Copywriting

What's a Sarah Jessica Parker?

"We have the Sarah Jessica Parker", I heard the girl pushing the trolley filled with in-flight duty-frees offer. "Would you like that?"

Now as she'd already passed by my seat, I couldn't see what the 'Sarah Jessica Parker' was. (In truth, I only just about know who Sarah Jessica Parker is!)

Now one doesn’t have to be a genius to guess that the ‘Sarah Jessica Parker’ will be toiletries or cosmetics of some kind, of course, but being in the sort of frivolous state of mind which holidays bring on, I leaned across the aisle and asked my wife.

“What do you suppose the ‘Sarah Jessica Parker’ is?”

She thought for a moment.

“A lager,” She replied confidently. “I think it’s a 7% Danish lager brewed for the export market.”

“Yeah”, I nodded. “You’re probably right. Or else it’s a small electronic language translator which converts travellers’ vocabulary freely from and to any of 4 preconfigured European languages.”

Now apart from evidencing that I was, clearly, long overdue the holiday on which I was headed, this is actually quite a decent exercise.

Make a list of say half a dozen celebrities. Then try to find three products which each of them would lend genuine weight to by applying their name, and three more to which the application of their name would not only lend nothing but would be, in fact, clearly preposterous.

And when you’ve done it… try to figure out for yourself why George Foreman has then turned out to be the best celebrity name imaginable for a low fat griddle.

That’s the thing about rules. Some things just defy ‘em.

The word cloud

About 750 years ago, I found myself trying to write an ad campaign for a brand of sun-tan products called Hawaiian Tropic.

Rather than write a traditional headline and couple of lines of copy, as was expected, I tried to get my art director and, more importantly, my boss, to agree that what we’d have on these 2 pages of premium magazine real-estate was simply a fantastic, typographic melee of words.

The words would all be associated with the atmosphere we wanted to evoke, and therefore with the true, underlying message of the brand, but would not follow each other sequentially to deliver a thought at the end of a sentence.

No chance. No-one was having any of it.

Over the last few years, however, blogging has made the Word Cloud a familiar part of the digital landscape. In the right column of so many blogs you’ll find a ‘cloud’ of typographically larger and smaller words, arranged by size based on the apparent importance of that word to the posts appearing in that blog.

On Facebook and other social networking sites, you’ll find free-association lists provided by their authors, of words which collectively represent his or her life.

It’s a fascinating and revealing format, which leaves the reader to explore or extrapolate from the information offered.

If you’ve not tried to create a word cloud around yourself, or your business or your brand (even if you never use it for anything), it’d definitely be an hour well spent.

Sample Project 1

Students sometimes email and ask if I have any sample projects to hand that they can use for practice. This is a real project that I've done over this last weekend, but I think it's an excellent practice project.

The client's business is a complete logistics operation, fronted by a web-application. It lets people set up any or all of 10 e-stores, each selling a different kind of products. The stores are pre-stocked by a dropshipper (a wholesaler who delivers direct to your customers for you), so all you have to do is set up your e-stores using the client's system, get people to come and shop in them, collect the retail price of each sale from your customers, pay the dropshipper the wholesale price, and you keep the difference as your profit. That's it.

The 10 types of merchandise you can sell are: Gadgets; Watches; Inkjet and Toner Cartridges; Football Merchandise; Lingerie; Beauty Products; Petcare Products; Ties; Adult Products; iPod and Mobile Phone Accessories.

The client wants to put 10 new pages on his site, one for each kind of e-store. In each category, the page should carry a short introduction of about 50 words, telling people convincingly why that particular choice makes such a great online business. It should then give 5 convincing bullet-point facts/plausible assertions able to act as 'evidence' for just why that particular choice offers such a good opportunity. Each bullet should be around 20-30 words.

Nice project. It gets you thinking about 10 different businesses at once. When my client has signed off my solution and applied it to his site, I'll post a link so you can take a look at what I did.