Blog in 04 2012.

The Ivor Novello Awards are coming up so we thought we'd share our favourite lyrics over the next couple of weeks. Whether they're from a musical, an anthem or a ballad, we're interested in the words, not the tune. ‘

And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time’

What Sarah Said, by Death Cab for Cutie.

The first time I heard this song, I misheard it.

In my head, every plan was a tiny prayer to having more time with your dad. It doesn’t really make grammatical sense, but hey, these are the words of a musician. He’s allowed to play a bit fast and loose with language.

It was only when I saw the lyrics written down that I realised it was Father Time, not father time (or even father-time). Of course. Whenever we make a plan, we’re sort of assuming we won’t die before it comes to fruition.

I like my version more.

By Padders    

‘And the bare-chested boys are going down / On everything that their momma believes’

Trani, by Kings Of Leon – written by Caleb Followill, Nathan Followill and Angelo T Petraglia.

This lyric first stuck out to me because it’s one of the few things you can actually understand on the early Kings Of Leon records. Caleb slurs and yowls his way through most of the tracks, and that’s a shame because you miss out on a lot of beautiful words.

I love the imagery in this song. It takes you right there, to the parking lot of a sleazy, grimy, run-down bar on the edge of town in Nowheresville, USA. And this line in particular slaps you about with the pointless machismo of the plosive ‘bare-chested boys’ drinking and brawling their lives away. The whole album revolves around the experience of young men with nothing much better to do than drink and get high, distilled perfectly in these thirteen words.

Sadly it looks like Caleb learned to enunciate properly around the same time he forgot how to write songs. (See: ‘you, your sex is on fire’.)

By Harry

According to this Marketing Week article, four more business words will be hitting our boardrooms soon. And they’ve caused such a stir, the likes of The Times and the Guardian have been covering them too.

In the line-up we’ve got: solomo (no, not a robot), plussification (which you have to read twice to check it’s not a naughty word), likeonomics (which is almost exactly what you think it is) and tradigital (a disgusting amalgamation of traditional and digital).

The problem with three out of the latest four to hit our boardroom-buzzword-bingo cards is that they’re unnecessary labels. They’re names for processes and ideas that we’ve always had, and never needed to name before.

Like ‘likeonomics’. In a nutshell, it means: the more people that like your brand, the more people will buy from you. But didn’t we always know that?

‘Tradigital’ marketing. That means using traditional marketing principles in digital spaces. Although it’s quite fun to say, it’s something that marketing companies should be doing already.

And ‘plussification’ has come from Google+. It’s about how many people have clicked ‘+1’ next to webpages – recommending them. The higher a website’s ‘plussification’, the more people will go on it. You know, a lot like how the more places that link to your website, the more people will get to it. That thing people have known and done for ages.

The fourth one is a bit trickier, but equally silly.

‘Solomo’ is a combination of ‘social’, ‘local’ and ‘mobile’. It’s about sending people deals based on where they are at the moment (since half the British population have smartphones, companies can tell where half the population are at any one time). But you have to be careful; readers can become ‘deal fatigued’. That’s right, deal fatigued.

The problem all four of these words have in common is that they need explaining. And everyone will have a slightly different understanding of them. So while everyone’s nodding at the presenter in the boardroom talking about raising the company’s likeonomics through solomo tradigital marketing, and getting a higher plussification average (without, of course, causing deal fatigue), no-one really has the foggiest what they’re on about.

Has anyone shouted ‘bingo’ yet?

There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle in the blogosphere the last few months about the advice ‘write like you speak’. Back in December, Taylor Lindstrom of ‘Men With Pens’ said it was the ‘worst piece of writing advice he’d ever heard’. People have been arguing it one way or the other ever since. It seems to us that most of the disagreements have come about because of a misunderstanding about what the advice is designed to help people with. Here’s why:

It’s largely advice about not putting on a ‘telephone voice’ when you write

The reason we say it is to stop people feeling like they need to adopt a formal, posh or ‘clever-sounding’ tone when they’re writing. For example, you wouldn’t say in a meeting ‘schedules shall be agreed upon prior to commencement of the project’. You’d say ‘we’ll agree the schedules before we start the project’. Yet lots of people tend to write the former, because they think it’s what ‘proper’ or ‘professional’ writing should sound like. Writing more like you speak is really about getting people to tune in to these sorts of differences.

It’s not about including all the habits of speech in your writing

When you speak you ‘umm’ and ‘ahh’, you don’t finish sentences, you digress, ramble, gesticulate for added effect. (Well okay, I do.) Clearly, nobody’s saying you should do that in your writing. Some people caveat ‘write like you speak’ by saying ‘write like you speak – and then polish’. Or ‘write like you speak – but speak well’. I don’t like these sorts of caveats because ‘polishing’ your words and ‘speaking well’ can sometimes be misinterpreted as ‘poshing it up a bit’, which gets you back to the problem you started with. I prefer saying ‘remember, it’s write more like you speak, not literally as you speak’. The simple practical test is: read your writing out loud. Listen to your voice. Can you read it out in your natural speaking voice?

It’s not advice about how to structure your writing

One of the complaints against ‘write like you speak’ as advice is that it results in rambling, stream-of-consciousness pieces. Of course, you should structure your piece well. Start with your main point. Group your points into themes, and so on. (Though, funnily enough, there are times when we’re talking that we’re really good at instinctively structuring what we need to say – if you’ve only got 20 seconds to persuade someone of something, it’s astonishing how effortlessly you can hone in on what your main point is.)

And don’t forget: writing is only half the story

Actually writing the words down is only half the job. Write like you speak is a great start. But then edit, edit, edit.

Certain things didn’t quite wash in The Apprentice this week.

More unbelievable than Jenna’s remark that she was ‘turning on the charm’, was Adam’s brazen-faced aggrandisement of cheap minced beef as ‘gourmet meatballs cooked to an authentic Italian recipe’. (Thank God he didn’t go for corned beef.)

As expected, the dish was less ‘deliziosa’ and more ‘dogs-a-deena’. Looking at the hashed-up mess of meat, perhaps Adam knew that it would take a hell of a lot to convince punters to cough up £5.99 for a portion. So what better tactic to use than the old supermarket naming trick? Simply tell the customer it’s gourmet.

Adam jumped right in and went for ‘Utterly Delicious Meatballs’. And if that didn’t make it obvious just how amazingly, agonisingly scrumptious these meatballs were, he larded on the strapline: ‘Italian splendour with oodles of taste.’

Are you salivating yet? Thought not.

Telling not showing is something we always warn companies about. Saying you’re credible doesn’t give you credibility. Just as saying, 'I’ve got a purple-feathered parakeet on my head' won’t make you believe I have. We think Adam should've spent less time coming up with a delicious name and more on making his dish edible.

Llb   hljff  ool;@n

(Oops, sorry. That was the parakeet.)

Last week I judged the year’s best Writing for Design at the D&AD Awards.

I had a pretty good idea of what to expect: there’d be some great work, some healthy debates with my fellow judges, a few yellow pencils awarded to the best of the best and some beers in the pub afterwards. 

And that’s pretty much how it went, except for one thing: we didn’t give out a single yellow  pencil in our category.

Here are ten reasons why:

1. Big brands should be braver. There were very few major brands in our category – and the handful who were represented (like Apple and Adidas) were just a bit... ‘expected’ in their writing
    
2. Corporate writing was conspicuous in its absence. Out of 74 entries, there was just one annual report. Where was all the other great corporate writing from the year? Serious writing can be sexy too.
    
3. Self-promotion is easy. Take away the client, the deadline, the politics and the rounds and rounds of comments, and of course the work stands a better chance of being great. No wonder there was once again a disproportionate number of entries promoting writers, designers and creative agencies themselves. (And yes, one of those was the only entry we nominated for a pencil.)
    
4. A veneer of good writing isn’t enough. One university prospectus had us ooh-ing and ah-ing from page one... but sadly only up to page three. If we could’ve given it a pencil for just those three pages, I think we would’ve. But sadly, the piece as a whole didn’t live up to that early promise.
    
5. Design matters... One hotly debated entry – a little hardback book of film descriptions made up entirely of search terms from video shops – failed to make it through mainly because it didn’t feel like ‘writing for design’. Almost entirely ‘undesigned’ in its simplicity, the book had no introduction at the front and three blank pages at the back – making the design feel very much like an afterthought and the whole thing more like an art project than writing for design.
    
6. ...So does the brief. One of my hot favourites was a set of stationery covered in words. Labels talking about labelling people, letterheads going on about ‘stationary’ vs ‘stationery’... It was all really clever, I thought – until my fellow judges made me realise the words had absolutely nothing to do with the cosmetics brand in question. I had to admit that it smacked of an idea a copywriter had been sitting on for ages, just waiting for a willing brand to come along.
    
7. Web writing is ‘writing for design’ too. Just five digital entries? Really?
    
8. Wacky can go one of two ways. Some things that made me laugh out loud made other judges groan. It’s a risk you take not just with awards judges, but with your customers too.
    
9. All packaging is starting to sound the same. Matey, cutesy, wacky... some examples were better than others, but ultimately we felt like it had all been done before (and done better).
    
10. If you never enter, you’ll never win. Although we saw some good writing, it just didn’t feel like the 74 entries in front of us truly represented the year’s very best from across the entire English-speaking world. A snoop around the other tables in the hall revealed that there was plenty of great writing that just hadn’t been entered in the writing category. Who knows how much more was never even entered at all?