Copywriting Inspiration From Drayton Bird, A Living Direct Marketing Legend January 20, 2010
Posted by Farrukh Naeem at www.copywriterjournalist.com in : Copywriting , trackbackWhat brought me into copywriting more than 10 years ago was the potential to use words for persuasion.
It was a bad time to be a copywriter.
While I was devouring the work of ad legends like David Ogilvy and Claude Hopkins, my creative colleagues were drooling over ‘no-copy’ ads in awards annuals.
The more eager I was to put the tried and tested direct marketing to use, the less interested my award-chasing creative partners seemed to be in any copy longer than a sentence. Awards, salary raises and adulation seemed to come only for ads with logos tucked in a corner and a visual pun sprawled from edge to edge.
Long copy was on its way out in this ADD prone world.
With internet marketing, things have started looking up for copy craftsmen again. Writers ruling the net are those whose copy brings in the clicks. Because everything gets tracked online. Every character. Every word. Good news for people who know which words pull best.
And as I celebrate the revival of the craft of copywriting, here’s a legend I would like to showcase today. Reading anything he writes – from his books to his ads to his Facebook updates – will inspire you to write long copy again. I promise you that.
Meet Drayton Bird.
David Ogilvy said that DB (as I like to call Drayton) “knows more about direct marketing than anyone in the world.” Yes, the David Ogilvy said that.
The Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton Bird one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.
Campaign magazine called him “the only universally acknowledged point of creativity in the direct marketing world”.
If, like me, you have spent a fortune throwing away your salary on ad books to perfect your craft, you could not have missed his authoritative work, “How to Write Sales Letters That Sell!”
DB now runs Drayton Bird Associates, blogs and posts really funny updates on his Facebook profile.
Like this one:
Just so you know what a dreadful bunch of low-lifes some of my clients are…
The following glorious piece of bad taste was sent to me by someone we’ve done the odd job for. I really do sometimes wonder where we find them.
A US army platoon was marching north of Fallujah when they came upon an Iraqi insurgent, badly injured and unconscious.
On the opposite side of the road was a British soldier in a similar but less serious state. The soldier was conscious and alert and as first aid was given to both men the platoon leader asked the injured soldier what had happened.
The soldier reported, “I was moving north along this highway and coming south was a heavily armed insurgent. We saw each other and both took cover in the ditches along the road.
I yelled to him that Saddam Hussein was a miserable, low-life scum bag who’d got what he deserved, and he yelled back that Gordon Brown is a fat, useless, lying one-eyed porridge wog and Lord Mandelson is a pillow biting old whoopsie.
So I said that Osama Bin Laden dresses and ponces about like a frigid, h****t-faced d***. He retaliated by yelling, “Oh yeah? Well, so does Harriet Harman!”
And, there we were shaking hands in the middle of the road when a f*****g bus hit the pair of us.”
If you have the same appalling sense of humour as my old client, pay on time, and need better results and good advice without being financially raped in the process, e-mail me at drayton@draytonbird.com. We should get on well.
This seductive invitation is limited by time as I am unbelievably old, and stringently limited by number (just four clients wanted) as I am involved in everything we do and very busy**.
Of course, you may conclude that I’m not too bright, as I mentioned this golden opportunity casually the other day but failed to stick in my email address – but if you go to www.draytonbird.com you’ll find lots of testimonials, many of which I didn’t write myself.
** Busy doing what? Putting the final touches to Commonsense Marketing – but I have this rather old-fashioned idea that I should not just pontificate but work on real stuff every day.
Now some of your readers will read this post and wonder what it was about. Pardon me. The others, yes – long copy isn’t dead, yet. Oh, and you might want to look up the last legend I featured on my blog – Indra Sinha. He actually responded to the blog. And got nominated for a Booker. It’s good to be in the company of giants, writing giants in my case.
Comments»
Very kind, and thanks. Did you know Indra Sinha used to work at Ogilvy in London? Very clever man, though I fear he looked down on us humble junk-artists ….
Thank you for letting me share your copy on this blog, Drayton. I know about Indra’s career – but I didn’t know the junk-artist bit… LOL.