Auto Copywriter

I’d like to consider myself as someone who embraces digital technology. Yes, even as a copywriter – dabbling in a skill that is probably as old as the first cave drawings.

Oh and I like caves too. Not the bat-infested kind but the mental cave of solitude from where I draw inspiration and shut out the world.

Hmmm… I’m not sounding much like the embracer-of-modernity as implied above.

Nevertheless, I’m sure you will agree that it is noisy out there. There are all sorts of digital apps, platforms and tools; all screaming for attention and promising a quick fix upon an even quicker sign-up.

And don’t worry, it’s free to start. But you can unlock amazing features to make your work/passion/life a breeze for a small monthly subscription for the rest of your indecisive life.

A familiar pitch these days inundating every other scroll-of-thumb in social media.

Unsurprisingly, I have also lately noticed ads for copywriting apps and templates that claim you can master the art of written persuasion in a few taps – an auto copywriter in your pocket of sorts.

Trust Your Copywriter

Pretty cool if you think about it. Why endure years of being under-appreciated and underpaid honing a critical marketing skill when you can just tap-tap and its done?

Being a copywriter is part art, part science, part depression and part mental anguish. And if you’re a freelance copywriter – add ‘part broke’ to that equation.

I would reckon over the last 20 over years of slinging copy, I would have sold products and services worth tens, or perhaps hundreds of millions for my clients.

And now, at a time when I am supposed to be at the peak of my prowess – combining my sales, business and strategic expertise – have come to know that I can be replaced by an app.

Hey, I’m a big believer in the democratisation that technology brings. Yes, jobs will be replaced but new ones are being created as well.

Actually, you don’t really need an app or template to be a copywriter. Social media has allowed anyone to string a caption together for their business and publish it to the world. Ta-da!

Mastery of the language, grammar proficiency and proofing skills are al old-school prerequisites that don’t really matter anymore, especially if you are selling exclusively on social media.

And that’s the caveat – these wonderous apps are probably only suited to social media marketing efforts – and some even claim sales letters – and even that primarily for the B2C segment.

But if you need copy written for any of these things:

  1. Website, portals or apps
  2. Videos or motion graphics
  3. Profiles – digital or otherwise
  4. CRM communications
  5. All B2B marketing touchpoints

Then going Canva with your copywriting is surely a formula for disaster.

Any serious business truly needs that one person to make the words work, and then build a personal relationship with the audience in view of generating a positive response. Then have the ability to put a creative spin on things with wordplay and uncommon insights for lasting appeal.

Not to mention having the acumen to uncover pain points and deliver solutions in an engaging manner. Plus, this person needs to be able to monitor results and optimise for greater impact.

That’s what copywriters do, which no app can emulate. And frankly, I am barely scratching the surface.

Good luck with the app!

Good Riddance 2020 – You Freak!

If the year 2020 was a/an:

  • Headline, then it caught all the wrong attention
  • Concept, it didn’t make sense
  • Website, it wasn’t very user-friendly
  • Ad, no one was sold
  • Call-to-action, it surely was misleading
  • Logo, it wasn’t recognised
  • Packaging, it misrepresented its contents
  • Campaign, it didn’t cross any borders
  • Online purchase, it wasn’t fulfilled
  • App, it crashed

This truly was an epic year, for all the wrong reasons. Even for me – a self-professed homebody and pseudo-introvert – it has been a sobering (errr, maybe not the right word…), perhaps depressing year to be living in.

HNY 2021
Please, don’t jinx it…

From the ever-flexible MCO SOPs to the ever-present MKN SMSes repeating the obvious, there just seem to be a tinge of cluelessness of late on how to eradicate this menace.

Granted, the whole world is struggling – even ‘first-world’ countries – to contain the pandemic. No easy feat indeed, especially with such a ferocious and now mutated virus in a highly social and often incorrigible human populace.

Just like that, we are at year’s end while being at wit’s end for not being able to revert to any sort of normalcy. Talk of pre-Covid times have become reminiscent of an alternate by-gone universe; where handshakes, dining-in, concerts and vacations are the stuff of legends.

Welcoming 2020
Me being ignorant AF!

So, it will still be masks-up and sanitisers-in-pocket well into 2021 from the looks of things, pending of course vaccine efficacy.

Yet even in these unreal times, humanity and humour is not lost. When Twitter asked people to ‘Roast 2020’, there were some very apt responses from major brands.

And for me, a fulltime freelance copywriter along with countless other freelance service providers, gig workers and home-based entrepreneurs – it does seem like an uncertain future.

But we will go into 2021 being cautiously optimistic. If history is any indicator, this war will be won – and we can possibly party into 2022 in style, I’ll still probably chill at home of course.

Yes, a lot can happen between now and then. Who knows? Maybe aliens will land and eradicate every last bit of the virus, and us included.

Till then, let’s just keep doing what we do best – Zoom meetings.

Life Took Control

Well hey, it’s been a 3-year hiatus since my last post.

I blame myself to be honest, for not keeping this sorry excuse for a copywriting blog up-to-date. You see, I really, really meant to continue writing, but circumstances of my own doing somewhat halted my drive and determination to keep the posts coming. My bad, to say the least.

Yet everything has a reason (or many reasons), and mine are very much to do with family and everything that goes along with it. In addition, I’ve had a full-time J.O.B over the last couple of years or so, which meant penning my thoughts was not high up my priority list. I slacked for a few weeks, which became months and eventually years… so here I am, ashamed of my lack of effort and motivation to, just, write.

SEO Writer
I chill for a few years and this is what happens to copywriting… damn!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But let’s let bygones be bygones shall we?

Essentially, life took control. And now I am in the midst of setting in motion the plans of what I hope will culminate in regular thoughts, insights, observations, advise, and the usual nonsense (or sense) from yours truly.

This is not a false start and I am determined not to falter. But as with all things that is being reconstructed, it may be a while before you hear from me again. It has been a whirlwind past 3 years, and I hope the trend continues in this domain, positively of course.

Before I end, it is only fitting for me to apologise to all those whom have enquired for my services in the past few years and got turned down. I must say I was very busy and would not have done justice to your company, brand or marketing plans had I taken up your project.

Hopefully soon, I will be available again to assist in achieving your marketing aims and aspirations.

Cheers!

 

About Branding

Okay. I know I’ve been envisioning a world where advertising will be transparent, seamless, targeted and minus all the mumbo jumbo that we’ve become accustomed to. But to reach this level of efficiency, a product or service has to first establish itself in the market. Herein comes the matter of branding.

A quick example. When Apple launched the iPhone, it did virtually no advertising. The mere mention from Steve Jobs that Apple is launching a phone was enough to create a ripple onto the sea of consumers. A buzz was created first among newsmen and techies then all the way to college nerds and the average consumers. People formed opinions about the iPhone months before it was even officially launched. And when it did hit the stores, the demand for an iPhone was overwhelming. Even that that time, advertising was minimal.

So what does this tell us? It’s not that Apple didn’t have to money to advertise to create the desired buzz, they just let consumers do it at almost no cost. But to be able to do this, there are 2 key criteria:

  1. The product has to be revolutionary and ground-breaking. Something that consumers have not seen, heard, felt or used before. It has to be a product that taps into a relatively untapped market. In the case of the iPhone, it’s Mobile Phone Entertainment.
  2. An established brand presence; especially as a leader in your market segment. In the case of Apple, it’s The Most Innovative Tech Gadget Maker. It also helped that Apple had already launched other successful products: the iMac and iPod come to mind.

Granted, the big boys with the dough have the advantage. They can leverage on their big brand presence and seamlessly transition into an advertising future that’s becoming more and more minimalist. Let’s say Google announces it plans to launch an application that scans the world’s online documents and creates an article on any subject in a click of a button, with contributing writers compensated. You pay a fee of USD3.99 for each article churned by this application which is fact-checked, referenced and annotated.

Now Google is a big, trusted online brand and people would be happy to part with their money for a product that they know would be of quality. Now if Microsoft announced it wanted to launch a similar product, well let’s just say there could be a couple of issues. Remember Windows ME anyone? Here’s while the product is revolutionary, the brand that is advocating it may have a problem convincing consumers due to past functionality problems. For the record, I would just like to say here that I have nothing against Microsoft.

So what can up and coming brands that do not have the presence do? For them, the product or service becomes critical. They must get it spot on. It has to be of real use to the consumers. It must create a new market or venture into an underserved segment. In short you have to be the first in your brand category, a pioneer. No one else must have what you intend to offer, even differing USPs won’t work; it has to be a brand new product or service.

Here are some success snippets as examples:

Apple, a now revered tech company, created the iPod, a portable, intuitive digital music player.

Nescafe, the world’s largest selling coffee, was the first instant coffee.

Old Town Coffee, now a successful franchise, was the first upmarket “Kopitiam”

Perodua, now the No.1 local car brand, was the first to introduce compact cars in Malaysia

Digi, a leader in the pre-paid business, was the first to introduce prepaid calling.

A word of warning though, just being first isn’t enough. You must also be the first in the minds of the consumers. And you must work to keep the brand presence at Top of Mind levels consistently. This is why Proton is not the No.1 local car manufacturer anymore. It was the first, but never really did anything after that.

The End of Advertising as We Know It

Forgive me for the rather long title. But then again, it is still within the 8-word limit, which is presumably the threshold of an effective headline. But then again again, this and pretty much every other ad-rule that you and I have painstakingly learned over the years could turn out to be antiquated junk. Remember the ‘cow-gum’ anyone?

While we’re haggling on the most catchy headline or where not the place the logo or how many more slides it will take to convince the client, the industry is evolving at breakneck speed, right under our noses. Ignore the signs at your own peril:

1. Mass advertising is dying: TV audiences are dwindling, newspapers are seeing reduced readership and radio listeners are tuning out.

2. Consumers are becoming or are already smarter: with a wealth of information just a search away, consumers are making purchase decisions way before they even go to a retail outlet or pick up the phone.

3. Clients are becoming increasingly results oriented: viewership, readership and strong creative do not faze clients anymore. It’s Click-Through-Rates, Page Views, Cost Per Impression. Bottom line… ROI.

4. Ads have to work harder and quicker with the amount of clutter that permeates the media. Consumers are seeing through the creative fluff, which is becoming increasingly cheesy.

5. Shouting FREE! and EXCLUSIVE! don’t seem to work: okay, let me rephrase, they don’t seem to work as well as they used to. The audience know exactly what they want and crave relevancy, quality and newness over freebies or empty promises.

These are just 5 early warning signs, from the top of my head, pointing to an advertising future that may become unrecognizable sooner than you think. I guess we’d all be happily trudging along had it not been for the internet, which is threatening the livelihood of traditional advertising. But the web is not the only contributor to these winds of change.

There’s a far more powerful force that is dictating the evolution of advertising, and yet we hardly notice. If fact, we are part of this force as every time we use it, it becomes better. This entity began with a humble quest of ‘organizing the world’s information’ and I must say it have succeeded admirably. I am referring to none other than our favourite surfing buddy… Google.

What has Google got to do with advertising you ask? Everything I say.  For the average user, Google is a tool to search for content online. Google’s business is search, and it was just search in the beginning. Slowly but surely, Google has evolved into a media cum content cum advertising agency. It has made advertising even more transparent, bridging the divide between advertisers and potential customers. There will come a time where you will be able to buy almost anything online (if that’s not the case already). No more fancy advertising agency, kick-ass creative or mind-boggling strategies.

Advertiser signs up for a Google account, and with a ridiculously low budget creates a targeted, virtually risk-free advertising campaign. Consumers search for a product or service, sees the sponsored link on the results page by an advertiser and clicks on it. The consumers are now at the advertiser’s doorstep to be done with as pleased. Simple, effective, direct, focused, efficient and economical.

You may argue that this is just an online trend. How would this work in a real, physical world? Technology is moving at such a blinding pace that we will become more and more wired as the years or even months roll on. There are web-enabled mobile phones, GPS navigation systems and the now humble laptops to encroach into our increasingly wired world.

Imagine this scenario:

You walk out for lunch from your city-centre corporate office. The restaurants are crowded, there’s hardly a spot for you and your lunch buddies.

Normally, you would ‘tapau’ and dine on your desk while pretending to be a model employee. Well, that’s so… hmmmm… 2.0. Fast forward a few years into the future and this is how your lunchtime might pan out.

You whip out your phone (which is a PDA cum netbook cum camera cum navigator cum alarm clock) and search for restaurants with a table for four in your area. You make a reservation, which will be held for, say, 10 minutes.

Now that’s lunching made easy. Now where does advertising come in all this? Can you see it? Subtle but effective. The restaurants will actually pay the Lunch Search Service to be listed.

Isn’t that advertising at its fundamental form? Connecting businesses with potential customers? No art direction, no compelling copy, no insightful strats… no fuss!

You know what? It’s not too far away I tell you.

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