I should of written this sooner, but I want to say thank you to everyone who either wrote on my blog or sent me email/SMS regarding the post about my Dad.
As I said in one of the comments, I find it amazing that I am afforded such warmth from a bunch of people I’ve never met but I am very, very grateful and very, very touched.
Maybe Andy said it best when he commented the human race isn’t as doomed as the media would like us to believe – though with all the shirking of responsibility by banks and governments regarding the global financial crisis, I think it’s a tighter race than he might of thought, ha!
Anyway the reason for this post is that Marcus and BTBB both used poems in their comments – and without disrespect to anyone else – the power they had on me is amazing.
Of course the fact they were relating to death at a time where I was thinking about my Dad meant they were always likely to be especially poignant – however it got me thinking about the power of good copy and why it is a dying art in adland.
Actually I should rephrase that because I know there are some incredibly talented writers in agencies … what I mean is that it saddens me that there are less and less brands who are seemingly embracing the power of the written word in their communication – they all seem to be favouring bullish headlines, a fancy photo and a few lines of description.
I don’t know whether this shift is a byproduct of clients wanting to just focus on the ‘offer’ or society not wanting to focus on the ads [possibly both] … and I do appreciate the emotions of ‘death’ and quite different to the emotions of ‘buying a sofa’ … however whilst the basic foundation of popular advertising is ‘entertainment’, that doesn’t mean people only react to slapstick humour or graphical wonderment – infact if done [and presented] well, I could argue long copy [spoken or written] is even more powerful in motivating or engaging society.
The only time I tend to see ‘longish’ copy these days is in ‘niche’ marketing collateral … however in many cases, the only element of ‘niche’ is in the terminology used because the rest of it is as flat, broad and emotionless as the stuff FMCG’s put out each and every day.
To me this sort of thing isn’t niche marketing, it’s niche effectiveness …. if a brand really wants to speak to a small segment of society – apart from ensuring the media placement is appropriate – they should get their agency to think about how they can express their ‘offer/news/views’ in a way that is interesting, deeply relevant and emotionally resonant.
Both the poems I got sent [plus a speech emailed by Naoko] had more impact on me than most ads could ever dream of achieving – and yet they needn’t be so different. If clients and agencies just remember the power of emotional communication … encouraging their planners and creatives to start talking and acting as humans again … then great things could happen, because as much as some say society has an ultra low attention span, I believe it has more to do with what the companies are saying than our ability to focus.
