Will Awdry is an account man who became a copywriter at BBH, a creative director at DDB London and, for eight years, creative director and acting managing director of Ogilvy and Mather London. He launched branding, design and marketing consultancy, Big Fish in 2014, and runs two courses for D&AD, Writing for Advertising and Writing for Impact. Words are his thing.
His course shows people, and his D&AD talk showed its audience, how easy it is to kickstart and re-inspire how you write whether you’ve been doing it for three minutes or thirty years. The steps, he says, are simple. Number one is get going.
Start sign with sky background
Number two is getting to a strategy when you haven’t been fed one. The answer is to polarise what you love and what you hate about a subject and decide which is more useful to you. And because you then try to push away from what it, you know what your enemy is – and you have something you can write about.
Number three is who the hell are you writing for. It’s a person, not a thing. Make that audience come alive in your head and you have the beginning of a conversation. Why is so much advertising writing so dull? It forgets number three. It doesn’t personalise.
Then there’s a fourth. Compression. Because real impact in writing comes from narrowing things down superbly. There isn’t one way to do that but the aim is to give people a short form of words that asks them to do a little work in their heads. That’s what fixes your message in the brain.
Here’s Awdry’s example: I can stick on a poster in the streets of London saying, “Do not smoke because it will kill you.” It’s a standard health warning common throughout the world, that presents a perfectly valid reason not to smoke. If I gave that as a brief to you and said, “you’ve got to stop smoking what are you going to do,” what would you write? Two Indian copywriters in Mumbai responded, “Cancer cures smoking.” With the first message, you get it but there’s nothing to take space in your audience’s brain so it sticks in their memory. The second makes stop and think about it. Do not smoke because it will kill you is a statement. Cancer cures smoking is an idea. Advertising might have to work three minutes, three weeks or three years later, so the more impactful and interesting the statement you make, the longer lasting it will be.
