Filming the unfilmable: A copywriting challenge
Mixing written and audio-visual media can produce big business results… if you do it right. Discover how we did it right, and learn how we can do it for you.
Quick story. We decided to do a video pushing our copywriting services. Muggins here got to write the script… and I didn’t have a clue how to start.
Writing is, well, it’s writing. All the excitement happens behind my eyeballs where (mercifully) nobody can see what’s going on. How do you go about expressing this process visually?
Thousands of marketers face this issue, or a version of it. How do you write about data, for instance, expressing a logical, numeric practice in a written medium? How did McDonald’s capture the essence of burgers in a jingle?
The old A Level philosophy problem, ‘how do you describe the colour blue to a blind man?’ now troubles highly paid creative professionals all over the world. And me. So, let’s examine how it’s done.
Setting video marketing goals
But why even bother? Like anything in marketing, it’s vital to decide why you’re doing something before you do it. Even if it’s simply to experiment, setting a clear goal is a must.
So what was our goal here? Surely writing stays on the page, video stays on the screen, music stays in the speakers, everything does its defined job and everyone’s happy?
Perhaps. But fusing media produces something greater than the sum of its parts. When sharing information, for example, mixing effective visuals into training can improve learning by up to 400%.
If language is indeed innate to humans (the jury’s still out on linguistic nativism), it still plays second fiddle to audio-visual input, an evolutionary constant. Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text. Sound is even faster, the brain recognises a sound in around 0.05 seconds.
Great marketing manufactures an emotional or perceived ethical need (pathos and ethos), which the customer then rationalises after the fact (logos).
Given the immediacy with which we process audio-visuals, they’re prime candidates for appeasing the pathos and ethos. Text and stats then let the logos feel good about itself and the sale is made.
But if we can translate the essence of these media, we imbue each with elements of its partners. The essence of writing can gain greater immediacy and transcend the plodding restraints of logic. Visuals might enjoy more weight if translated into a form which appeals to the logical mind.
…Probably. Maybe. Hey, if we already knew the outcome there’d be no point doing the experiment, right? Tally ho!
The sweet smell of success
In terms of intersensory marketing, thoughts instantly turn to perfume ads. You’re basically saying ‘this smells nice,’ which can’t be meaningfully conveyed in a written or visual media.
Smell is a raw, animal sense. We admire a tender touch, a refined palate, a keen ear for music, or a discerning eye. Smell, meanwhile, is tied up in so many unsexy connotations that even making it an aspirational experience is its own challenge.
It took Ridley Scott’s 1979 ad for Chanel No.5 for the art to find its acme. Yes, the director of Alien and Gladiator started out by flogging perfume. “I am made of blue sky and golden light,” purrs a beautiful poolside woman, “and I will feel this way forever."
Not one mention of perfume. Not so much as a glimpse of it until the closing four seconds, when the voice of Spock invites us to “share the fantasy.”
By selling that fantasy, Scott joins the canon of aspirational marketing gibberish. He’s not even selling benefits; you can’t smell like someone who hangs out by the pool a lot. The ad deals with the problem of articulating smell by ignoring it completely and instead selling… something else.
But it worked, and the formula for perfume ads hasn’t changed since. An industry worth £647 million each year manages to say precisely nothing distinctive or creative. When even Vice is accusing you of lapsing into self-parody, you’re in trouble.
So, lessons learned for our copywriting video? The experience we presented had to be, in some small sense, rooted in the reality of working with us.
Going full woo woo wasn’t going to do anyone any favours. If we came up with anything even close to that infamous 2018 Haigh Associates train wreck… well… we weren’t going to be doing that.
Tips from music journalism
What was required was something grittier than high concept, something more akin to the dog-eat-dog morass of digital content.
Having shared a few open bars with the late, great Pete Cashmore, I know there’s nothing grittier than music journalism. Those guys craft a cross-sensory extravaganza every day, in a staggeringly competitive industry. As always, the BBC had my back with this nugget of advice:
“Sean Adams says the lack of new ‘music icons’ has hurt the business.
“There aren't as many people to put on the covers of magazines anymore,” he says. New writers should be thinking about ‘ideas and concepts and themes’ instead of nailing an interview with Coldplay.
“Wired magazine doesn't put Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg on the cover very often,” he says. “They have ideas on their covers - what are you going to learn from reading this that you wouldn't have known if you didn't buy this magazine?”
This was a lightbulb moment. What ideas concern the task of copywriting? All good writers I know share a few traits in common:
A rigorous process which makes inspired results repeatable on uninspired days
The ability to manage pace, to go from relaxed ideation meetings to furious bouts of creation
An iceberg effect whereby we analyse and discard 50 words for every one which sees the light of day
Connection with popular (digital) culture, an intuitive sense of when to lean into the zeitgeist and when to subvert it
Tea. Copywriters drink tea, in contrast to designers who drink coffee. This is an inalienable law of the universe
If we could hit these five beats using video, all in the space of 30-40 seconds, the job would be a good’un. Quite a task.
The Task of the Translator
Philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, wrote the Task of the Translator, first published in English in 1968. Intended as a work for literal translators – from one language to another – it retains some incredible insights for what we were trying to achieve:
“A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator.”
By ‘pure language,’ Benjamin is talking about communication in an almost noumenal sense; a hypothetical media by which to trade pure information, unhindered by the ambiguities of language.
Given an inability to speak in tongues, our quest for this pure language drew us to that last sentence: words, not sentences, as primary elements of translation.
This was a big take. In our terms, perfume adverts fail because they try to translate whole convoluted sentences about luxury and decadence and fantasy. The whole messy package is forced on them and they can’t seem to unpick it and isolate the elements which work.
To make our video, we needed to take those boiled down ideas inspired by music journalism and express them in a way which couldn’t be done by text, or in Benjamin’s words:
“It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of the pure language, he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language.”
The proof of the pudding
Armed with our big ideas, some solid theory to articulate our goal, and the all-important examples of what not to do, we produced our video. Judge for yourself if we succeeded or not.
The best part of this process is knowing it’s repeatable. We can produce something just as fun, slick, and quirky for any client in any industry. All it would take is a workshop to translate your expert knowledge into big ideas of your very own.
So what do you reckon? Tired of the same old talking head shots? For video marketing that cuts through the noise, talk to Sookio today.
