David Abbott: Use your life
Advice from a legendary ad man on creativity: "If something moves you, chances are, it will touch someone else, too."
Famed advertising copywriter David Abbott:
“Put yourself into your work. Use your life to animate your copy. If something else moves you, chances are, it will touch someone else, too.”
(Source: Ad Breakdown: Volvo’s “If the welding isn’t strong enough, the car will fall on the writer.”)
It’s one of Abbot’s “Five things that I think are more or less true.” Here’s the full list:
1. Put yourself into your work. Use your life to animate your copy. If something moves you, chances are, it will touch someone else, too.
2. Think visually. Ask someone to describe a spiral staircase and they’ll use their hands as well as words. Sometimes the best copy is no copy.
3. If you believe that facts persuade (as I do), you’d better learn how to write a list so that it doesn’t read like a list.
4. Confession is good for the soul and for copy, too. Bill Bernbach used to say “a small admission gains a large acceptance”. I still think he was right.
5. Don’t be boring.
Another bit of advice from Abbot: When you’re stuck, change your process.
Sometimes when I’m stuck I go back to the big pad and the big pen. A change in procedure is often a good idea when you’re not getting one. I’ve been writing copy since 1960 and by now I’m comfortable with the job. I don’t panic and I know that the best thing for me to do when tired or thwarted is to walk away from the ad and do something else. The job still surprises me and for every easy problem, there’s a stubborn sister. I might rework a headline 50 or 60 times to get the thought and balance exactly right. If I think there’s an ad in there somewhere, I nag at it until it comes out.
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Abbott claimed he was never interested in words.
I am not interested in words. I don’t own a Thesaurus, I don’t do crosswords and my dictionary has pictures in it. Words, for me, are the servants of the argument and on the whole I like them to be plain, simple and familiar. I believe that I’m paid to be an advocate.
“When you start off in copywriting, you fall in love with words. In my early days in advertising, I used to be an inveterate punster. As I got older and wiser, my style became more plain.”
-David Abbott
David Abbott and the fourth wall discusses the ads shown above:
In all three cases, the same trick is taking place. The writer is playing with the convention that adverts are a ‘brand’ talking to its audience, and explicitly drawing attention to the fact that there is a copywriter – a real person – being paid to write this stuff. In theatre, you would call it breaking the fourth wall – momentarily stepping out of character to address the audience directly, effectively to say ‘Look at me, I’m an actor’. It’s a technique that plays with expectations and has a postmodern edge to it – a sign that David Abbott could have fitted comfortably into the age of Twitter and meta-jokes…
He’s not putting himself into the writing in the conventional writing-workshop sense of ‘drawing on your own personal experience’. He’s shifting the conceptual framework entirely to place the writer in the foreground. In a world where the babble of disembodied brands with annoyingly ‘personal’ voices is getting ever louder, there’s something appealing about this honest acknowledgement that a copywriter is involved in the process. It’s not a trick you can play every time but, when you do, it has a nicely humanising effect.
Abbott on the keys of running a great agency:
You care about two things. You care about quality–in everything you do. From the chairs in reception, to the way you answer a phone, to a piece of typography, to the ideas you have, to the research you put your name to, to the meetings you hold, to the way you hang a picture, to the way you crop a photograph or write a line.
Quality is always possible and always under threat, but if you don’t seek and defend it you won’t be satisfied and you won’t be happy.
The second thing you must care about? That’s easy. It’s each other.
Great post. Thanks for sharing.