Dave Dye: Let's Do Words Gud

"When you took copy into John, he would reach into his pocket for a pencil before the copy had hit his desk.

The idea he wouldn’t have anything to correct never crossed his mind. He’d go through it word by word, thought by thought, link by link, and he’d tell you where it wasn’t working.

You’d go back and try to smooth it out. If, after four or five times, you were getting discouraged and still hadn’t done it, he’d do it for you. He’d say do this, do that, move this, move that there, and you’d think how did I miss that?

Eventually, after about a year or so, you might come out of John’s office and he hadn’t made a mark on your paper. You’d do a little skip in the corridor, or a whoop. It was invaluable."

That’s David Abbott. The chap with the itchy pencil finger was David’s DDB copy chief, John Withers.

I’ve heard that story a thousand times. Nick Bell’s version starred Richard Foster, Andy McLeod’s features Derrick Day and Tim Riley’s name-checks Al Tilby.

Although the stories vary in the amount of rejection doled out, they are consistent in one area; the quality of the names involved. I don’t hear that story anymore. Writers coming into the business today are just expected to be able to write, from day one.

There are good reasons for this, things are needed quicker and budgets are smaller. Ironically, the less time people have, the more they write.

If you haven’t got time to really think something through you try to cover the map. So instead of presenting one script they love, they present six they’re ok with, rather than a headline they’d die in a ditch for, they show 10 they wouldn’t be embarrassed about, instead of writing 50 words, they write 150 words.

Junior writers used to worry about whether they would be able to distil, now the challenge is whether they can expand.

I recently did a podcast with Tom McElligott, I asked him why each of his Porsche posters used three words, never two or four. Coincidence or self-imposed extra discipline?

‘‘I guess discipline, it took me about 25 years to be able to write that way.’’

If we are to compete with the best creative industries we need to write as well as them, which means getting back to teaching creatives the value of the alphabet.

It’s the most potent tool we have, rub the right words together and they catch fire. Instead of viewing words as grey and functional, we need see them more like Lego, colourful, playful building blocks, that if carefully chosen can bring to life anything you can imagine.

DDB ad (below) for The New York Public Library puts it best, it shows an a little alphabet in a sea of blank space, at the bottom it says ‘At your public library they’ve got these arranged to make you cry, giggle, love, hate, wonder, ponder and understand.’

The words we choose are the difference between good and bad communication, between engaging or disappearing. They can make the familiar seem fresh, or familiar.

Take Apple, they could’ve said ‘Don’t think like everyone else’, instead they stated ‘Think different’. Street-wise, sassy, rebellious, its tone is almost as important as its meaning, in part due to its incorrect use of grammar. So why are words less precious than they used to be?

The business has obviously changed, we now live in a more visual world, the long copy skills of someone like David Abbott are no longer relevant to our fast moving digital world. But is that true?

People don’t have the time or inclination to read today.

The truth is that people read more today than at any point in history.

Pop into your local Starbucks and you’ll struggle to spot someone who isn’t reading an email, Twitter, newspaper, facebook or even an an actual book for that matter.

Which reminds me, even millennials are reading more than their equivalents 20 years ago (The Atlantic).

So words aren’t off-putting today, it depends what they say, as Howard Gossage put it ‘People don’t read ads, they read what interests them, sometimes that’s an ad.’

Ads that win awards today are visual, hardly any words.

It’s a widely held belief, but there are more words used in the latest D&AD than there were 20 years ago.

Take the press section, historically the place where the majority of the words hang out.

What would you guess the average word count per ad? Five? 10? Maybe even as many as 15? It’s 69. Twenty years ago it was 65.

A cunning use of statistics perhaps? No, aggregating the numbers make it look closer than it should be, take a look at the numbers below for a more accurate picture.

Copy isn’t needed in agencies today.

True, but the problem with the label ‘copywriter’ is that it implies you write copy, y’know, that slug of text at the bottom of press ads.

It wasn’t accurate twenty years ago, it’s even less accurate today. Writer is more accurate, and there’s more writing required in ad agencies today than twenty years ago.

It’s just not called copy anymore. Compare the jobs that may hit a writer’s desk today to those twenty years ago.

‘Copy Chief’ now sounds terribly old fashioned, but the role need is needed more today than ever. The process described at the beginning doesn’t just make better writers, it makes sharper thinkers.

Words have the power to change the world, we need to start taking them seriously again.
‘Let’s get the United States back to being as peachy as it was in the old days’ just wouldn’t have resonated, also, it wouldn’t have fitted onto those red hats.