Interview: Will Awdry, Ogilvy

Will is a creative partner at Ogilvy, has been writing great advertising for decades, and leads the D&AD Writing for Advertising course. Here we learn how he got started in copywriting, and see how he approaches the challenges of advertising writing. Like many senior copywriters, he mainly oversees creative teams and only manages to write copy himself when he gets the chance in between his busy schedules.

In my current role I spend my time keeping everyone inside the factory gates making sure the people outside the factory gates get the picture. My main job now is writing emails, and the art of copywriting has never been so important as in writing emails.

I had always felt comfortable with writing, but my first jobs were in account management. During this time I worked in partnership with a designer to create a “book,” a portfolio of creative advertising – concepts in this case. We worked on briefs that we were given on D&AD workshops, where we also had exposure to presenting our work to advertising professionals, helping us learn how to show our work in its best light and how to handle criticism.

If you want a job in advertising, remember that they tend to look for teams: two problem-solvers working together who respond with an “idea” for a theme or creative concept. Two heads are better than one, because you can bounce ideas around. One comes up with ideas, the other edits them, and the roles swap from one to the other.

“Begin strongly. Have a theme. Use simple language. Leave a picture in the listener’s mind. End dramatically.”

Winston Churchill

You have to be able to capture the flavor of what you are trying to achieve. What we really do is turn company stories into a narrative that might be of interest to an audience. The challenge is how to sequence the information so it is of interest. The media, all forms of it, are a series of influences that characterize behavior. Our copy is simply a series of very, very short stories that are looking to rent space in people’s brains. It’s “mental rental.” We’re trying to create thoughts that last longer than others.

Copywriting is commercial communication and it won’t work unless you engage people. You have to invite yourself memorably into someone’s mind. Your approach is to do this in its most compressed form and then leave it for them to act upon. Didactic carpet-bombing doesn’t work anymore.

In the 1970s, advertising would say “buy this, we’re telling you why” and explain that this soap powder gives you the whitest wash. Today, some campaigns give the reader just a fraction of the information, but the best approach is to leave just enough information for the target audience to work out the core message and get the satisfaction of doing this. It is a relationship. Saying “do not smoke, it will kill you” won’t work. Saying “Cancer Cures Smoking” is far more effective, and is a perfect example of a slightly cryptic advertising headline. That’s what makes it click.

Antonio Damasio writes about the treatment during the Second World War of people who had serious brain damage, and the discovery that even in cases where the majority of the brain was missing – leaving only the emotional receptors at the front – perfectly rational decisions were capable of being made. It is our emotions that steer our decisions. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising produces a compendium of examples of the most effective advertisements in terms of sales. They publish 10 or 12 case studies each year, focusing on the return on investment. Between 1994 and 2004 they published 230 papers, and of these nearly three-quarters of the approaches used largely emotional ideas. When you are writing your copy you must speak emotionally to your audience, you are not some hack journalist rehashing a spec. Engage their interest by being relevant.

Think of your engaging, emotional point as a dart. Your headline, the compressed summary of the thought (for example “The ultimate driving machine”), is the sharp point. Your body copy, the sustained explanations that support the headline, is the feathers of the dart. If your body copy is too brief the dart loses its way; if it’s too heavy it won’t fly. Achieving the perfect balance is essential.

“You cannot be a copywriter unless you
are a strategist. You attack the problem.”

Humans are now very adept at understanding copy and the most rigorous editors of all are the audience. The advertising community has broadly lost the trust of the audience. It used to be British justice, but now it is French justice. Now you have to prove that your client is not guilty.

Dove and the campaign for real beauty

“I apologize for such a long letter, if I had more time it would be shorter.”

Blaise Pascal

The controlling thought for Dove is “real beauty.” The brand originated during the Second World War, when surgeons discovered that most bad gunshot wounds healed better when moisturized. Ten years ago Unilever expanded the brand, which is characterized by having 25 percent moisturizer, across all bodycare products. The seismic change began with the “campaign for real beauty.” This broke down stereotypes, catapulted the brand into mainstream consciousness, and boosted sales.

The trick, however, is not just to gain sales, it is to maintain them, and there is very little loyalty in most marketplaces. Products are given names such as “pro-age,” celebrating age, with the line “because beautiful skin has no age limit.”

A lightness of touch and a certain freshness takes the messages beyond the hackneyed, and allows you to look at imagery differently. You cannot be a copywriter unless you are a strategist. You attack the problem.

I read the brief, turn it over so that I can’t look at it, and then summarize it in one sentence, no matter how clunky or unworkable that sentence is. Then I write it large on a big sheet of paper and stick this on the wall (this is how I get past the blank page). Then I think to myself, “it’s easy to do something better than that.”

I might then write a short exposition, two or three lines to develop that thought, and sometimes a pithy line may emerge from this that will become a key point. I then go for a walk, and consider how to approach this to bring it to life.

I make sure I get to the end of my first draft before I redraft it. From here it collapses in on itself all the time, and everything “packs down” as I edit and revise the first draft. If I don’t do this it looks over-written, and can easily take

on the look of slick “advertising-ese” very easily. Copy needs to be quirky and surprising, and your choice of words should come from outside the mainstream.

“There are just three rules for copywriting, but no one knows what they are.”

Somerset Maugham

A great example of good use of copy is in the bookshop Waterstone’s. Tim Waterstone had the idea of letting the staff include their “own choice” recommendations of books, where they write their own reviews by hand on pre-printed cards that form a special display in the center of the store. It is very personalized and many retailers are now copying this idea.

Once people understand what you’ve written down, then you can play. Use imperatives, or questions, or whatever takes your fancy. The average vocabulary of a typical adult in England is 43,000, in Italy it is 27,000 and in France 25,000. This gives us lots of opportunities to play games with words.

Try these exercises if you can’t get going. Think of a slightly ludicrous audience, for example, Action Man or G.I. Joe. Write 50 words to him that explain the message you’re trying to communicate. If he could write 50 words back to you, what would he say? Do this with understanding and a degree of sensitivity. This will get the arguments flowing. Think about your favorite movie, then write the entire plot in sentences of no more than three words. This will help you get to the nub of what’s being said. Your arguments should be ordered, clearly identifiable, and sequential. This lets the audience know that you know what is going on in their lives.

A campaign is a minimum of three expressions of an idea, running consistently throughout. You must have a call to action. If you are not eliciting some form of response it’s not working. This takes sensitivity. A bad stand-up comic or circus act will do the act and then stand back and wait for the applause. You have to make the response seem as unlike hard work as possible. If the reader is saying “you’re asking us to do the hard work” he or she won’t respond.

There are two media types: lean forward and lean back. The first refers to readers who are seeking out information about your client – often online. They want to know, so tell them. The lean-back type is more passive, watching TV, sitting on the train, or listening to the radio in the car. You have to create interest. The bulk of copywriting is targeted at lean forward.

Great copy uses visual words. In mainstream above-the-line copy you are fly-fishing for the audience’s heads, and need to be very brief. For example, David Abbott’s ad for The Economist – “‘I don’t read The Economist,” Management Trainee Aged 42” – gets the whole message across in a few simple words. After 25 years the campaign is still running and still wins awards.

The basics of mailer copy

Be clear about the mailing process – it affects your copy

The way to success with direct marketing is to send carefully crafted messages to a perfectly targeted mailing list. Perfectly targeted and completely current mailing lists are very expensive, but the alternative is to mail enormous quantities and play the numbers game. It’s your role to focus on the messages and ensure they are both relevant and interesting.

If a client is looking to increase sales through a direct-marketing campaign, the strategy could be to purchase a premium-quality list of high-net-worth individuals who each have the capacity to make substantial purchases. There may be 300 of these people in the designated catchment area, and the list – guaranteed to be current and accurate – may be extremely expensive. This approach is favored by premium businesses with high-value offers because they are interested in communicating only with the wealthiest individuals. The cost per mailer in these situations can be enormous, but the potential returns mirror the initial investment. Writing for these is a very high-pressure job, made easier by the precise audience profile, which gives you plenty to work with in terms of establishing a relationship with the reader. This low-volume, high-quality list gives you a clearly defined target audience to whom you can speak in their own voice, and use examples directly relevant to their lives.

An alternative could be to purchase a list of 30,000 middle-income households. You might get this list for the same price as the list of 300 high-income prospects, but it will be a different type of audience, and the response rates will be much lower because the list may be slightly out of date or have other inaccuracies. As the writer, you can’t make too many assumptions about this broader and more generalized audience, so focus on the product or service instead, and settle for a more “catch-all” benefit statement. This high-volume, low-quality list gives you a broad and diverse audience, to which you’ll have to sell harder in order to deliver the right level of response.

Depending on the quality and accuracy of the mailing list, direct marketing works on typical responses of 0.04 percent of the total mailed. Utilities companies commonly use high-volume mailers to offer cheaper deals on gas and electricity, for example. With the high wastage approach (buying cheap lists covering entire catchment areas), the preferred route is to send creatively written and designed postcards as the print and postage costs are far lower.

Direct marketing is a vital tool for relationship marketing

Relationship marketing focuses on retaining existing customers and building stronger relationships with them, and direct marketing – particularly with targeted mailers – is an excellent tool for developing existing customer relationships and increasing customer loyalty.

By definition, your audience for a loyalty campaign will be current customers who have given permission for you to contact them. You know what they are like, and you know that they have previously bought into your brand and may want to know more. You simply want them to retain their loyalty to your brand by continuing to purchase. This makes the writing process more straightforward as there is less uncertainty and risk involved. As they are current customers, you could afford to take a more familiar voice than with your main marketing material, and rather than sell to them you can present your information to them clearly and calmly so that they continue to buy from you.

Depending on your client’s customer information, you can operate highly targeted direct mail campaigns. A retail client could mail a specific group of premium customers and invite them in-store for a special evening where they could meet a celebrity, get some tips from experts, see a preview of a new range, or enjoy special discounts. You would write this using a different voice

– being more personal and inviting – than if you were mailing the entire customer base with a more basic promotional offer.

Variable data printing allows text in a print run to be changed to suit different readers. This can be as simple as running three or four variations of a text to suit different age or geographical profiles, or it can allow the name and personal details of readers to be printed within the document, as if it had been created solely for the recipient. As the copywriter, make sure that the message is as relevant and credible as possible – it’s not enough to use this technique as a gimmick. Your main challenge is to make sure that text reads smoothly with the permutations that may occur in a “mail merge.”

Direct marketing is about filtering

The majority of direct mail never gets read: sending a mailer to someone who has not requested it is about as random as communications can get. The point is that some of the people you mail will read it and respond positively, and as the writer this is all that matters to you.

“One of the first lessons our copywriters get is this lesson – you must make the product interesting, not just make the ad different. And that’s what too many of the copywriters in the US today don’t yet understand.”

Rosser Reeves

Your target audience is different at each stage in the writing process. At first, you are communicating to a general audience, many of whom are simply not interested. Some of these people will show an interest by reading your advertisement, and these readers form a different audience profile: they are the part of the audience that may well be prepared to put in a bit of effort to find out more, so write with them specifically in mind. You may need to keep your body copy short and sweet in order to appeal to as many readers as possible. Or you may decide to give them something more substantial in the form of a more detailed proposition. Well-crafted, long copy that presents a case, backs it up, and delivers a carefully constructed argument can win a lot of readers and convert many of these prospects into committed customers.

Once you have completed your copy, leave it overnight, go home, and return to it with a fresh pair of eyes. As the writer you view it from a specific perspective; as the reader this will be very different. How does it work for you as a potential member of the target audience? What would you change? Does

it work hard enough? This “next day” test is a vital part of the creative process.

Your clients will always want to make amendments; it’s human nature. You have to consider whether proposed amends improve or detract from the final effect, and argue your point strongly, from the point of view of the brief.

No matter how good it is, edit it down

The tighter your copy the better, so cut out unnecessary words. Previous generations hailed the merits of long copy in advertising and direct marketing, but more recent consensus seems to be to keep it as short and punchy as possible. Both are right, it’s simply a question of fitness for purpose. You have a split second to catch the attention of a newspaper reader flicking through its pages, and your creative concept has to hit home quickly. However, once you have the reader’s attention, you can work with it and can present your story.

For example, Clever Wally’s (pages 50–1) uses the headline “Pizza Joint triggers ‘sensory excursions’” and a sub-head “West Londoners Overwhelmed by Raw Power,” to tease the reader into the body copy: “‘I tore open the bag and found myself floating over rolling Cotswold hills. Below me, ripe, golden wheat swayed in the soft breeze,’ recounted a Hammersmith woman.” Your copy should project personality, and you must be prepared to add human touches wherever relevant, while sticking closely to your original copy brief.

This direct mail piece is simple yet bold, incorporating a clear message with imagery that gives personality to the obsolete computer. The theme is expanded within the booklet, building to a strong call to action.