HEAD BLOG

There’s a sign hanging by the counter of my local cafe which says “Good Coffee”.

Good.

Not great, not the best; just good.

The understated, happy-with-my-lot side of me likes this sign. Good is, well, good enough. It doesn’t attempt to lay claim to being the key to the one drink that will make your day or give you a story to pass on to your children. It’s just good coffee. Used in the same way as we might say that we would like “a nice cup of tea” it offers a charm which is wholesome and welcome, especially when placed against the grandiose claims of the big coffee shops.

And yet, another part of me wonders what would happen if there was a second sign next to it saying “Great Coffee”. How would that affect customer behaviour? It’s one thing enjoying the folksy charm of the ‘good’ but, given a choice under the same roof where such a decision can be clearly measured, would we stick by our simple friend or raise our aspirations?

Perhaps they know their customer is just looking for the good life.

Recently I’ve been writing a few short stories for a website run by Tom Mason. The conceit is that each story must be sparked off by an image and be no more than 330 words long.

It’s a great format for me because with it I can say something quickly without running into the issues of structure I’d face with something longer.

I do, however, periodically consider whether what I’m writing can be classed as “story” at all.

In fact, the definition of “story” is something we all wrestle with at Head First because it is integral to creating strong and effective advertising.

The difficulty I have with my 330 word stories lies in the difference between a story and a concept. Is it possible to relate a story in so few words? Or does the reduction render it to a concept?

It’s easier to see when you reduce the word count even further. To, say, 140 characters. One guy tweets very short stories which come across more as outlines (or perhaps poems) than stories.

You could argue, of course, that anything can be a story. If I write something like:

“She lived. She cried. She died.”

You get a sense of narrative. You get a classic beginning, middle and end. Even the choice of words plays a part. “Lived” is more emotive than “was alive” because it suggests more than the simple act of existing, of breathing. And by starting it that way, I set the scene for the tragedy that follows. The reader might arrive at their own conclusions but it is clear that the woman’s situation is a result of her having “lived”.

So that could be described as a story.

Except it isn’t. Not in the more traditional way.

For that, you need more flesh on the bones for story to occur.

My personal jury is out on the 330 word stories. Perhaps they are something different. Certainly they are something exciting (to write at least).

What is clear, however, is the lesson they contain for advertising. Because by challenging my understanding of story, they make me challenge the story of advertising.

Whether I’m writing a two word ad or advertising through social media the lesson remains. I must ask myself what story am I trying to tell.

For the two word ad I must work to ensure the experience, through the combined efforts of text and imagery, is sufficiently satisfying as to provide a story.

Because stories are how experiences are related and relationships formed.

And that’s a way to ensure advertising is effective at the deepest level.

Many years ago, I thought I wanted to be a teacher.

The idea of engaging with young minds, being inspirational and starting my own religion and army certainly influenced the decisions I was making around that time. The application form seemed like a formality.

Wanting to capitalise on every advantage I might have in order to wow the course leaders I drafted in the assistance of my sister, already a teacher and a formidable and persuasive presence in her own right.

With her help I wrote a letter filled with the terminology of the day. She knew what boxes to tick and I wasn’t afraid of ticking them all. Attainments, engagements, inspirings – I grabbed them all.

Secret weapon deployed I sat back and waited to be called for interview.

Now, if you are with me so far then you’ll be expecting there to be no interview. You’ll expect me to turn this around and show how getting someone else to do all the work for me didn’t pay off in the end.

If that’s the case then you’d be wrong.

I did get the interview.

Within weeks I was sat in a room at Manchester University going through my application with two of the course leaders.

They asked me a question, a simple enough question:

“Why do you want to be a teacher?”

Easy.

I’d had the same question back on the application form.

I couldn’t, however, remember what I’d written. Something about shaping minds, being interested in educational development – that sort of thing.

So I started to talk.

I opened up about why I wanted to teach. I told stories of the teachers who had inspired me. I talked about my genuine, heart-felt love of English.

I don’t think I mentioned wanting to raise an army.

But I had their attention.

It was only a matter of time before I had my own school. Screw post-grad diplomas. I was on fire.

At the end of my outburst one of the teachers asked me why I hadn’t written all that in my application letter.

That floored me.

So I told them the truth.

I took a deep breath and explained that my sister helped me because I really really wanted to be a teacher and because she was a teacher she knew what other teachers wanted and why they wanted it. She knew the language used in all the literature and then copied by other teachers and so, I explained, I assumed that using all that knowledge in one massive burst of jargon would help me get an interview.

The course leaders listened and then told me one thing: that I nearly didn’t get called for interview because my application was so obviously not my own words.

It was quite the lesson.

Sometimes, when I’m reading through a website or a brochure, I wonder what the writer was thinking about.

I’m not sure it was about the job in hand because more often than not it feels as though the writer doesn’t believe in what they are selling.

Which would be fine if they weren’t a writer.

Consumers are allowed, expected even, to be cynical about a product.

Writers aren’t.

They must be the most gullible people in the world because they have the hardest job.

They need to convince themselves that a product is the best thing since sliced bread.

Sometimes that isn’t easy.

But really, when you think about it, it’s something we all do. A lot of the time at least.

Look in the mirror in the morning and within a few minutes you’ll have convinced yourself you are the best looking dog in town.

And you’re not. I’ve seen you and believe me, you’re not.

Not that it matters what I think of course. It’s your face and if you think you’re the best looking dog then you’ll find it a lot easier to convince others of that.

Copywriting is the same.

We get all manner of products thrown our way and many, on the surface, seem a little, well, rubbish.

We can’t tell the client that of course. The evil mercenary in us just wants to take the money and run.

So we have to look a little harder and find what it is the client sees in their own product.

Along the way we’ll produce a list and perhaps end up seeing more than one great thing about it.

We’ll have convinced ourselves.

Convincing others is easy.

I read copy.

A lot of copy.

I even call it “copy”, something you might only do if you read it and work with it.

Give me a bottle of milkshake and I’ll be turning it over to see what there is by way of.. you guessed it… copy.

I get a bit of a kick when I read something more than the ingredients. Although, if the ingredients are well written then I’ll even get a kick out of those.

What I find, when reading all this incidental copy – what many people might term “blurb” – is that more often than not it is just a space filler, without being honest enough to tell you it’s a space filler.

I’d love to squint at a pack to see the copy say something like:

“I don’t know why you’re reading this but thanks. The boss told me he didn’t like all the white space the designer was using and so could I do something about it. So here it is. I hope you’ve enjoyed it but don’t be too hard on the designer, white space is nice too.”

That would be fun. That would make the time I spent reading it a little bit more pleasurable because, let’s face it, if you are reading the back of a packet then either the instructions were really hard to find or else you are just a little bored and so in need of a pickmeup. Someone who will chat to you until the microwave pings or the slug pellets have all emptied out.

It isn’t difficult for a product to fill that need.

There’s an element to creativity I don’t like: opinion. Specifically other people’s opinions. Idea killers the lot of them. Toil and polish falls away at a handful of words and that, I don’t like.

Of course opinion is also vital to creativity. All that toil and all that polish can get you lost in a dark place, namely up your own arse and that’s somewhere nobody should be lost.

Experience lessens the importance of the opinions of others. Over time a writer or artist learns the impact of their work and how it is interpreted by others. That wonderful, frightening word, “interpret” is certainly one to watch out for as readers bring their own approach to bear upon carefully crafted work. Yet, as I say, experience tempers this element and folds it into the substance of the work. Ambiguity is employed as a tool rather than left dangling, ready to unravel meaning, and technique becomes adept at preempting any dissent in the ranks.

Years ago, way before I’d learned any formal writing technique, a friend read over a poem of mine and said he didn’t much care for it. My work, he offered, was becoming too practised, too glib. I agonised over the comment (and still do) undecided whether it was a good thing. In part he meant the technique I was learning to apply, the structures I was reaching for that would enable me to direct ideas rather than just have them. But he also meant that he missed the roughness and energy a wider understanding of technique often smooths out.

I remember being captivated by The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. It was a short novel filled with ideas and surprises. Little of his later work has ever matched that power; growing less with each novel. Many writers lose that edge as their technical ability to structure, to wordplay, increases. Ultimately, it is about how to balance the two and where and when to bring in opinion. After all, it is easy to spot a writer who has studied at UEA.

The humble tagline both attracts and repels me. As with a magnet, this effect largely depends upon which way it is pointed but one way to guarantee my dismay is to use then unnecessarily.

So whilst I am happy to learn that BA is “the world’s favourite airline” I am less interested to know that the people behind the East- West water pipe infrastructure are “keeping the water flowing”.

The former tagline grants me some kind of confidence as I choose which airline to fly with whereas the latter tells me nothing I didn’t know already and serves little purpose neither educationally or commercially.

It is as though the words leaked out from a meeting intent upon marketing its service in a ‘commercial’ manner.

The same goes for the BBC election broadcasts. Maybe I ought to be glad they are “making it clear” because all the other channels are “pulling the wool over your eyes since 1882″. The clarity of a tagline brings everything into sharp focus.

Public bodies, in their confusing remit to offer choice, seem to suffer more than most from the scourge of the pointless tagline.

Everywhere I turn I learn new and interesting facts.

Did you know (I didn’t and almost to my fatal cost) that the NHS is “safe, clean, personal”? I should hope it is but saying it doesn’t necessarily make it so. I don’t need the glib sales talk. It does nothing to make me feel better.

And then there are the taglines that don’t even give you any sort of clue why they were written. Travelling behind a van for a company called Fantasy Bathrooms I wondered at their tagline, “Why Compromise?” I can think of lots of reasons to compromise really. It actually seems like a good skill to learn. So what were they trying to say? Was it that their bathrooms were top quality and expensive, imitation brands at a low cost, very cheap and poor quality? What?

It’s such a general line that it evaporates into nothing. Much like Smirnoff vodka who also make use of it which just shows how interchangeable it is.

It is as though creatives or marketeers have a tool in their kit which they simply must deploy despite being unsure of how to use it. Perhaps these lines were trotted out as a way of selling in key creative which might be fine in the context of a presentation but less so when released into a population of people who aren’t fired up by the possibilities of sales talk.

I was seventeen years old, sat in an eighteenth century manor house and receiving the sort of English lesson normally reserved for twelve year olds.

The first day of an A-level English literature course ought to have been a baptism of fire. At least the way they used to teach it. Shakespeare was a given but Pope, Eliot (T S not George) and Bronte would demand close reading and F R Leavis would show us how.

That wasn’t how it started.

After a brief appraisal of literary terms our teacher decided to start again. This time at the very beginning. Read more…

No surprise when the Twitter stream was flooded with reactions from Flash Forward, the hot new show from David (Batman) Goyer and a show which was somehow bagged by Channel 5. And it was a solid start too. Similar enough to shows such as Lost, Heroes, Fringe and The 4400 for it to quickly nestle down in the arse-groove of our sofas. There were mysteries and clues, portentious looks and expositional dialogue a-plenty. Read more…

At just after 6:30 this morning I logged on to Twitter and saw a post by @JSCarroll recommending a story. I’ll flick through these sort of recommendations quickly and easily, slipping them between the pages of my journey to and from work but leaving them in the background, often not caring if they stay or get lost. This one, however, stuck. I started reading before I caught my train, I continued it during and then I re-read a couple of times afterwards. Have a read of it, you’ll see why it was recommended. Read more…