New series: the blogs you really should be reading if you care about copy
You could spend your entire day reading blogs about copywriting. In a new series, we’re going to help you pare down your RSS feed to the handful of (other) blogs you really need to look at if you work with words. Copyblogger? Men with Pens? The imminently useful* Write to Done? You won’t find the usual suspects of the writing world here.
Just the blogs we at Doris and Bertie find ourselves returning to for snarky comment, stylish prose and sane thinking.
This week’s pick: Bob Hoffman’s Ad Contrarian.
If you’re in marketing you need to know what Bob Hoffman’s saying.
Because Bob calls bullshit and he calls it brilliantly. A grumpy old agency exec with a finely tuned ear for jargon, Bob’s on a mission to expose the fraudulent claims of today’s snake-oil salesmen.
Namely all those digital doofuses (doofi?) with their talk of millennials, “disruptive” marketing and people having conversations with brands.
Bob regularly snarks on his subject with flair, four-letter words and cold, hard facts. Facts like:
Email is 40x more effective at selling than Facebook/Twitter. Yes, forty times.
People aged 75 to dead buy more new cars than those aged 18 to 34.
Things you’re statistically more likely to do than click on a banner ad:
complete Navy SEAL training
have your application to Harvard accepted
survive a plane crash.
That’s why we recommend Bob to everyone.
To every former colleague-turned-freelance who frets to us about how they need to do a course on social media because they don’t “get” it. (Hint: there’s nothing to get, but if you like, we’re happy for you to pay us to tell you what your common sense would say anyway).
To every client who tells us they absolutely, positively must have a blog. (Because, you know, the way to sell more stuff is to slake the massive public thirst for puff pieces on resource utilization solutions. Besides, anyone can bang out 800 compelling words on resource utilization solutions in half an hour).
So if you haven’t done so already, sign up to Bob’s blog. Then go carve out 44.49 minutes of your day to watch his recent talk at Advertising Week Europe.
Do come back and thank us in the comments below.
* yes, deliberate malapropism
