Jeff Sexton Writes

Braving the demons of the deep in search of great copy

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"Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature... what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action... if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being."

~William Bernbach

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Basi­cally, aug­ment­ing a reader’s real­ity means either:

a) get­ting her to see more of what’s there, to notice pre­vi­ously over­looked details, or

b) get­ting her to look past the sur­face to see intan­gi­bles, rela­tion­ships, processes, or

c)  both a & b

This isn’t a tech­nique given to sys­tem­iza­tion, but there are ways to spark your think­ing process.  One I par­tic­u­larly like is some­thing I stole from the field of Tag­memics.  Below is an extremely abbre­vi­ated dis­cus­sion of it.

You can under­stand just about any object by means of:

• Con­trast: how is a donut dif­fer­ent from fun­nel cakes or dough­boys or cin­na­mon roles, etc.  What makes a donut a donut and not some­thing else?
• Vari­a­tion: how cake donuts, glazed donuts, fruit filled donuts, etc. are all donuts.  How lit­tle choco­late donuts in a box at the con­ve­nience store and fresh-baked donuts from Crispy Kreme are both donuts.
• Con­text: how donuts are typ­i­cally a break­fast food, how they’re often paired with cof­fee, in what sit­u­a­tion donuts are eaten, what are the cul­tural con­no­ta­tions and asso­ci­a­tions of donuts, etc.

Like­wise, you can also think of an object in terms of:

• A par­ti­cle or thing: a donut as just that, a donut
• A wave or dynamic process: a donut in terms of eat­ing a donut.
• A field or net­work of rela­tion­ships: donuts as a cul­tural and culi­nary force

Aug­ment­ing a reader’s real­ity often means mov­ing them from under­stand­ing some­thing sim­ply in terms of con­trast to look­ing at con­text. Or from see­ing some­thing as a thing/particle to see­ing it as a dynamic process or a net­work of relationships.

The most obvi­ous exam­ple might be to take some­one who sees cof­fee just in terms of the sim­ple hot steam­ing cup o’ joe in front of them to see­ing that cup of cof­fee as an oppor­tu­nity to either actively sup­port fair trade prac­tices that enable the cof­fee farm­ers to earn a decent liv­ing from the sale of their crops, or to sup­port some exploita­tive corporation.

For the most part, fair trade cof­fee looks and tastes just like reg­u­lar cof­fee, but we gladly pay a pre­mium price for the intan­gi­bles attached – as long as some­one has taught us to see and value them.  As long as we’ve been pro­vided with that bit of aug­mented reality.

Of course, those kind of intan­gi­bles have to be baked into the prod­uct itself. They usu­ally can’t be cre­ated out of thin air through copy alone.  When J. Peter­man con­cen­trated on only acquir­ing and sell­ing items of authen­tic romance (empha­sis on the authen­tic part), his com­pany went from a sin­gle space-ad in the New Yorker sell­ing cow­boy dusters to $70 mil­lion in annual rev­enue in a few years, arguably on the strength of the cat­a­logue copy.

J. Pert­er­man copy was leg­endary for trans­form­ing a shirt into some­thing much more than a shirt.  The copy “aug­mented” one’s per­spec­tive on J. Perterman’s cloth­ing, usu­ally by lean­ing heav­ily on con­text and rela­tion­ship. Here’s an exam­ple from their cur­rent web catalogue:

“Every sea­son, before they become the boys of sum­mer, base­ball play­ers have to get through April.

Like Open­ing Day in 1907. Giants host­ing the Phillies a day after a snow­storm blan­keted New York. The crew at the Polo Grounds barely fin­ished shov­el­ing in time for the first pitch.

A few weeks later, it was the White Sox home opener against the Browns. There was no snow, but when St. Louis starter Harry How­ell took to the mound it was a chilly 38 degrees.

It would go down as one of the cold­est Aprils in base­ball his­tory. Luck­ily for the play­ers, the equip­ment man­agers had a duf­fle bag full of these.

Vin­tage Base­ball Sweater (No. 2646).Last seen at the turn of the 20th cen­tury in places like Coogan’s Hol­low, Crosely Field and Comiskey Park, it got play­ers through the first 10 games of every sea­son. You know, those days when the skies are gray, the foul pole white with early morn­ing frost, and the play­ers’ breath as thick as the mus­tard on the hot dogs.

Sub­stan­tial, five-gauge 100% lamb­swool, it’s the per­fect weight for early spring or late fall. Wear the col­lar up or down.”

Makes you desire the prod­uct far more than you might oth­er­wise want a button-up cardi­gan, huh?

But in late 1999 the com­pany slid into bank­ruptcy with the same copy­writ­ers writ­ing the cat­a­logue copy.  What changed?  Accord­ing to J. Peter­man him­self, it was a loss of focus; they started sell­ing all sorts of stuff not hand-picked by him­self or staff that had been trained by him – stuff lack­ing authen­tic romance.

And while there were undoubt­edly other busi­ness pres­sures and dynam­ics at play in the demise of the com­pany, I’d be will­ing to bet that the copy suf­fered when the objects them­selves no longer had authen­tic romance baked into them. You just can’t aug­ment what isn’t there and never was there to begin with.

The good news?

1. If you’ve got some­thing with a gen­uine appeal, you’re way ahead of the game
2. Most items and ser­vices are more inter­est­ing than you might think — espe­cially to the per­son in dire need of it.  Often times, the authen­tic sto­ries are there to be found, and as a copy­writer, you just have to dig a bit to uncover them.

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