603 Copywriting Blog

It’s that time of year folks. The creative agencies have wheeled out another wheelbarrow of formulaic awards bait, and this year the Twitter dullards are brown-nosing the big purple monster or whatever schmaltz John Lewis have done in 2017. (I don’t cover John Lewis in these round-ups. I leave it to Adturds. See last year’s post […]

Are you prepared to be chilled to your very core? Dear reader, you are about to face one of the most terrifying, face-meltingly awful things that anyone can view. A POWER POINT PRESENTATION. Well, a Slideshare. This Halloween, I’ve decided to eschew the bobbed apples in favour of lashings of pure cheese. So if you’re […]

Sorry Blade Runner fans. A copywriter can do a lot of things, but we can’t be expected to administer a Voight-Kampff test to your business. Seems like you ask us to do that a lot though. Because something keeps coming up when I hear other copywriters mention tone-of-voice. I heard it at Copy Cabana. I […]

“12 Blazing Speakers / 1 Day / 1 Beach” Copy Cabana promises a lot. It didn’t actually deliver on every promise. Calling it “The hottest copywriting event around” is a bit of a stretch when the rain’s coming at you sideways off the sea and someone’s sheltering under a pizza box with what looks like […]

LinkedIn. Doesn’t really get the pulse racing, does it? It even sounds stupid when you say it out loud. “LinkedIn.” “Linked In.” “Link Din.” Meh. It’s not got the instant gratification of Twitter or the mass market appeal of Facebook, but poor underrated LinkedIn has generated more business for me than any other social media […]

Do you know what the first piece of marketing copy I ever wrote was? Of course you don’t. You don’t know that it was for a small boutique hotel, or that a 200 word piece came back with six recommended amendments from the Head of Copy. Most importantly, you don’t know that it was a […]

I bumped into an old school friend a few weeks back. I’d not seen her in about 15 years, and she had no idea what I did for a living. I write, I said. “Fiction? Novels?” No, I replied. I’m a copywriter. I’m no good at fiction. Fiction’s basically just lying for money. “Isn’t that […]

There’s a word that keeps coming up in meetings I have with clients. It comes up when they ask me what I think’s really important when it comes to putting their message out there. The word is disconnected. It’s not a word I see used often on copywriting blogs. Maybe other copywriters bring it up […]

There’s more to my job than writing copy. There’s reading copy too. I read a hell of a lot of copy. Some amazingly good, some toe-curlingly bad, most of it fair-to-middling. Quite often, the reason I’m reading a piece is that a client has asked me for my opinion. To see what I think. Whether I […]

Do you know who the first man to make a million dollars was during the California Gold Rush? It was a man called Samuel Brannan. He didn’t mine a single fleck of gold. He didn’t sell everything he had to head out into them thar hills and strike it lucky. He just opened a shop. […]