique position to move those campaigns to a more useful place. But a word jockey isn’t.

Keep writing (and thinking), Tom Chandler.