Modern Ads at a Loss for Words

YellowBrix, Oct 01, 2012, By @MichaelWolffNYC, Michael@burnrate.com, USA TODAY Not too long ago, I had lunch with the head of a large digital advertising agency -- owned by a larger traditional agency, in turn owned by a much larger holding company -- who offered the following cryptic explanation for the way his firm did its job: "We don't do story. We facilitate the handshake between buyer and seller." In this new world, he was saying, the craft of advertising, of explaining the virtues of a product and making it seem exceptional and therefore creating desire for it, was significantly less important than streamlining how a customer completes a transaction. Cold, I thought. But modern. Then recently a media consultant I know who is called in by big agencies to help creative teams with the problem of ever-increasing consumer disengagement observed that even in the meeting-obsessed business world ad agencies stand out. Nothing is done or decided, in his experience, without large numbers of people sitting in a room. Hardly anyone even writes memos anymore. When they do, it's done as a Powerpoint deck -- symbols instead of sentences. Exchanges of information are through meetings, or conference calls, or via Skype. This is necessary, analyzes my friend, because even creatives want to avoid writing -- because they can't. "Scary, semiliterate, gibberish," he characterizes their infrequent attempts. While technological disruption is most often blamed for the existential predicament of the media business, the more precise problem is that advertising doesn't work as well as it used to work. This presents a crisis not only for newspapers, magazines and television -- but also, according to the stock market, for Facebook. We just don't look at advertising, respond to it, or believe it, as much as we once did, wherever it appears. Maybe this is the reason: There are no writers in advertising anymore. Johnny who can't write has gone into advertising. In fact, "copywriter" is a job that now hardly exists. The historical partnership between graphic designer and copywriter has, more and more, become a partnership between project manager and programmer, or videographer and editor, or media buyer and researcher. If you are the person who actually has to write an ad -- rather than conceptualize, or produce, or program, or pitch, or research -- your career in advertising is not going very well. Tick off the reasons: Advertising is all visual now; the real money is in making boffo videos; consumers don't read; in the post-consolidation agency business, the bureaucrats have taken over from the creatives; in a big data world, you need to target not convince. Almost everybody in the advertising business will tell you that there are more efficient ways to influence the consumer than writing copy. But here's something else that almost everybody agrees on: It has gotten harder and harder to build brand, move merchandise, convey a message, leave a lasting impression. Almost all the intellectual capital of the advertising business is still vested in campaigns, most of them print campaigns, from the early-'60s through the mid-'80s: The Silver Cloud (Rolls-Royce); Think Small (Volkswagen); We Try Harder (Avis); You Don't Have To be Jewish (Levi's Rye Bread); The Ultimate Driving Machine (BMW); The Absolute Bottle (Absolute); Just Do it (Nike); Macintosh introduction (Apple). These are all word ads. They tell a story; they make a case; they offer a big idea; they change the way we think. And often it takes quite a lot of words -- text-heavy copy. The more you get someone to read (the job of the copywriter), the more the reader is engaged with what you are saying -- and selling. The late Jay Chiat, then CEO of Apple's ad agency, Chiat/Day, once told me that every time a new person was put on his account, Steve Jobs, who was as shaped by good advertising as he was by innovative technology, would say "but can he (or she) write?" That's a question it seems every client should reasonably ask. "Pictures," Jobs once told Chiat, "are easy. Words are hard." And, indeed, Apple has continued to ground its ad campaigns in print. When I first saw the USA TODAY redesign for the paper, I had the same epiphany I always have about the page: It's a perfect canvas. Everything else is ephemeral, plastic, fleeting, while the page is fixed -- in your mind and in the moment. Or, to put it a different way: The problem may not be with the medium, but with the message. There are just fewer and fewer people to fill the canvas. My suggestion to USA TODAY editors was to let the opportunity of the page encourage an agency and client to brilliantly use it. A contest -- always beloved in the ad business -- was suddenly born. It may be that all we have to do to reinvent traditional media, save Facebook, even make digital media a decent business, as well as move more merchandise, is bring back the copywriter.