A piece of copy so confusing, so overwrought and so terrible, that professionals don’t even know what it means.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the greatest paragraph of the year.

 

“Through multi-touch screens, we’re now intuitively collaborating with technology in the same way we manipulate our every-day surroundings”

The above is from a web design and development website. I won’t name them here, but if anyone wants to pitch some copywriting services, see if you can hunt them down.

Why is it so bad?

It’s unclear. I honestly don’t know why that should appeal to businesses. And it’s not just me who’s baffled by it. I took the debate onto Twitter:

@ABC_Copywriting: I’d like to be serious but I just don’t understand what it means
@waxingmoonman: It’s all about manipulation and collaboration! Every-day.

It’s not punchy:  Why on Earth say “intuitively collaborating” when you can say “using”?

It’s not showing any benefits: You’re a small business owner. You need a web presence. You need to make money. You need to be visible to clients. The copy above doesn’t tell you anything that you’d want to know before you buy.

Quite simply, it’s terrible. So I challenged people to do better.

@waxingmoonman: In a world of technological confusion, we’re here to confuse you. Confuse you so much you’ll employ us. Manipulation – it’s what we do best.

@ABC_Copywriting: “Like lab chimps, people like pressing things that light up”

@sarahcopywriter: How about: ‘We touch shit & it fucks up, just like in real life.’

@inchoo: Multi-touch screens are a natural form of interaction we use in our everyday life and that’s why we can use these screens more intuitively.

Of the three above, only @inchoo comes close to decoding a potential benefit from the piece. It’s got me baffled.

Next time you’re proof reading, pick out a random sentence or paragraph. If it makes no sense out of context, you really need to re-write it.

Can you do better than the attempts above? Or have you seen an even more confusing piece of copy? Share it with us in the comments section.

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The “Naughties”. The “Noughties”. Whatever you choose to call the first decade of the new millennium, you’ll have to agree on one thing.

We’ve seen some absolutely stunning marketing. And some complete dross.

My marketing masterpiece of the 2000s seems to have been lifted from Withnail and I, whereas the marketing misfire probably wouldn’t even make it into Horne & Corden.

The Marketing Masterpiece

Magners Irish Cider – Bulmers (2004-2006)

(Disclaimer: I can’t stand cider. I’ve not touched it since about 1999, aged 14, in the park)

“Two large gins. Two pints of cider. Ice in the cider”
Withnail – Withnail & I

Remember cider back in the 90s? The drink of choice for the poor, the underage and the derelict.

Chances are that you’d pay for cider using change, most of it copper. You’d then swig your scuzzy scrumpy from the bottle in the glamorous surrounds of a shop doorway.

Fast forward a decade, and people with jobs are paying ridiculous prices for that same product and drinking it inside.

From glasses.

Over ice.

You wouldn't touch this when it was Woodpecker

That’s all it took for cider to make the transition from tramp juice to the drink of choice for hip young things across the country. Ice. Ice and a few adverts with a homely Oirish voiceover. Between 2004 and 2006, Bulmers reported a 40% increase in sales thanks to Magners Irish Cider, and all because watering down cider with ice became cool.

For turning a drink barely superior to meths into the next best thing to champers, Bulmers showed us all how powerful good marketing can be.

The Marketing Misfire

Sea Kittens – PETA (2009)

(Disclaimer: I’m not in favour of cruelty to fish, I just think PETA are idiots)

I really don’t think the twenty-something vegetarians are going to get that stoned that they want to come home and read the unintentionally funny Struwwelpeter-meets-Lemony-Snicket “Sea Kitten Stories” before their comedown.
Katy Evans-Bush – Textpixels

Fish have a bad lot, say PETA. We’re really awful to them. Not because they’re tasty and healthy, but because they’re slimy and slithery. So what better way to save the fish than to rebrand them?

Well, any way really. Drawing a cartoon fish in a cat costume and calling it a “Sea Kitten” isn’t going to stop fish being tasty, or make it any less appetising to pescavores.

The most tragic thing about the Sea Kittens campaign is that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall showed campaigners how to make people think about where their food comes from with his anti-battery chicken crusade. Wouldn’t farmed salmon swimming in their own shit have made a more effective image than this?

Not pictured - 10,000 cellmates and litres of fish urine

Katy Evans-Bush summed it up perfectly in her post on the matter: “How to use PR to make people do the opposite of what you want.” Nearly everyone that saw this either laughed so much they missed the point about overfishing and trawling, or decided they’d like haddock for tea that evening.

It’s better to be instantly forgettable than memorably foolish, as any PETA campaigner who’s suffered ridicule following this campaign will tell you.

Maybe PETA should get in touch with Bulmers’ advertising company?

With ten years of adverts to choose from, there must be other marketing misfires and masterpieces to add to the list. Let me know your thoughts by contacting me – I’ll publish the best (and worst) marketing ploys in a post later this month, with a big fat backlink to your site or blog.

Of course, if you’d just like to pick holes in my choices, you can leave a comment below.

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Photo by Pedro Klien

Copywriters can generally be grouped into one of two camps. Those who ride roughshod over the rules of grammar and taste in order to get their message out, and those who are sticklers for the laws of the language.

I count myself very much in the former group, but there are a number of common copy mistakes that offend even my loose sense of what’s grammatically right or wrong.

Do blunders make your blood boil, or do you sympathise with the slipups of simpletons? Either way, you’ll be familiar with these five copy mistakes

1: “N” is for Number
A seemingly innocuous error, but one that looks more ridiculous the more you think about it, is the use of the phrase “PIN number”. As anyone with a working knowledge of 21st Century acronyms knows, PIN stands for Personal Identification Number. That makes a PIN number your Personal Identification Number number – and all those numbers can leave your readers numb.

2: Questions Squared
For a while, it was the done thing for every site to have a “Frequently Asked Questions” page. Because it was the late 90’s and early 00’s, that simple phrase had to have an acronym. FAQ. Easy, right? Wrong. Apparently the Q being plural isn’t enough and people feel the need to add a superfluous “s”. Welcome to the sibilant word of FAQs – or Frequently Asked Questionss as they’re known.

3: They’re Over There Looking For Their Dictionary!
We’ve all done this one. You’re rattling through a post or piece at breakneck speed as deadlines whoosh by, and as the words tumble from your keyboard you forget that there/they’re/their are homophones, but not synonyms. No, the rage-inducing horror of this is when you see it cropping up in supposedly proof-read pieces of copy. If you want to know how much your proof reader relies on spellchecker, ask them where there going on they’re holidays. If they don’t pull you up on it, you should probably shoot them.

4: Cn U Plz Tk MeDum In2 Acnt? Thx.
LOLZ! Sumtyms u nd 2 drp lttrs n dat 2 sv spc in a txt or twitr. However, most of the time you don’t. This is thankfully becoming more rare, but some of us can still remember an internet populated with Freewebs sites asking us “if U want cheap car insurance”. Even now, you might recieve a newsletter or “business” email with a LOL tacked on the end for no reason. It chills the spine. It really does.

5: Possessives, Plurals and The Rogue Apostrophe
Everyone knows this one. Everyone’s been guilty of this one. The problem is that the streets of Britain are still clogged with signs advertising Fish and Chip’s, 2-4-1 Drink’s and Free Aneurysm’s. It’s time to fight back. Only the creation of a Grammar Stasi can save us from the rogue Apostrophe element’s.

If you’re sick to the back teeth of poor grammar, or you want to confess to a copy cock-up, leave a comment in the box below.

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Photo by inuyaki

It’s said that copywriters have to do with the written word what good salespeople do verbally. Most of the time we work like car salespeople – someone will wander into our website or showroom, wondering if they should part with their hard-earned cash. We’ll then use our tricks, techniques and wiles to worm our way into their wallets. We get paid, they get a product, everyone wins.

But what about the copy equivalent of the door to door salesperson? Well, they can be just terrible.

Spam emails and forum comments are the online equivalent of knocking on somebody’s door and opening your suitcase full of wares. If you don’t have your patter just right, it’s an alsatian to the crotch before you can even get to the end of your first sentence.

That being the case, why do we never see fantastically funny, well-written spam? Surely investing a bit of time into an amusing, gramatically correct piece of copy singing the praises of your “penis engorgement assistant” makes more sense than posting one of the following comments:

“You make big c**k by with use [PRODUCT NAME]!!”
“[LINK] buy now [LINK] make purchase [LINK] equity [LINK] cheesecake”
“Вы будете иметь исполинского цыпленка мальчика если вы едите этого волшебного тонического камрада”

Spammers of the world, stop a moment. Take some classes, read some blogs, buy a dictionary. You never know – some of your attempts might even beat my filter.

If anyone can come up with a convincing, well written “spam comment” below, I’ll be impressed. Double points for anyone selling anatomy enlargement apparatus.

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Photo by G-Hat

A quick disclaimer before I rile up the Reds with this article. I may be Mancunian, but my football loyalties lie in West Yorkshire. On the basis that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I don’t have an axe to grind with Liverpool FC.

“The referee’s assistant was too young”
“We should have been given three penalties instead of one”
“It wasn’t my fault!”

Do you know what Rafa Benitez should have said after watching his title chasing Liverpool side sink to a 2-1 defeat at the hands of the mediocre Tottenham Hotspur? The magic words that would have let him walk away from a potentially embarassing defeat with his head held high?

Simple.

“I made a mistake.”

We may not all have allowed supposedly inferior opposition to score twice against our Premiership football side, but we’ve all made mistakes. The second you realise that the bullet has left the barrel and is heading at full pelt for your outstreched foot, your first reaction is to bluff and bluster and blame it on anything you can think of.

Writing an advert for a hotel once, I made a snide little pun about the vegetarian menu being for people who don’t like real food and eat like rabbits. Funnily enough, this went down like a ton of bricks with the vegan hotel manager and they didn’t want to make use of our services. I tried all the normal excuses to make it look like I wasn’t in the wrong and the client shouldn’t have been offended, “I thought it’d be funny“, “most of your clients will be omnivores“. “you need to lighten up!”

Nothing but stony-faced silence.

Finally, I did what I had to do. I owned up to my mistake, admitted it had been a badly-judged comment and apologised.

That client got five more adverts from us, and loved every single one.

Have you put your pen to paper and foot into mouth? Share your best excuses in the comments section. If you need to apologise to someone but don’t know how, you shouldn’t use this template.

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