Why do so many freelance copywriters forget that their job is not to write poetry or win advertising awards, but to sell their clients’ products?
Having spent most of my early career writing for in-house marketing departments, I was always leery of freelance copywriters.
Many of the ones I’d seen in action had (successfully, to my chagrin) built their portfolios on style and flash over strategy and substance. It seemed to me that they were always more concerned with “being creative” than helping clients achieve their goals.
Alas, the companies I worked for liked to bring in these hotshots to work on their most important and high-profile marketing initiatives, such as company rebrands and major ad campaigns. I guess they thought there was something mystical about self-styled creative rock stars with no health insurance.
One small cataloger in particular hired freelance copywriters to craft its “glamour” copy—the headlines, section leads, and “story interludes” throughout its books.
I remember a meeting in which the company’s founder introduced our latest great get. We were preparing to launch a new jewelry catalog and she had found this fellow who was—when he wasn’t writing catalog copy—an aspiring playwright.
He had just finished reading to the group—in a booming, impassioned voice—one of the “romance” passages he had written. Something about a young couple in love, strolling the big-city streets hand in hand in a swirling snowstorm at night.
A few of us cringed. The owner swooned.
“OH, how WONDERFUL!” she gushed. “I can’t WAIT to show this to the board. They’ll be SO excited when I tell them we hired a REAL writer!”
Now remember, I was at this meeting. I was the company’s one and only full-time copywriter, and I was sitting right there.
I was mortified.
By all of it.
Fast-forward a few months, and the catalog turned out as expected—cloying and pretentious. I don’t think it performed very well. But something interesting did eventually come of it.
On the final day of his contract, this copywriter-cum-playwright told me flat-out that my job was a lot tougher than his.
I don’t think he was pandering. I really think he meant it.
“As the in-house guy,” he said, “you have to be solid and sensible. You have to uphold the brand and the style guide, and worry about selling the product. That’s not what my clients want from me at all. As a freelance copywriter, people expect me to dazzle and ‘whoo!’ them with creative ideas. They’re paying me to be different and ‘out there.’”
He was right. My company’s management ate right out of its freelance writers’ hands, even (or especially) when their self-indulgent copy lathered itself up into unbridled orgies of creative excess. Like selfish lovers, these writers prioritized their own satisfaction, reducing their readers to baffled spectators of their amorous self-diddling.
Clients are just as guilty. To be fair, most probably don’t know any better. You should have seen the looks on faces when I pressed the creative manager and freelance art director to use actual selling devices in the catalogs I worked on—front-cover violators, promotional callouts on product pages, a prominent money-back guarantee . . . hell, even just putting the company’s phone number and web address on the front and back covers. This company thought of its catalogs as actual works of art and I was sticking my neck out by suggesting we make them work harder to sell.
Not that there is anything wrong with a little sizzle. I have always said that pyrotechnics can have a place in copywriting—but style is no substitute for substance. Whenever I work as a freelance copywriter, I do my best to write copy that respects the brand, with all the care and conscientiousness of an in-house writer who has a vested interest in the client’s success.
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