Consulting Journal: Writing - Writing advertising copy

Writing: Writing advertising copy

by David Blakey

Here are two techniques for transforming a consultant's report into advertising copy. And when you can use them, even if you don't write advertising copy.

[Monday 23 February 2004]

Consultants mainly write reports. Consultants rarely write advertising copy. Sometimes, consultants do need to write copy, or, at least, to write in a style that is more attractive to their readers than the style of their reports. For the moment, let us assume that you need to write advertising copy.

There are some techniques in writing reports that you should not use if you are writing copy. There are some techniques in writing copy that you would not be able to use if you were writing reports. Here are two of them.

Nouns and adjectives

When you are writing reports, you will often use a noun and modify it with an adjective. If you are writing about a problem it can be a minor problem or a major problem. When you are writing copy, you should look for a single noun that will replace the adjective-noun combination. A minor problem can become a glitch; a major problem can become a crisis. You can see why I wrote that you would not be able to use this technique in writing reports. In a report, you will use a noun like problem - which is a ‘dispassionate’ word - and then qualify it by adding an adjective. You will not use nouns like glitch or crisis - because they can have emotional overtones to some readers. They are strong words, because they bring strong images into a reader's imagination.

What do you imagine as you read each of these words:
problem: a crossword puzzle, a mathematical equation?
glitch: a blunt pencil, a late train?
crisis: a burning building? a train crash?

Verbs and adverbs

In the same way, when you write advertising copy you replace verb-adverb combinations with a single verb. So, where a report may say that a task should be done quickly, advertising copy might say that it should be accelerated. Just as the nouns that replace adjective-noun combinations can be strong or weak, so the verbs that replace verb-adverb combinations can be positive or negative. It may sound positive when you write that a task has been accelerated. You can make it sound negative if you say that it has been rushed.

Here is a consultant's recommendation.

We strongly recommend that you implement business process mapping rapidly in order to make your plans for an ERP produce results in the short term.

It can be rephrased into copy as

We urge you to seize upon business process mapping now, to get the benefits of your ERP quickly.

The original sentence has not simply had the words replaced. Its structure has been changed as well, so that the new words work better. The result is a sentence that includes a pause between our recommendation and the results from it, rather than a smooth transition from our recommendation into the results that we anticipate from it. In a consultant's report that smooth transition is useful. It allows the reader time to think, so that they are reading the reason while they consider the recommendation. In the advertising copy, the reader is hurried from recommendation to result. They desire the result before they have fully understood the recommendation, so that their desire convinces them that the recommendation is good.

Uses

As you learn more about the differences between consulting reports and advertising copy, then you begin to appreciate how you can change your text to go from one to the other. At the beginning of this article I asked you to assume that you had to write advertising copy. Now that I have described two techniques that you would use in writing advertising copy, I want you to consider whether you could use those techniques in preparing slide presentations. If you need to prepare a summary of a report as a slide presentation, you can re-word the main points of the report to make them ‘punchier’. Similarly, if you want to change a slide presentation into a white paper, you will be able to re-word the bulleted text into smooth, professional paragraphs.

If you imagine that your slide presentations are advertising copy, then you will produce presentations that have an immediate appeal to your audience, through strong or weak nouns and positive or negative verbs. This sentence

We strongly recommend that you implement business process mapping rapidly in order to make your plans for an ERP produce results in the short term.

may be transformed into

Getting ERP benefits quickly
business process mapping now

in a slide presentation.

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