The Matter of Art: Great Authors Who Were Great Copywriters

Oscar Wilde said in his opening preface to Dorian Grey that ‘All art is quite useless.’ When challenged on this by Bernulf Clegg, Wilde further explained that ‘Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way.’ This meditation on creativity and its – perhaps divine – elusive purpose is fascinating and burrows down into the nature of the metaphysical world itself.

Taking this axiom on board, I wonder what Wilde’s response would have been to Marshall McLuhan’s statement that ‘Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.’ Advertising is where art meets a material objective. Art provides a compass for the soul, allowing us to better know our place in relation to the world, if only just to see the inner and outer landscape better. Advertising provides a compass for a brand which in turn reveals a pathway to the culture: ‘How do we make people see us so they can know us?’ More than this, advertising and marketing is the soul of a brand.

Without the dynamic persona the creative element brings, a brand or organisation is a cold and brittle thing that could never survive the ebbs and flows of modern cultural whims. It would simply crack and erode under the pressure of it. For this reason, many of the greatest copywriters of the past century have also been famous authors.

Below is a list of some of the world’s best authors who made their initial impact through copywriting.

Fay Weldon

Throughout her career as an author, Fay Weldon produced 31 novels including Puffball, The Cloning of Joanna May, and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. She also wrote an extensive amount for radio and television. This is a titanic achievement for any writer.

As well as her literary successes, she was the head of copywriting for Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, which later became Ogilvy & Mather where Salman Rushdie was to work as well. She created the ‘Go to work on an egg’ slogan used by the UK’s Egg Marketing Board during a massive advertising campaign throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Legend has it that the popular concept of toast ‘soldiers’ and boiled eggs was first invented for the series of TV adverts for this campaign.

Salman Rushdie

Famous for his novels Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, as well as his bravery in the face of fanaticism, Rushdie also wrote for multiple small copywriting agencies throughout the 1980s before achieving his literary fame. But his most memorable copy was written during his time at Ogilvy & Mather. He coined the ‘That’ll do nicely’ slogan for American Express, as well as the brilliant ‘Look into the mirror – you’ll like what you see’ tagline for The Daily Mirror.

Some of the copy he wrote which was rejected was still later used, such as the ‘Naughty, but nice’ slogan for Fresh Cream Cakes. And who could have refused his compound word tagline for Aero, ‘Irresistibubble’?

Joseph Heller

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller made such a significant impact as one of the 20th Century’s greatest novels that the title phrase is now in common usage among the English-speaking world. This is an achievement most writers could only dream of. In terms of advertising copy, this would be the pinnacle of success.

Heller worked as a copywriter for the magazines Time (1952-1956), Look (1956-1958) and as a promotion manager for McCalls. He also worked briefly for the typewriter manufacturer Remington-Rand where the future novelist Mary Higgins Clark also worked as a secretary. Heller left in 1961 to teach writing at Yale.

James Patterson

One of the most commercially successful authors of all time, James Patterson’s repertoire of over 50 novels has led to him selling more than 425 million copies. He’s broken several sales records along the way, including being the first person to sell over 1 million e-books. All this was after his debut novel was refused 31 times before it was published.

Before becoming a full-time writer and achieving astronomical success, Patterson was also a copywriter of full accomplishment. Over the course of a 25-year career, he started out as a junior copywriter for J. Walter Thompson and worked his way up to become C.E.O. and creative director of its North American branch. He led the famous ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ campaign for Burger King whilst writing fiction on the side before he took his audacious leap.

Dorothy Sayers

Author of her famous Debut novel Whose Body? which first featured the amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers went on to write ten more novels from the success of this character. She became known as one of the four ‘queens of crime’ alongside Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham. She also wrote several other novels, radio plays, and multiple works of translation.

Before this, she worked as a copywriter for Britain’s largest advertising agency, S.H. Benson. She was something of an expert on the psychology of copywriting. Fluent in many languages such as Latin and French, she adored wordplay and puns. She employed these linguistic tricks in her craft as a copywriter, conjuring many advertisements that are still famous today.

Not least of these world-renowned advertisements are the ones she created for Guinness. Guinness approached Benson with the request that it ‘didn’t want an advertising campaign that equated with beer.’ Working with the illustrator John Gilroy, Sayers came up with the famous Gunness zoo animals alongside the beverage, featuring pelicans, turtles, and the famous toucan contrasted against the dark stout.

Utilising her love of wordplay, Sayers took the brave move and invented the slogan ‘Guinness is good for you. How grand to be a Toucan, Just think what Toucan do.’ For the many without Sayers’ rich understanding of play in language, this slogan would not have been created.

Sayers’ biographer, James Brabazon wrote,

Whether she was composing an advertisement for stockings or writing a sonnet or a villanelle, ideas still had to be fitted into a neat, predetermined form and expressed with the maximum possible impact. Dorothy loved problems like this, and to be paid for spending one’s time solving them must have seemed like heaven on earth.

Where Art Meets Matter

Brabazon’s quote describes well this flashpoint between the creative process and a marketing aim. Art allows its creator to meander around and see what emerges so that others can admire the creation for the sake of itself. Creative copywriting requires this same meandering, but so the creator can find a brand’s optimal route to marketing prosperity.

People's Partnership: Crafting Simplicity to Improve Financial Wellbeing

The last eighteen months have been significant for my development as a copywriter and for the company I was contracted to work with, People’s Partnership.

People’s Partnership is a not-for-profit financial services company with a focus on workplace pensions. Since the introduction of auto-enrolled workplace pensions, the growth of the organisation has been dramatic. As of today, it has over six million members. Twenty percent of the UK’s workplace pensions are through its scheme ‘The People’s Pension’.

Being both a not-for-profit and a financial services company may sound like a contradiction in terms, but this ethos embodies a significant selling point. It means there are no shareholders of the company’s products, so all money that gets funnelled in gets paid back out again to the scheme members. To better highlight this member-focused approach to finance, one which still prioritises growth and returns but without the middleman, People’s Partnership coined its own motto, ‘profit for people’.

The purpose is clear for People’s Partnership. The aim is to ‘help people build financial foundations for life’ by following three stated values:

• ‘We understand people by putting ourselves in their shoes’

• ‘We create simplicity by stripping out complications and removing obstacles’

• ‘We keep our promises by always doing what we say we’ll do’

The world of finance and pensions is a complicated and serious one. It involves many variables including the state of the economy and its long-term planning, UK governance, world affairs, private business... to name only a few. This is to say nothing of the unique situation each individual will find themselves in throughout their life. People’s Partnership’s three tenets provide an anchor for its objectives right the way through every department, helping to ensure the financial security of its members.

The bottom line is this: people want to know they’re making the right decision with their money and that it’s growing in their pocket.

My Approach as a Copywriter

To meet the seriousness of this responsibility within my role as a marketing copywriter, It was crucial for me to engage with the company’s values and to reflect them in my writing. I used plain English and a straightforward, conversational style with a ruthless and exacting approach.

The management methods for all documents I worked on were novel to me. To guarantee the utmost accuracy and clarity of each piece of work, regardless of what it was, all copy had to go through a vigorous approvals process through an online approvals and storage system called DAS. These processes had to be signed off by numerous people at every stage, from collaborators to compliance specialists, providing sure-fire assurance that the highest standards were met. The stages of these approvals were:

• Collaborator

• Copywriter

• Money technical

• Compliance

I found these processes to be refreshing for a copywriter. I was reassured that every document was of the highest possible standard I could produce and nothing less. Anything less could have led to profound detrimental consequences.

The only concerns were the barriers between each specialist group’s knowledge and the language they expected to suit their cause, and the sometimes-differing opinions on the chosen language that resulted. This is where the extensive in-house style and tone-of-voice guidelines were useful. They provided a gospel resource when such impasses on how and what to write arose. They were also beneficial in helping me to write copy that met the expectations of People’s Partnership’s conversational, plain English style.

The projects completed

Below is a list of the projects I’ve worked on to completion over the last year and a half.

Full Company Rebranding

This last year has seen People’s Partnership undergo its biggest rebranding in its eighty-year history. It’s easy to understand why such a rebrand was needed, given with contrast between People’s Partnership’s overt core principles and the opaque and inaccessible previous name of ‘B&CE’, which is short for ‘Building and Civil Engineering Benefits Scheme Trustee Limited’. I don’t know whether the abbreviated or the full-length version was worse. Most people – including members – wouldn’t be able to say what either stood for.

As such, the name was recognised as unfit for purpose for a modern and dynamic financial services provider. This rebranding was a colossal task for which every single document had to be rebranded, both print and digital. A series of launch communications were also created to inform people of this name change, why the decision was made, and to underscore for members the safety of their finances.

In a sentence, the rebranding chiseled out in stone the core principles of the company: ‘We’ve always been the people’s partner and always will be.’

Pension Scams Awareness Pledge

This was an initiative created by The Pensions Regulator and opted into by People’s Partnership to increase awareness among members and employers of the ever-growing problem of pension scams. I took the lead on this project from a copy perspective and am proud to say a certificate of completion was awarded by The Pension’s Regulator.

Pension scams are frequent and can ruin the lives of their victims. Scammers will often use psychological techniques and professional-looking materials to draw hard-earned money away from people. It was therefore crucial to create a culture of scam awareness within People’s Partnership and among the membership to prevent this from happening.

This culture of awareness was achieved through a series of actions by me:

• Creating several versions of usable copy around pension scams, informing members to be vigilant as well as pointing them to further resources on the subject from the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) ScamSmart website.

• Updating over a hundred documents from physical letters to webpages with this scam information and optimising its position within the document. These documents had to be analysed for their specific format to include the appropriate version of the pension scams copy.

By promoting an awareness of pension scams through information, guidance, and signposting, my work has also helped to solidify People’s Partnership’s reputation as a trustworthy and responsible organisation.

Retain & Grow

One of the biggest marketing teams in the business, Retain & Grow, set its objectives in the medium-to-long term. It had an extensive propositional roadmap to expand the organisation through multiple developments, including the company’s burgeoning online retirement planner and the new pricing scheme which offers a more flexible approach to its financial services. The rapid growth of People’s Partnership is largely the result of such dynamic and conceptual thinking in line with the modern world.

To deliver on these projects, I wrote and managed copy for an extensive host of media formats:

• The People’s Partnership website

• Powerpoint presentations for B2B

• Dynamic emails

• Dynamic letters

• Brochures

• Video scripts

TUTMAN Contracted-Out Pension Scheme Closure

I Crafted the communications of the closure of this particular scheme, informing each member of what this closure means and reassuring them that their finances are secure. For all members, I wrote a series of letters letting them know their money has either been paid into their The People’s Pension account, their bank account, an enclosed cheque, etc.

This project faced some significant complications which I had to work through, such as members’ shares being sold and held in the shares of companies that pay out dividends (portions of company profit) twice a year. This meant that additional payments couldn’t have been paid out to members or paid into their pots until the organisation received this payment.

Transfer Letters

I wrote a series of transfer letters indicating to the members what their options are for their pension now that they want to transfer it away from the business, followed by explaining the processes required to transfer depending on the circumstances.

As a copywriter, considering the best interests of both the company and its members is key. Retention was a clear aim of the initial letters. I made clear to the member what benefits they could miss out on if they chose to move their pension away from the business, as well as the potential risks and lack of a member-focused guarantee there was elsewhere.

Members’ options were based on their own individual circumstances, whether they lived abroad, or would have liked to transfer into a new pension scheme with another provider.

The bottom line

I am saddened to be leaving People’s Partnership, although I always knew this was part of the arrangement as a contractor brought in for a specific service. That the company should have needed my skills, and being employed in to execute them, serves as a complement to the rapid growth and bold vision of the organisation beyond its current anatomy. For this, I am proud to have played my part.

Open Pen Issue 29: Pushing Beyond Its Pages

Here it is, another great issue of Open Pen. The number 29 might not be a milestone, but the stories are broad in style and high in quality once again. This issue contains an eclectic mix of sci-fi, western, surrealism, and the abstract, staying true to our core sentiments as plucky literary ambassadors. It’s hard to imagine another publication that is so wide in its scope within the parameters of its word limit. Open by name. Open by nature.

The synopsis of this issue can be read below:

Issue Twenty-Nine is here. It’s been with subscribers for a while now, but finally we’re able to roll it out across our roster of independent bookshop stockists. What a lovely lot they are. Handsome homes for the last issue of our twenties.

Issue Twenty-Nine is a primary colour skinned bumper issue with a fantastic editorial from Good Choices author Bonny Brooks, which reminds us exactly why she’s a literary talent tearing us all to pieces with her wit, grit and irresistibly taut observations. Here, Brooks takes on ‘iSelf Author Culture’, and argues that “fiction without ambiguity is punditry”.

Hannah Hoare gets the cover story treatment with “The Curse”, an imaginative tale about the most inescapable fact of life and society, the totalising and conclusive death which we are all fated to. No matter what attempts are made to contain it, only the pace of its approach can be slowed, and then only sometimes too. Hoare deals with this morbid truth by spinning a sci-fi fantasy yarn with a relentless realism throughout. Perfect reading as we march towards summer with one eye over our shoulders.

We also see Jake Kendall return to the fold (joining a small company of writers to have been published in our raggy rag more than once) with “The Tailor’s Tale”, Kafka loving B. B. Fitton and “We All Have Our Uses”, and Sally O’Reilly with “The Mess”, which is also available to read over on our website now.

As always, Open Pen is FREE, and you can pick up your copy of Issue Twenty-Nine from one of our independent bookshops stockists this weekend. If you can’t get to those, you can subscribe here for the price of postage and the cheapest envelopes we could find.

What a joy to be Twenty-Nine. We remember it well/selectively.

A personal favourite of mine is B. B. Fitton’s ‘We All Have Our Uses’, a daring and surreal take on the breakdown of a relationship.

The Brick Lane Short Story Prize 2021

Literature isn’t a sport or a competition. It’s about the contribution we all make as individuals to the grand cathedral of the human spirit. This is where the human spirit is housed and the human condition exhibited for everyone to see and seek understanding within.

A bad or mediocre story is soon forgotten amongst the rubble of all the others. A good story will always rise to the top and its reader will take the vision of it with them long after reading. An excellent story will change the reality of its reader forever.

It is for this reason that prizes like the Brick Lane Short Story Prize serve their purpose. And this is why I was delighted to take part as a reader for the second year in a row.

The prize searches for ‘new, exciting and diverse voices’ in the world of writing with the expectation that the cream will rise to the top. In doing so, such voices can illuminate the corners of the world around us not yet seen fully, or not yet recognised for all its beauty and complexity.

I look forward to reading the winner.

A New Journey

I’m delighted to announce the launch of my first freelance website. After years of writing and editing for a variety of groups, I have decided to untether myself from the limiting demands of others and become an independent copywriter.

What inspired me to spread my sails and go it alone as a freelancer is in the title itself: the freedom of it. I’m excited to have this liberty, to be able to decide for myself who it is I work with and how I work with them.

I have always been exacting in my approach to writing, whatever its purpose or the form it takes. It’s this meticulous approach which has helped me to choose my motto and mantra for my professional work: ‘the best words in the best order’.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge once expressed in a single line what he believed the central tenets of prose and poetry are. He wrote, ‘Prose: words in their best order. Poetry: the best words in the best order.’

This simple assertion is its most cogent when placed in the context of professional writing. A good business or group requires the best words in the best possible order for the optimal outcome.

Words have an unlimited power when used well!

Always demand the best words in the best order.

Please get in touch: joe@josephjohnston.co.uk

P.S. Language is a complex instrument. I could write, ‘All the words they had had had had a negative effect on their outcome’ and it would still be correct in the technical sense. The bottom line though, is that it’s awful to read and would only ever deter a client. If the words and sentences deployed are not of the highest standard, they may in fact hinder the intentions of those they’re supposed to work for. So choose your words wisely!