I don’t disagree with your approach and I didn’t intend to offend you, although I can see that it was unavoidable in what I was saying. To be more specific in what I was saying, finding out what is special about the product should be at the heart of every brief and every creative solution. If you work for an agency as a junior writer, you’re taught to take this approach from Day 1 of your career.

And, yes, the right ideas are always the simplest.

The point is, the danger for clients in the amount of copywriters out there who don’t do this because ‘they don’t know they don’t know this’, and take time to discover it, at their clients’ expense. It can happen when a client doesn’t have a marketing background and so doesn’t automatically include this in the brief.

This is such a late response because I only read your reply this morning, when looking at the search response for my website URL.

Actually, I’ve never been on any copywriting courses. Not one. I’m a former journalist with two degrees, including an MA in creative writing. I started out working for small digital agencies, B2B brands and small local consumer businesses, before growing a respectable consumer portfolio as a freelancer on all manner of national and international brands through word of mouth. Perhaps cutting my teeth in this way gave me a very different perspective to you.

And honestly, five years of freelancing (hard to believe this blog post is almost a year old!) gave me an incredible insight into just how similar the process is, regardless of the product you’re selling, or the size of the brand you’re working for.

Discover what’s special about the product — why “it” and not its competitors — and push that benefit in the tone of voice that resonates with the audience.

It’s not some spectacular secret I’ve learned, nor is it unique to me. It’s the same style of copywriting recommended by many seasoned industry veterans. Take this line from the Ad Contrarian —

“No matter how complex a marketing or advertising problem seems to be, no matter how much research has been done… no matter how many planning insights have been concocted, no matter how many decks have been written and Powerpoint presentations have been made… the correct idea, when found, will be simple.”

You are free to disagree with my approach. But you’ve not offered any evidence that your approach is superior.

I know the feeling. I love doing conceptual work but if I only took on these jobs I’d quickly starve — I follow the money and my fairly broad experience enables me to earn a decent crust.

In my first year as a freelancer all I got were niche B2B jobs, mostly to do with software — very technical. If I’d niched there I’d be bored to tears by now. These days when I get a job like that I relish it, because it’s different to what I did yesterday.

Do you think clients prefer generalists because we’re cheaper, then? I’m quite surprised, because I would prefer an expensive specialist with extensive industry knowledge and I think my clients do too, as they always ask me for my experience in their sector (and are more likely to get in touch if they’ve seen something similar in my portfolio).