I had lunch with a colleague last week.
Like me, he comes from an ad agency background from way back.
We have the same opinions about a few aspects of advertising and copywriting.
First, we both get hugely irritated by bad advertising. We hate blunt, clumsy ads and blunt, clumsy copywriting.
And we both agree that really good copywriting is also really good writing.
That shared opinion led me to tell him the story I share in my live talks about copywriting. It’s about a series of ads written for an insurance company in the UK back in the 1970s. The company was Commercial Union and the copywriter was Susie Henry.
Reading her ads is a joy. She followed advertising legend Bill Bernbach’s philosophy that “good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling”.
Her copy style was also conversational…it was “across the kitchen table” copywriting. In that sense she anticipated the more conversational style of writing for the web.