Dear the advertising industry,
Not for the first time – I’m out.
This time it’s nothing to do with your relentlessly sexist imagery which normalizes a minority body shape to the extent that normal body shapes seem weird, and makes girls feel bad about the way they look before they even start school.
Nor the extent to which you have appropriated every cultural, scientific and sporting achievement of the last century for your own dark purposes.
This time it’s the actual words. The specific objects of my one-man cultural boycott are below.
Thanks,
Nick (former copywriter)
1) Anything written in the first person narrative
‘Please wash me at 30 degrees’ is says on my t shirt label, yet I know that objects only speak after loads and loads of drugs so this must be a lie. Why would my t-shirt lie to me?
2) Made up job titles
I know that your ‘chocolatier’ is not a kind-faced elderly gent in a fluffed up chef’s hat painstakingly dripping chocolate into an individual mould, rather a bored machine operative wearing a hairnet in a factory on an industrial estate, dreaming of a better life as, picking out the occasional mis-shape and possibly regretting life chances and life choices all the way until the end of a long uneventful week, when it’s time to take drugs until objects start to speak.
Microsoft I know your call centre staff aren’t ‘ninjas’ and stealing the name of a Japanese medieval feudal sect because they are unlikely to sue is an act of cultural theft. See also gurus, warriors, jedis.
3) Misplaced adjectives relating to an emotion
You can have the purely descriptive (big, small) but the rest are subjective. ‘Fun size?’ I’ll be the judge of that. ‘Gourmet’ is also subjective, as is ‘luxury’, and even ‘improved’, and – as a rule of thumb – wherever you see a self-administered ‘boutique’ it’s a signal the thing being described is not going to be in any way boutique.
4) Fluffy names for dull stuff
Calling your operating system ‘Cupcake’ doesn’t affect the fact it’s a huge string of code produced by people who don’t like the outdoors but love Game Of Thrones (stereotyping coders is the last stereotyping that’s still allowed. One day they’ll rise up and make everything crash but physically they will be easily overpowered)
5) The actual wrong word for stuff
Aqua? What’s aqua daddy? It’s like water but more expensive. Your shampoo is not being straight with you, it’s a useful lesson son.
….this poster says ’90s Grunge, BANK THE LOOK’, I took it in Bristol where ironically* they have been banking the grunge since the early 90s.
6) Any produce featuring copy relating to an imagined workplace with a philosophy/mission statement, etc
My lyin’ shampoo done tell me, word for word, on its label, that: ‘we have always been driven by a simple truth; every women deserves to look fabulous without spending a fortune.’
Let’s unpack that. Always? This has always been the thing that drives you? I don’t have the time or resources to disprove this clearly false statement, but perhaps if you work for Tresemme you can tell me whether this has been your eternal motivation. If true, we can plan an intervention for you.
Despite anecdotal evidence that the average workplace is a hotbed of insecurity, stroppy fridge Post Its, idiot managers, pointless meetings, petty grudges, etc product copywriters make out that ‘we’ – which is wrong for a start, because copywriters are mostly freelancers who would not be seen dead in a hairnet or on a production line – that ‘we’ are in this together, that we are all an informal crazy bunch you don’t have to be crazy to work here but it kinda helps.
Innocent drinks? The most guilty.
They basically suggest that their company started in a puff of lovely pink organic smoke, and that fluffy bunnies, tooth fairies and unicorns routinely gambol up and down their tree-lined office, giving out sage advice and Thai massages to delighted worker elfs. The truth is different.
Three public-school educated chaps who met at Cambridge and worked in advertising created a brand of smoothies adored by people who love writing on the side of their drinks packaging – coincidentally the same consumers who are incapable of chewing fruit – which they then sold to Coca Cola. They tried to call their product ‘liquefied fruit salads’ in order to dodge the taxman. Turns out you may need the tooth fairy after an innocent smoothie, because according the Daily Mail, in a bizarre exposure of sugary gack, an innocent smoothie has more sugar than a Coke, or three and a half Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. Weird to type this, but thanks, Daily Mail you done good.
7) Childish or fun fonts to convey ‘brand values’
Choose art. Choose line, depth, composition. Choose beauty. Choose the way in which the spirit can be lifted by good design. Choose a graphic design degree. Choose the Bauhaus movement. Choose fonts. Choose *noise the of stylus scratching to a stop* Kidprint?
See 6). Amusingly Innocent the drinks brand are involved in a legal wrangle over their design team and look set to literally lose their halo, proof indeed that there is possibly a god, albeit a complacent god with a sophisticated sense of humour who punishes graphic designers.
8) Idiot celebrities tweeting endorsements
So you give it to someone else I don’t like for free so that I have to pay a bit more for it? This is your actual strategy? LOL.
9) There is no 9
10) Or 10 either
Look if you haven’t worked out that bad news doesn’t come in threes, or that a list with 10 items contains at least two fluffers or skips a couple of important things then we are possibly doomed as a species. Even the word listicle is hateful.
So that’s it?
Getting a bit chummy pal but possibly a rhetorical device so I’ll let you off, oh my God that faux matey copywriting is catching and I hate myself, anyway the point is that if you have to sift through so much informational crap in order just to buy something you start to believe that water really is aqua when it’s in hair product it becomes much easier to believe anything anybody wants to tell you.
For example, that your side of a conflict is made up of loyal troops (as opposed to ‘fanatical, brainwashed militia’), and that they carry out daring pre-emptive first strikes, (and your enemy ‘sneak raids’); or that economic growth (grow, happy word) is the thing that will improve our quality of life, as opposed to fairer distribution of existing wealth or swimming in a river in the sunshine or a total ban on unnecessary or dishonest copywriting on packaging starting tomorrow.
That’s my – I mean – ‘our’ philosophy.
PS If you are worried about the copywriters and what they will do, see my other listicle ‘9 things you can do with your word skills that don’t involve making the richest, luckiest people in the world feel unsatisfied with the things they’ve got to the point they ignore the extent of world inequality, say, or the genuine beauty and wonder of the universe.’