You've probably heard of advertising legend David Ogilvy. He virtually invented modern direct response copywriting.
Wouldn't you like to know how he did it?
He wrote it down!
In 1955, a fan asked him to describe his right process. And he did. It's pretty amazing, and inspiring or helpful to the rest of us poor slobs who write.
The letter is at Letters of Note: I am a lousy copywriter. Here's the core of it:
- I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.
- I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years.
- I am helpless without research material -- and the more "motivational" the better.
- I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.
- Before actually writing the copy, I write down every conceivable fact and selling idea. Then I get them organized and relate them to research and the copy platform.
- Then I write the headline. As a matter of fact I try to write 20 alternative headlines for every advertisement. And I never select the final headline without asking the opinion of other people in the agency. In some cases I seek the help of the research department and get them to do a split-run on a battery of headlines.
- At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)
- I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts.
- If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.
- The next morning I get up early and edit the gush.
- Then I take the train to New York and my secretary types a draft. (I cannot type, which is very inconvenient.)
- I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry -- because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.
While I can't endorse the "drink half a bottle of rum" part of his process, there are a few things worth pointing out:
- The office might be your worst place for writing!
- He found out every possible thing he could about the thing he was writing about.
- He put repetition to work: 20 alternate headlines. 20 attempts. Great writing comes from trying a lot of different things, most of them not good.
- He separated writing from editing. Two very different activities, both necessary. We often try to combine them into one step -- which means we just do a half-baked job at both.
I'm no Ogilvy, but my process is similar. It's a great path to solid fundraising writing!
from Future Fundraising Now https://ift.tt/2Lcg6nF
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