The problem with copywriting, exemplified

This post on beauty blog Temptalia caught my eye, because it perfectly demonstrates a problem I’ve had many times since I’ve been a Copywriter.

The post is a review of a Chanel lip gloss, which looks like this:

 

And is described by Chanel like this:

This brilliant pink lipgloss delivers the ultimate pop of colour, along with subtle shimmer and a high-shine glow. Part of the limited-edition Knightsbridge Collection, its striking hue is named for a thriving artistic and cultural area of London.

And now the problem. The gloss actually looks like this:

Are you seeing ‘brilliant pink’? A ‘striking hue’? ‘The ultimate pop of colour’? No, me neither.

Christine, who writes Temptalia, wonders how Chanel could see something in this gloss that clearly isn’t there. And I can tell you exactly how.

The poor copywriter was given a photo of the tube, just like the one above, and if they were lucky, a few notes about the product. These probably said something along the lines of ‘shimmer, high shine, pink’. Not much to go on. I bet you a fiver they’d never even seen the product in real life, let alone tried it out. Which is how they understandably missed the fact that outside the tube, this gloss is weaker than Anthony Worrall Thompson’s resolve in the Tesco cheese aisle.

I can sympathise because it’s happened to me many, many times. I’ve written gushy descriptions of mobile phones I’ve never touched, drinks I’ve never tasted, and cars I’ve never driven (I can’t even drive). In fact, I once spent a whole week writing a massive manual for a fairly important piece of technical equipment that I’d never even seen a photo of. I had to describe how to operate the thing, including what buttons to press when – despite not knowing what the buttons said or even what colour they were.

How does this happen, you might rightly wonder? Well, no one’s under the illusion that it’s an ideal situation, and there have been plenty of times when I have seen the relevant product and even tried it out. But in the current workplace culture, where deadlines are constantly squeezed and everyone’s overworked, there often just isn’t time to do things properly. You can try to insist on seeing and trying the product, but all you’re going to do is massively delay the project, getting innocent account managers into trouble with their bosses and expectant clients, whose deadlines have also been squeezed.

I don’t know how useful anyone found the manual I wrote blindly, but I know I did everything I could under the circumstances to make it accurate, and hopefully it was a great deal more useful than no manual. So yes, it’s a big pain in the bum for all of us when you buy a hot pink lipgloss and it turns out virtually transparent, but if you’re going to blame anyone, don’t make it the copywriter. They were probably disappointed too.

Blatant thievery at the Chip Shop Awards 2011

I’ve posted before about how I think the Chip Shop Awards are brilliant and a chance to recharge your creative batteries by showcasing ideas that would normally get shot down.

However, no-one takes the awards particularly seriously or considers them as much of an accolade as, say, a Cannes Lion or a D&AD Pencil. So why do agencies risk their reputations by sending in blatantly plagiarised work for the chance to win such a minor award?

This year, there are at least three entries that are blatantly ripped off from elsewhere. In reverse order of heinousness, here are the three I’ve spotted:

3. ‘Great white teeth’ for Colgate by Dinosaur

The ad:

The ‘inspiration’:

The idea from this ad pretty clearly came from a series of sharks photoshopped to have human teeth, posted by c_kick of totalleh.com on B3ta. However, the agency at least seem to have written the line themselves, so that’s kind of OK.

Edit: It’s just been pointed out to me by @adambodfish on twitter that this entry is actually from last year – it’s rather confusing since it’s featured prominently on the Chip Shop homepage! Oh well, the point stands.

2. ‘Every Lidl Helps’ by Walker Agency

A direct rip-off of not only another agency’s work, but work that won a Chip Shop Award in a previous year. Talk about diddling on your own doorstep.

Walker Agency’s ad:

The original, from Saatchi & Saatchi X in 2009:

And a third ad created specifically to take the piss out of this apparent, er, coincidence by Thinking Juice, entered into this year’s awards under the category ‘There’s no such thing as a new idea’ (fairly generous in my opinion, I’d have gone for ‘Copycuntery’ after this great blog):

And the winner:

1. ‘We Sell Fridges’ by C21 Advertising

This one takes the absolute cake. Behold ‘their’ ad:

And then this photo of a real shop in Liverpool, which has been floating around the internet for donkeys’ years:

What an absolute pisstake. It’s even the same photo with the same guy standing in front of the shop. Ironically, this is entered in the ‘best use of plagiarism’ category, because of the use of Selfridges’ branding. Not because they admit they’re thieving gobshites. I’d love to hear their justification for this.

I have to say, stuff like this makes me lose a bit of faith in the industry and the awards. For every ad born out of an original idea or insight and slaved over, there seems to be one stolen wholesale from somewhere else and shamelessly entered with an agency’s name plastered over it. Thankfully it never seems to be the good agencies, and lets us all know never to submit our CVs and portfolios to C21 Advertising. Because you just know your first brief on your first day would be ‘The client likes this YouTube video, can you just do another one of those?’.

For shame.

EDIT: In adding the agency links to this post, I discovered that Walker Agency’s website bears a striking resemblance to Rainey Kelly’s, particularly in the colour scheme and lettering style (click for bigger):

(Walker Agency on the left, RKCR/Y&R on the right)

Really classy, guys.

Make Up For Ever: Unretouched my bum

So earlier today I posted about Make Up For Ever’s apparently unretouched advert. But since then I’ve spotted another version of the ad floating around, in which the model appears to be wearing different makeup, but in an otherwise-identical photo.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two images, both found on the Huffington Post – click for bigger (image one, image two):

I’d like to see an explanation of this discrepancy that doesn’t involve retouching. It’s possible that the difference in make-up colours could be accounted for by colour-correction – but what about the image on the camera screen? On the left-hand photo, no image on the screen. On the right, a faint image of the girl. Colour correction or not, that image has definitely been retouched in.

I guess once again we’ve all been sucked in by a load of hot air. Unretouched? Like hell it is.

FeelUnique.com can’t use mail merge

Beauty website FeelUnique.com are running a promotion on Facebook at the moment whereby you ‘like’ their page and enter your details, and you get emailed a variable percentage discount for the site, or money off (up to £250).

I entered a few days ago and received this email (click for bigger):

 

 

I quote: “You’ve won yourself your next order”. Not the best phrasing, but I and the other people who received it took this to mean our next order was free. However, there was no indication of maximum spend, so some confused fans took to the Facebook wall to ask for clarification:

The next day, I got this. Spot the difference:

 

So the prize has changed from ‘your next order is free’ to ‘here’s the measliest discount ever’. Wow.

 

Is 5% ever worth giving out as a discount? Even if I bought a £100 pair of GHD straighteners, I’d only get a fiver off – and I can’t even do that, because they’re exempted from the discount in the Ts & Cs.

 

So far, FeelUnique haven’t responded to the disappointed fans on their Facebook page – but if they’ve got any sense, they’ll do something to rectify the total shambles this promotion has been. I’ll update if and when they do. Until then, my piddling little discount code will go unused.

 

The smartest spam I’ve seen yet

I’m quite interested in spam. In order to make an email convincing enough to get people to click the poisoned link, it has to sound a good deal like the brand it’s purporting to be from. Or at least, sound like A brand. Even if you’re not overly familiar with how your bank speaks, you wouldn’t expect them to misspell multiple words or sound like they wrote the email via BabelFish.

Scammers and spammers have cottoned on to this, and realised that the more they sound like their target company, the more money they’re going to make. And so those of us who write on behalf of brands for a living are no longer the only ones learning their tone of voice. Scattered across the world are a whole other group of people learning the quirks of a brand’s way of speaking, often through the filter of their own native language and with no hint of a brand manual. So it’s all the more impressive when they sound passable.

Behold this email I received from “Alliance & Leicester” the other day:

Dear Customer,

We are excited to announce that…

Alliance & Leicester, Abbey and the Bradford & Bingley savings business, are coming together to become Santander. This is great news for our 24 million customers in the UK, who will be able to enjoy the benefits of access to over 1,300 branches and 4,500 cash machines, all under the one name.

We want to be the best commercial bank in the UK, best for service and best for customer loyalty. We have got big plans to do it, and this website tells you all about them.

Please Click Here To Start

Yours sincerely,

Chairman, Emilio Botin”

Now, the language isn’t quite right (particularly “Click Here To Start”) but how clever is that? They’ve seen in the news that Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley are becoming Santander, and they’ve sent what looks very much at first glance like an official announcement message. They’ve even done their research about numbers of customers and ATMs.

If I were a customer of Alliance & Leicester, and a little less savvy about spam, I might well have clicked that.

Scary, isn’t it? Imagine what will happen when they do get it spot on. They could bankrupt the company they’re scamming (withdrawing a large proportion of savings from any bank puts it in trouble), which would eventually put legitimate brand writers like me out of business.

Spam emails could even become recruitment tools for new writers. Your standard Nigerian spammer scams because he needs money, and he’ll work for a good deal less than someone like me. We could end up with talent spotters from marketing agencies scouring their junk mail folders for potential new hires. I could end up working alongside a chap from Lagos who only last week tried to convince me I was the last surviving relative of a dethroned Indonesian king.

What a strange world that would be.