Turns out that being a best-selling author isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. After becoming a best-selling author, things went a bit wrong. Well, actually, things went a lot wrong. Life, eh? Look at it: going a lot wrong and that.
Anyway, that’s perhaps for another time. (You know, what’s been going on for the last seven years and how things went a bit – A LOT – wrong.)
In the meantime, I actually wrote an actual pitch. My first one in years.
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To: Gordon Young @ The Drum
From: Pitching the World
Subject: I’m elevating this robust pitch, Gordon, with impactful writing solutions
Hi Gordon,
Sorry to email you out of the blue like this but I think I have something that might fit for The Drum.
What if marketing-speak isn’t as bad as we think it all is?
So, in the advertising and marketing world we all can’t bear marketing speak, right? We’re sick of it. I know, as a jobbing copywriter, that I am. But as one of only a handful of copywriters in the UK who run their own experiments into the effectiveness of language* I didn’t want to just say it. I wanted to prove it.
The idea? Take two pieces of text, both saying the same thing, but have one crammed with marketing-speak (‘unleash’, ‘innovative solutions’, ‘robust’ … you get the picture, I’m sure) and the other in well written plain-speak. My hypotheses? Plain-speak would trounce the marketing-speak. I ran them both through readability calculators and tested them out on an LLM (‘Is this writing clear?’ ‘Is this writing memorable?’ ‘Is this writing likely to be acted upon?’) and the plain-speak version shone brightly. Readability calculators loved it. LLMs loved it. And both hated the marketing-speak version. So far, so predictable.
Next, I tested out on the public – specifically through Prolific. I thought I’d have my suspicions confirmed – that there would be howls of protest, that participants in the study would loathe the marketing-speak version, that the overexposure and overuse of these words would have caused some sort of semantic bleaching and readers would find marketing-speak lazy, cliched, tired, foggily obscuring the message and a whole heap of other bad things.
But that didn’t happen. In fact, people preferred marketing-speak over plain-speak. So I ran my smallish pilot again. Same results. I cartoonified the language further, stretching it to ridiculous proportions – “Unleash more sales solutions” – and still the same thing. Overwhelmingly there was a feeling that marketing-speak sounded more ‘dynamic’ and ‘smarter’ and ‘more sophisticated and professional.’
Anything in this, Gordon? As copywriters, marketers and ad people we assume that the public are as tired as we are of the seemingly trite sentiments of marketing speak. But what if the truth is different from that? What if we – collectively – have to get out of our bubbles a bit more? (I’m saying this as someone who loves Japanese selvedge denim and Picasso t-shirts as much as the next person.) To actually, you know, go out and test out some of this stuff rather than making assumptions. There’s maybe even room to explore if a conversational tone of voice is all it’s cracked up to be. I’ve read studies and papers showing that, actually, there are some circumstances where a corporate TOV fits much better …
This is my first pitch in years. I know, I know: IT’S WAY TOO LONG. Sorry about that. If it’s not a good fit I have other places in mind but The Drum felt like a good home for it. I’ve got plenty of clipping from my time writing features for broadsheets and magazines and hundreds of columns and reviews if you’d like to see any published work.
Many thanks indeed,
PTW
*You know what, I don’t know if this is true – but I do know that it feels true.
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A drum, earlier
Gordon, who’s the editor of The Drum, got back to me within an hour or two. “Wow,” he opened, “sounds sensational.” And went on to tell me that he passed my pitch on to John, The Drum’s Opinion editor.
So, that’s a thing that happened. I sent a pitch and got a reply to a pitch. Who knows where that might go.
And who knows where I might go. Nowhere, hopefully. I’ve missed this place like the dickens. But I also know that I have certain … proclivities.
Thanks for reading.
Pitching the World 