Back in the days when I worked as someone else’s employee, a manager would occasionally ask why I seemed so resistant to making seemingly minor copy changes requested by other departments during review.
“It’s just a small thing,” they would say sagely. “Choose your battles.”
Except that a lot of the time, it wasn’t just a small thing.
A lot of times, it would be a program manager telling me he didn’t like the word “free,” or a sales director requesting that I cut the all-important P.S. from a letter because, to her, postscripts looked “childish.”
These critics didn’t know it, but acquiescing to their off-the-cuff demands could very possibly affect response rates, and not for the better.
Always, I would explain my reasoning.
Often, they would insist.
How had I gotten here, I wondered, to this strange and uncomfortable place where I, a trained and experienced marketing copywriter, found myself having to defend and sometimes literally fight for the most basic tenets of good copywriting?
Why does this happen to any of us creatives?
Embrace the power of “and”
The other day, a clever fellow by the name of Andrew Boulton provided an answer.
In an amusing yet eloquent rant, Andrew explains why it is so important for copywriters (and by extension, graphic designers and other creatives) to have the trust of their clients — and why simply bowing to the whim of every armchair editor is a slippery and treacherous slope.
Andrew writes (bold emphasis is mine):
Why the “don’t start sentences with ‘and’” thing actually matters
We make light of the ‘and’ thing. We tell the stories, as much to laugh at our own preciousness as to faux-grumble about the dumb clients who are actually, mostly, rather good to us.
Its status has been reduced to a stock grumble, or perhaps a permanent landmark between those who get it and those who honestly believe they do, but don’t realize the thing they actually get is not the “it” we would prefer to be got.
Now . . . I have been nudged into pondering whether the “and” thing represents something more than the go-to complaint of a writer in want of real grievances.
I wonder if the “and” thing actually merits a little more than a weary eye-roll and a minor yarn of half-hearted indignation.
Surely, the client who has the conviction to ask (occasionally demand) not to begin sentences with “and” has catastrophically undermined the relationship?
If we, the ones hired for our supposedly superior grasp of how words can and should work, are overruled on such a strange and inconsequential point, would it be an enormous surprise to find ourselves marginalized over other, far more important matters?
(I can smell the overreaction coming off my keyboard, though that might be the Jaffa Cake remnants. You may have guessed that I have just read that very comment in a batch of otherwise fair and sensible client feedback.)
I suppose my point, as shrilly as it’s been expressed, is that copywriting works best when we trust that we are trusted. If we disagree over something so small and, indeed, unambiguous as the “and” thing, our authority — and our ability to argue for the most effective copy — begins to erode.
And then what kind of shit might we find ourselves in.
Hear, hear.
Little things matter, friends. And if clients don’t trust us with little things, then they won’t trust us with the big things, and that undermines our positions completely.
“If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.”
David Ogilvy
Of course, we creatives need to be deserving of our clients’ trust, and we should always give proper consideration to their questions and suggestions. (Keeping in mind, that’s what client feedback should most often be — questions and suggestions, not prescriptive feedback.)
We are the ones who have trained and practiced as professional copywriters and graphic designers and motion designers. The moment we allow ourselves to be treated as order takers or “tracked-changes accepters” (as one disgruntled UK copywriter complained), that is exactly what we will become.
Thank you, Andrew, for sharing your wit and wisdom, and for allowing me to share it here at The Cranky Creative!
Andrew Boulton (@Boultini) is a freelance copywriter, lecturer, and brand language consultant based in the United Kingdom. He writes a copywriting column for global marketing publisher The Drum and was nominated at the Professional Publishers Awards for Business Media Columnist of the Year. Not only has he written for some of the UK’s top creative agencies, but he has also been bitten by a giraffe and had 50p stolen from him by the footballer Roy Keane. Lose yourself in his many writings for The Drum here.
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