A Letter to Junior Copywriters
What I wish someone had told me in 1993.
You have chosen a profession that most people do not understand, many people do not respect, and almost no one enters for the money. I congratulate you. The fact that you have chosen it anyway suggests that you have a quality that will serve you well: stubbornness. You will need it. Advertising is not a kind industry to its writers. It will ask you to produce work that is brilliant and then reject it for reasons that are idiotic. It will promote people who are less talented than you because they are better at meetings. It will tell you that your craft is dying, that your skills are obsolete, that the future belongs to algorithms and platforms and data scientists. You will be tempted to believe this. Do not.
I entered the industry in 1993, which means I have now been writing advertisements for more than thirty years. I have worked at agencies large and small, in London and Milan and briefly in New York. I have written campaigns for products I loved and products I was indifferent to and one or two products I actively disliked. I have won some awards, though fewer than I deserved and more than I needed. And I have arrived at a set of convictions about the craft that I want to share with you, not because they are definitive — nothing in this business is definitive — but because they have been tested by three decades of practice and I believe they are sound.
Read Everything
The first thing I want to tell you is this: read. Read voraciously. Read widely. Read outside the industry. The worst copywriters I have ever worked with were the ones who read only advertising books and advertising blogs and advertising award annuals. They wrote copy that sounded like other copy. They produced work that was technically competent and creatively bankrupt, because they had no raw material to draw from except other advertisements.
The best copywriters I have known were readers of novels, of history, of science, of biography. They read the Economist and the London Review of Books and the New Yorker. They read Orwell on prose style and Hemingway on economy and Joan Didion on the relationship between the sentence and the thought. They read Claude Hopkins because he understood selling, and they read Joseph Mitchell because he understood people, and they understood that these two kinds of understanding are not as different as they seem.
When Ogilvy wrote his famous list of books that every advertising person should read, he included not a single advertising book. He recommended Confessions of an Advertising Man, yes — his own — but the rest of the list was novels, histories, and works of popular science. He understood that the copywriter's raw material is not advertising. It is life. The more of life you absorb — through reading, through observation, through conversation, through experience — the more you have to bring to the page.
Learn to Sell
The second thing is less romantic but equally important: learn to sell. I do not mean learn to be a salesman, though a few months of door-to-door selling would do many young copywriters an enormous amount of good. I mean understand the mechanics of persuasion. Understand why people buy things. Understand what moves a person from indifference to interest to desire to action. This is not intuitive. It must be studied.
Read Claude Hopkins. I know I have already mentioned him, but he is worth mentioning twice. Scientific Advertising is a slim book, barely a hundred pages, and it was written in 1923, and it contains more practical wisdom about selling through the written word than anything published in the century since. Hopkins was not a stylist. He was not a craftsman in the literary sense. But he understood, with a clarity that has never been surpassed, what makes people respond to a written appeal. He understood the power of specificity. He understood the importance of the offer. He understood that advertising is not a creative exercise but a commercial one, and that the copywriter's job is not to entertain but to persuade.
I realise that this view is unfashionable. The industry today talks a great deal about storytelling and emotion and brand purpose. These are not unimportant, but they are not the foundation. The foundation is this: can you write a sentence that makes a stranger want to buy something they did not know they needed? If you can, you have a career. If you cannot, no amount of storytelling will save you.
Do Not Fear Directness
Young copywriters are often afraid of being direct. They wrap their message in layers of cleverness, as though the selling proposition were something shameful that needed to be hidden. I understand the impulse. The first time you write a headline that baldly states a benefit — "This mattress will give you the best sleep of your life" — it feels crude. It feels unsophisticated. It feels like something a less talented writer would produce. And so you retreat into wordplay, into allusion, into the kind of oblique cleverness that impresses other copywriters and baffles everyone else.
Resist this temptation. Directness is not the enemy of craft. Directness is the foundation of craft. Ogilvy was direct. Hopkins was direct. Even Bernbach, who is often celebrated for his wit, was fundamentally direct. "We try harder" is not clever. It is blunt. It is a plain statement of a plain truth, and it is one of the most effective lines in the history of advertising precisely because it does not try to be anything other than what it is.
The skill is in being direct without being dull. This is harder than it sounds. Anyone can be direct. "Our car is reliable." "Our soap cleans well." "Our bank has low fees." These are direct, and they are deadly boring. The art is in finding the direct statement that is also surprising, that also has rhythm, that also rewards attention. "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock." This is direct. It states a specific, concrete benefit. But it states it in a way that makes you stop, that makes you think, that makes you want to know more. The directness and the craft are not in opposition. They are the same thing.
Defend Your Work
This is the hardest lesson, and the one that most young writers learn too late: you must defend your work. Not every piece of work — some of it deserves to be killed — but the work that you believe in, the work that you know is right, the work that serves the client's interests even if the client cannot see it. You must fight for that work, politely but firmly, with evidence and conviction and the quiet authority that comes from knowing your craft.
This does not mean being difficult. There is no virtue in being difficult for its own sake. The copywriter who fights every change, who treats every revision as an insult, who refuses to collaborate — that copywriter will have a short and unhappy career. But there is a difference between collaboration and capitulation, and you must learn to recognise it. When the client asks you to change a word because it will be clearer, that is collaboration. When the client asks you to remove the headline because it makes them uncomfortable, that is something else entirely, and it is your responsibility to explain, clearly and respectfully, why the headline matters.
I have lost many battles in my career. I have watched good work die because I did not fight hard enough, or because I fought hard but the opposition was harder, or because the timing was wrong, or because the client changed, or because the budget was cut. These losses are painful, and they do not get less painful with time. But I have also won some battles, and the work that resulted from those battles — the campaigns that survived the committee, the headlines that survived the focus group, the ideas that survived the approval process — that work is the work I am most proud of. It is the work that actually ran, that actually sold products, that actually made a difference.
Be Patient
Finally: be patient. Not with mediocrity — never be patient with mediocrity — but with yourself. The craft of copywriting is not learned in a year or two or five. It is learned over decades, through repetition, through failure, through the slow accumulation of experience and judgement. You will write terrible copy for years before you write good copy. You will write good copy for years before you write excellent copy. And even at the peak of your abilities, you will write more bad work than good, because that is the nature of the craft. The ratio does not change. What changes is your speed of recognition — your ability to see, quickly, which of your many attempts is the one that works.
I am sixty-two years old, and I am still learning. I am still discovering things about sentences that I did not know. I am still being surprised by the gap between what I intended to write and what I actually wrote. I am still, on good days, producing work that pleases me, and on bad days, producing work that does not. This is not a failure of the craft. This is the craft. It is inexhaustible, which means it is never boring, which means you have chosen well.
Welcome to the profession. Now go and write something that stops a stranger in their tracks.