"You can't keep me from writing. It's a kind of madness." - Charles Bukowski
"Shit won't happen if I work harder." - Cheeky college T-shirt's summation of Protestant theology.
Since I'm on a full-time hunt for a new advertising copywriter gig, I've been in need of a new way to exercise my smack-your-arm-and-raise-a-vein need to sit down every day and punch out something creative. Under my present circumstances, it was easy to concoct the resolve. Just mix one part straight artistic discipline, one part professional survival, and one part pure compulsion. Stir it all over the cold, bracing rocks of unemployment, and pour it all straight up in a glass deep enough to drown your neuroses in. Finally, garnish with enough loud, noisy fruit that the Creative Director at the other end of the bar will have no choice but to notice you, admire your flamboyant creative flair, and please, please, please God almighty, employ you.
You can see the broad contours of where this is going. he specifics are bound to get interesting - so stick around.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
"Excuse them for being a little weird."
This blog made me a chuckle a deeply existential chuckle.
There’s a delicious irony to it. After all, who in the strange land of Advertopia would ever imagine that the copywriter would happen to be the one to come up with a fascinating, all-encompassing "one word" of a campaign? The copywriter? WTF? The word nerd? The scribe of the hive? The dude who, like, reads 'n shit like that?
I’m reminded why writers in advertising make for such well-practiced underdogs. While “The Idea” behind any campaign ideally comes from the classic "art and copy" duo, today's copywriters are the stepchildren in a supposedly filial arrangement. More than ever, "Art" comes first in the paradigm, and it’s not because of the syntactical rhythm: in our cultural of constantly iterating spectacles, it’s sight that sells, pictures are worth more than ever, and 90 million tweets a today have relieved consumers of the responsibility of ever reading a thousand words. And those business-driving ideas we all pursue and love to discuss on conference calls? They may start as eloquent PPT slides for a marketing manager’s benefit, but they’re all aimed at developing perfectly crafted, digitally perfected sights and visuals, the fewer words the better. As my first creative director (an erstwhile designer) once put it, an ad without design is a crowded fortune cookie. An ad without copy is a full-signature Bulgari spread in GQ.
And copywriters? Well, our lot in that life is that we have to play by rules that can’t be bent by PhotoShop. You can’t airbrush a verb to make action-ier, and you can’t run an adjective through infrared filter to give it an edgy look. Writers can only monkey with his raw material so much before their work becomes unintelligible; we can’t slap a gradient on a sentence and cut the saturation on it to hide the fact that it has a few ugly grammatical pores. Sooner or later, a copywriter has to rely solely on that most inflexible, clumsy, and clunky of media: language. No miracle of airbrushing. No CS5 programs to make it work. No “we’ll fix it in Post.” Nothing but words and the fabulous interplay of words.
Not that I won't take that hug. But no wonder we’re all “a little weird.”
There’s a delicious irony to it. After all, who in the strange land of Advertopia would ever imagine that the copywriter would happen to be the one to come up with a fascinating, all-encompassing "one word" of a campaign? The copywriter? WTF? The word nerd? The scribe of the hive? The dude who, like, reads 'n shit like that?
I’m reminded why writers in advertising make for such well-practiced underdogs. While “The Idea” behind any campaign ideally comes from the classic "art and copy" duo, today's copywriters are the stepchildren in a supposedly filial arrangement. More than ever, "Art" comes first in the paradigm, and it’s not because of the syntactical rhythm: in our cultural of constantly iterating spectacles, it’s sight that sells, pictures are worth more than ever, and 90 million tweets a today have relieved consumers of the responsibility of ever reading a thousand words. And those business-driving ideas we all pursue and love to discuss on conference calls? They may start as eloquent PPT slides for a marketing manager’s benefit, but they’re all aimed at developing perfectly crafted, digitally perfected sights and visuals, the fewer words the better. As my first creative director (an erstwhile designer) once put it, an ad without design is a crowded fortune cookie. An ad without copy is a full-signature Bulgari spread in GQ.
And copywriters? Well, our lot in that life is that we have to play by rules that can’t be bent by PhotoShop. You can’t airbrush a verb to make action-ier, and you can’t run an adjective through infrared filter to give it an edgy look. Writers can only monkey with his raw material so much before their work becomes unintelligible; we can’t slap a gradient on a sentence and cut the saturation on it to hide the fact that it has a few ugly grammatical pores. Sooner or later, a copywriter has to rely solely on that most inflexible, clumsy, and clunky of media: language. No miracle of airbrushing. No CS5 programs to make it work. No “we’ll fix it in Post.” Nothing but words and the fabulous interplay of words.
Not that I won't take that hug. But no wonder we’re all “a little weird.”
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