Why copywriters should get awards for the good ideas that get ruined
The film critic Roger Ebert once suggested, with Morgan Freeman in mind, that ‘maybe actors should be given Oscars not for the good films they triumph in, but for the weak films they survive’. I feel like a similar system would work just as well, and provide considerably more comfort, if applied to copywriters.
You don’t need to have carted your pencil case very far through ‘The Industry’ to have realised that creative awards are, at best, a complicated business. If you get an award, I imagine (and imagine is all I can do) it’s a splendid feeling. But, if you’re one of the many creatives who have won enough of these things to build an shimmering fortress for a large family of belligerent turkeys, does it start to feel slightly less like vindication of your talent and more like an unwelcome storage conundrum?
By far the worst category to be in — and the most densely populated — are those creatives responsible for wonderful work where there is not the budget, the clout or, possibly, the appetite to fling a costly hat towards the big prize juries. (It is for this reason, and many others, that I’m a big fan of The Chutes awards.)
But back to what I’m shamelessly appropriating as The Ebert-Freeman Principle. Perhaps a better test of a copywriter’s creativity — as well as their resolve, their diplomacy and, ultimately, their pacifism — is how they acquit themselves on projects that start poorly and burst into flames from there.
One of the very late-night thoughts that often troubles my uncooperative brain is how many of my very best lines and ideas were never picked, never made and never even given more than a passing grunt of tepid appreciation. Multiply that by every copywriter in the game and the pool of rejected brilliance is like a Jupiter moon besides the ping-pong ball of ‘completed’ accomplishments.
The passing over of your best idea should, by itself, merit some kind of reward or recognition — but too often that’s merely the first, rather than the least, of a creative’s indignities. The idea that gets picked — even if it’s a weedy cousin to your better, wittier, handsomer concept — is still, for now, yours. Which of course is a state that lasts for all the time it takes for somebody to say ‘Can we just…’. From that point, no matter how much you write, how diligently you tinker, and how frequently you make the stupid changes, it’s less yours than it’s ever been.
And this is the stuff a creative award should be acknowledging — the writers not only cheated out of a glorious thought, but forced to saddle a decent one with all the baggage of doubt, disagreement, insecurity, ego, ignorance and compromise that accompanies every marketing idea from birth til the end of its brief and unhappy life.
The copywriter who is able to take a turd-dipped diamond and, by polishing up one small corner, allowing a little of the brilliance to glimmer through, is surely deserving of an award.
The creative who, having had their offer an inspired concept dismissed, pulls out all the stops to elevate — through skill and professional pride — the bland alternative further above its naturally flatulent state than it probably deserves. Hand that person a fashionable glass trophy and a small cloth with which to keep that trophy shiny.
Is this glib? Yes, I suspect it might be a little. But, in my experience, glibness tends to come from a place of hopelessly unalterable truth. Good ideas die or diminish on a daily basis for copywriters — and that’s never not been the case.
But if you and I were able, however privately, to recognise moments when the work we did — and not the work that ran — was worthy of applause I think we’d collect far more trophies in our minds, and our hearts, than even the greediest of the Riviera’s gong gulls.
Andrew Boulton is the author of Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter, available from all nice bookshops. And the big mean one.
