if you're one of my clients, you might not want to read this

I'm sure they harp on its necessity in marketing courses all the time (I don't know, I've never taken one) but the unique selling proposition is one of those necessities that regularly gets ignored even though everyone espouses its necessity.

Too many of the briefs that float around the typical agency are full of clichés and "me too" product benefits. If you're a creative reading this, I know that you feel like a voice in the wilderness complaining about this; I know that you've tried to challenge your account team or client to tell you what's different, what actually matters about the product you're advertising, and I know that they've all come back to you and said, well, um, nothing.

Under these circumstances, if you're lucky the brief you're faced with boils down to, try to make it interesting, but we don't have high hopes. If you're unlucky, it's make it interesting and we have very high hopes.

The issue seems to be that the world is full of products that are all approximately the same. Clients tend to be bad at thinking about their products with any kind of realistic perspective (i.e., how consumers think about them) but they're also handed products to sell that are basically the same as their competitors. Apart from Steve Jobs and... well, I'm sure there's got to be someone else, no one is thinking about developing unique products that consumers actually want and will line up for. Maybe that's the nature of early 21st century market capitalism. There's a lot of cut and paste from whatever the competition is doing.

I point all this out selfishly, because it affects what I do. I've been asked too many times to make people "out there" care about products that no one "in here" seems to be terribly passionate about.

Passion comes from an emotional truth, not a list of bullet points of features written by engineers or accountants or programmers. Maybe it's arrogant, or simply unusual, but passion means standing out, being different, not caring that someone else may disapprove. 

And if I can feel that passion from you when I'm getting briefed, then my job isn't necessarily any easier, but I know it's going to go in an interesting and above all real direction.

If I can't feel it at the brief, then it's my job to make up the reason that anyone should care.

And if I sound cynical about that, it's because I once had an ad killed because one – yes, one – grandmother in rural Saskatchewan wrote a letter of complaint. It was one of those times when I'd found a reason for people to care, found a funny/emotional way of connecting with people, but because it was a purely creative solution, no one internally but me felt the passion. It was easy to kill the ad and replace it with one that wouldn't get complaints, an ad that wouldn't emotionally connect with anyone, an ad that no one would really notice.

email is the devil's work

We had a moment today when there was a lot of back and forth with a client, a lot of typing of obvious frustration on both sides which was growing round after round of terse emails, and I finally went old school and said to the head suit, "Let's call the client."

The phone. Wow. How innovative. Why not send a telegram?

And yet, it was all taken care of in 45 seconds. Everyone was happy. You could hear it in the client's' voice, and ours. The attitude in our room was so much lighter. And it made us all think, crap, why didn't we do this sooner?

Email is great, but it's impersonal and bloodless. It allows you to follow the weird and savage logic of your own head, you know, the logic that suddenly finds you disrespecting people and saying things that you will regret.

The phone isn't quite face to face, but it's a hell of a lot better than being one of the hundred emails we all get every day. There's still something a little analog about the phone, something a little bit human, that lets us connect.

don't tug on that

It's been, um, a busy week. Lots of typing and presentations happening very quickly. Yesterday I got feedback on some copy which was approved except for one word. One little word. Change it and everyone's happy, and we can get on to everything else. No big deal, right?

Wrong. One wrong word sitting in the middle of a whole bunch of right ones makes all of them wrong. Clients and account people aren't paid to listen for nuance and emotional impact and, well, flow. But we are. Because people out there notice. Sitting in their car listening to the radio, or when they bother to click on the one potentially interesting email in their inbox, people care if what you write feels wrong.

The fact that the words have to feel right is why not everyone who slings words can actually write. It sounds finicky and stupid but it's true. People read not just the sense but the sound of your language. You have to be aware of the poetry in the language of even the most mundane buckslip. Even if you can't formally scan the metre of what you're writing, you have to hear it. It has to flow. If it sounds wrong, or if it sounds out of place, it probably is.

It's why I think about writing as composing.

So when I present a deck to my client, it works. It hangs together seamlessly. (In my mind at least.) You can't just pull out one stitch and think that the whole blanket will hang together.

Changes are of course fine. But tell me what the issues are, so I can incorporate them and still write something that flows. Don't tell me what the changes must be. Don't try to pull a word out and jam something else in.

To quote the immortal words of the great scientist and rock star Buckaroo Banzai, "Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."