According to David Droga, chairman of ad firm Droga5, “good copywriting paved the way for the tweet long before Twitter was actually invented. . . “
In his defense of the virtues of advertising copy, Mr. Droga notes that the average billboard has no more than eight words. It takes skill to make a product or service memorable in such a small amount of mental real estate. He exhorts ad copywriters to brainstorm, to “throw down dozens of half-baked ideas in sweaty notebooks.” He suggests that they constantly hone their copy, “rather than thinking expansively” about products and services. The result, he says, are words that “enter the cultural vocabulary and never leave.”
Think about “Just do it.” “Does She . . .Or Doesn’t She?”(Thank you, Shirley Polykoff, for that terrific Clairol tagline.) “Think different.” And one of my absolute faves from David Ogilvy, “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”
Good writers are always thinking about how to say something better. And saying something better invariably means saying it in fewer words. One of my clients’ style guides, for example, asks writers to drop extra verbiage such as “in order to,” “as a result of,” and “due to the fact,” in favor of leaner usage.
When I sit down at the keyboard, my mission is to capture readers’ attention—or at least keep them awake—and not to keep them long.
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