Colin Campbell, Copywriter

colin@colin.org      408-370-6521

Copywritering 8-10-24

August 10, 2024 No Comments

Copywritering 8-10-24

   I’ve been copywritering for a long time. I read all the books about copywriting and read the biographies of the great copywriters and I applied their best practices in everything I wrote as a freelancer.

     So when I landed a job at BBDO Detroit I thought I would encounter a crew of similar adherents to the foundations of good advertising. 

     Instead I found a creative staff that had other things on their mind instead of the daily drudgery of producing what Chrysler Corporation wanted to say about Dodge Trucks. I wrote print, radio, and TV commercials as if they mattered and I was crestfallen to find out that the others on the staff had no pride of authorship. They cranked out the crap and tried not to think about it.

     I spent my first six weeks on the job studying everything the agency had produced in the past year and was stunned by its violation of sound copywriting principles. I kept thinking I would gasp and wake up to find it was a dream.

     Eventually I figured out what the ad agency wanted from me. Good copywriting wasn’t what they wanted.

     Okay, I shrugged and gave ’em what they wanted. Over the next calendar year I wrote more ads than anybody else in the agency. If there was a project that needed actual, you know, writing, they called me in.

        One day I was typing away, reasoning myself through an assignment by writing about it to consider all aspects, when the senior art director said, “It’s amazing how you can just sit down and write.”

       Startled the hell out of me as I didn’t know he’d been standing behind me.

     None of the other writers wrote very much. They were surprised to find out that when I went home at night, I sat down at the typewriter and wrote stories and magazine articles. They were eager to set aside all aspects of work when they got home each day.    

     They were puzzled as to why I would use my first big paycheck to buy an IBM Correcting Selectric typewriter. Don’t you already have an IBM at the office? Yeah, but I need one at home, too.

     I kept writing about how the agency was going to lose the account if they kept up their anti-copywritering ways.

      A new CEO took over at Chrysler and he visited the agency and had a meeting with the top Creatives (not me, I was the junior writer back in those days). He pointed at one writer and said, “You–what’s a McPherson strut?” I could have answered that one.

     That writer was irate about it. He told me, “I’m an artist, not a mechanic.”

     When the agency got fired I was contacted by several other Detroit ad agency recruiters but I knew that they were all essentially identical to BBDO. Instead I fled back to California to resume freelancing, which I have done ever since.

Copywritering 8-8-24

August 9, 2024 No Comments

Copywritering 8-8-24

How can a freelance copywriter fit into the workflow these days. 

I recently looked at the websites of hundreds of web design shops from Silicon Valley to San Diego, and although they are all staffed with the world’s best coders and graphic designers, hardly any of them list a copywriter on their team. Copywriters are no longer in the picture.

In the Before Time I wrote content as a freelance copywriter and creative director. My clients were advertising agencies and graphic design shops, which by today have morphed together into web design shops that don’t need copywriters.

So, who’s writing the content?  I’m looking for advice as to how a freelance copywriter can fit into the workflow these days. 

The designers tell me that they use whatever text the client supplies. Web designers have abdicated the responsibility for the communication of facts about the client.

When I look at the sites they produce for industrial and technical clients, I see that the graphics are fabulous, but the sites suffer from the common flaws of client-written copy.  

One of which is the underlying assumption that nobody reads this stuff anyway, so why bother putting any effort into the presentation of facts about the company.

As a copywriter, my goal is to respect the visitor’s time: condense the information into a succinct summation, and make sure it’s worth the reader’s time to actually read the stuff. My first duty is to the reader.

Copywritering 8-7-24

August 7, 2024 No Comments

Copywritering: August 7, 2024  

“Copywritering” is the process of attempting to earn a living by being a  copywriter.

      I’ve been doing it a long time. I never expected to retire: I thought I would work until my final breath. I’m not in retirement, I’m still trying to adapt my skills toward being a useful participant in the world of website-building.

     I haven’t been able to attract any attention from the local website community. If such a thing even exists. I’ve met and/or interacted with hundreds of webshop owners from San Francisco to San Diego and none of them have been interested in offering improved copy to their clients.

     My old thing used to be: brochures. A brochure was a substantial expense for a small company. Usually I was brought into the picture only after the company had already been sold on the idea of spending the money.

     Okay, what is going into the brochure? It was my job to interview people in the company and investigate what the competitors were publishing and find out what the market circumstances were, and then present a rough draft that was wrong in every aspect but at least it gave the division managers a starting place and of course each division manager wanted his division to be first.

     Usually the final version morphed back toward my initial presentation as executives slowly realized that my structure was pretty darned good, now that they’ve actually looked at it.

 
 
 

Copywritering 8-6-24

August 6, 2024 No Comments

Copywritering 8-6-24
    I saw an article today, “Big Tech’s AI shock troops came for us — are you next?” by Josh Slocum. He was laid off as a content creation writer when the company he worked for went out of business last week and all thirty writers are now in the unemployment line.

“It’s not as if we hadn’t seen it coming. The immediate benefits of automating are all too clear, especially if a company is struggling. “AI is cheap, accessible, and easy,” Jack tells me. “[Even if] it’s not necessarily good.”
https://tinyurl.com/y4k4fuzp

     It’s a new universe of an infinite number of venues. Pick a niche and there’s an existing support structure for it already monetized.

     I’m mired in the adbiz of old. Step 1, catch attention. Step 2, transfer information. Step 3, make offer. Most shops concentrated too much on Step 1.

     I was the guy at the Step 2 and Step 3 desk.

Saturday, April 19, 2024

April 23, 2024 No Comments

4-19-24

I used to get dozens and sometimes hundreds of visitors in a day, and a lot them were looking at photos. Then it stopped. I became invisible in the search engines. Sure, if you knew the exact URL of one of my photos pages you could go there directly, shazam, it loads lots faster than the kludged-up database pages.

     How long ago was that. 2017, it looks like. My daily visitor count was still in the steady double figures in January, and then fell to single figures. I didn’t begin to notice it until March.

     I don’t remember when I began researching it. The search engines no longer could find me. I went through all the procedures to comply with the search engines, up to and including changing from the deprecated http address to the secure https address. Search engines ignored or red-flagged the sites without that extra “s” for security.

     I did all kinds of other things but nothing has brought back my previous presence on the web. Lots of my visitors were going to the Alvarez guitar catalog and the Seymour Duncan catalog, for instance, and now I never ever get any hits on those items.

     I changed all the Seymour pages to have the new Google ID numbers, but the fact remains that nobody goes there.

     Maybe I’m just paranoid. Maybe everybody else was shadow-banned, too.

      At one time if you searched for “copywriter,” I was in the top ten results because I was one of the first people to create a copywriting page. Colin Campbell, Copywriter, has had a website since 1995.

     Then I was in the top 100. Now I don’t exist.

     Nothing personal: if you google “copywriter” you will be hard pressed to find a person. Instead you get an endless list of intermediaries who will find the perfect copywriter for your task. Oh, and lots of how-to-become-a-copywriter tutorials.

455pm

     I ordered another Apple Magic Keyboard. The letter “N” has rubbed off–that’s a sign that I’ve reached the limit. The keys all still work but they don’t have the springiness of a new keyboard. I’ve been looking at prices for a month because there are sale prices once in a while. Not this time, $99 everywhere you look except Other World: $79.99. But I’ve ordered it from OWC twice and it arrives in a non-Apple box, and even though they swear it is not refurbished, just a bulk-order thing, I’ve found things I didn’t like about them both times. So I shrug and pay the extra $20 to get a Gen You Wine brand spanking new keyboard.

     I have no idea what they do to refurbish an Apple Magic Keyboard. Probably they open it and run a can of spray air over it and that’s it.

     All I know is that when I have a new keyboard it’s like it’s not even there, I’m flicking my fingers and the words appear onscreen. When the keyboard is old enough so that the lettering is worn off the N key, my fingers push down past the now-gone springiness and clank against the bottom. Maybe I learn to type softer.

     Well, a few years ago I saw an Underwood Upright at a garage sale and I was thinking, what if there’s some catastrophe that knocks out electricity for months? Maybe I should have a manual typewriter on hand, just in case.

     So I tried it out and I couldn’t believe how much travel there was in the keys, how the heck could I have typed 60 words per minute on this barbaric device? And then I wondered where I could get ribbons for the ancient thing. Certainly not at Lund’s Office Supplies. I have plenty of paper and pens on hand if the catastrophe occurs.  

      I was trying to hold off on the new keyboard because surely there’s something else more important that I could be spending $106.67 on.

18 reasons why I’m better than an AI text generator.

March 21, 2024 No Comments

18 reasons why I’m better than an AI text generator.

     Or some number.

     AI can’t stick to the subject. It meanders off into the wild blue yonder. It remains trite and simplistic. Like Eliza, it spends a lot of wordage repeating your question back to you in cumbersome grammatical structures. It’s a chore to read more than a couple paragraphs of AI text.

     Who knows if AI can improve itself. It seems inevitable that it will fill in all the easy stuff. Ten or fifteen years ago I read about the app that wire services were starting to use to write high school sports stories. The app had access to school rosters so it could generate a couple paragraphs about the game if you inserted the box score. “Catcher Tom Smith slugged two doubles and drove in three runs while also throwing out two attempted base stealers in High’s 6-2 victory over their crosstown rivals.”

     I keep seeing PR bursts from other AI companies comparing their offerings to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Each and every one of them is better than ChatGPT, according to the PR.

     The main problem in expanding AI’s market share is that most people have no idea how to use AI for anything. Including me.

     The main stumbling block for AI companies is not the technology per se, it is the growing social pushback against it as the intentions and agendas behind the programming emerge into view. AI has to be “trained”–GPT stands for “Generative Pre-Trained Transformer.” If you train AI on Nazi garbage, that’s what you’ll get back.

     Also, the powers of AI are so stupendous that they must be kept out of the hands of the raggedy-assed masses. Why, if they gave us unrestricted access, the internet would be flooded with Taylor Swift porn videos.

     AI is still not good enough to produce a fake video of Joe Biden making sense.