Lost only subscriber and move to freeWriteCamp.org

I enjoyed creating for Copywriting Examples but I wasn’t happy with creating just another silo where you lock in people and then try to squeeze money out of them.

Maybe I’m also a little bit tired of the money-centric copywriting world when in fact the creative execution is what really makes the difference, or as copywriting veteran Bob Hoffman said:

THE FIRST and perhaps most material reason advertising is crappy is that good advertising is very hard to create. Much harder than you think. There are very few people who can make excellent advertising on a consistent basis. I spent 40 years in the ad business and I created maybe 10 or 12 ads I think are really good. The rest were somewhere between okay and awful.

If you're stuck at home in lockdown like I am, you've probably come to realize how many shitty TV shows, shitty movies, and shitty songs there are in the world. It's not that people set out to create shitty things, they just turn out that way. Creating something excellent is amazingly hard.

The same is true of advertising. Nobody sets out to write bad ads, they just usually turn out that way. Talent is a rare and precious thing and contrary to pop-psych bullshit we are not all creative. In fact, hardly any of us are.

NEXT reason for ad crappiness is that ad agencies have lost confidence in the power of creativity. The advertising industry has devalued creativity in favor of technology, data, and other manifestations of business math. Sure, they still give lip service to creativity, but follow the money. For the past ten years agencies have been throwing lots of money at technology and data, but not at creative talent.

Publicis is a great example. They put tens of millions into a dumbass internal AI initiative called Marcel that looks to all the world like just another closed-loop social media whack-off. Imagine what they could have done for their business if they had taken the $20 million and hired an army of outstanding creative people instead?

Source: Bob Hoffman - 5 REASONS WHY ADVERTISING IS CRAPPY

I think one of the reasons advertising has become less effective is that consumers have become better at playing defense than we are at offense. Our job is to sell them something, their job is to avoid being promiscuously sold. It's like baseball. We are trying to score, they are trying to keep us from scoring.

I think there is a simple explanation for why their defensive skills have become better than our offensive skills. We've become obsessed with media strategy at the expense of creative strategy. By far, the most heavily debated issues in the ad world these days are around media strategy -- traditional vs digital; precision targeting vs mass reach; programmatic vs direct, etc. There is far less impassioned discussion over creative strategy. Even an old blogweasel like me -- who spent his life as a copywriter and has no background in media -- winds up spending 80% of his time writing about media.

By focusing on media, our industry has become obsessed with where to hit the ball, rather than on how to hit the ball. The problem is - just like in baseball - the "where" in hitting is valueless without the "how." Hitting a hard line drive into the gap will get you two or three bases. But hitting a soft fly ball to the exact same spot will you get you nothing but a seat on the pine.

We may have gotten better at finding the "where" but I'm afraid we're hitting way too many soft pop-ups. We're making it easy on the defense by ignoring the most important aspect of our offense -- making solid contact.

Source: Bob Hoffman - ADVERTISING AND BASEBALL

So, I paused the Copywriting Examples publication, made all Premium content freely available, and will now be integrating Copywriting Examples into freeWriteCamp.org which will give the latter a revival injection.

At freeWriteCamp.org you learn the craft of writing so you can stop guessing what works. Write emails, landing pages, ads, and creative stories that work for your readers, get you jobs and get the job done. A nonprofit. In development since 2015.