 Great photo by Grok. We recently worked on a book project, wherein we worked closely with the author (to be specific, we ghost-copy-edited the manuscript), and we were also involved, as a creative resource, when it was time to create the book’s cover. We had a great graphic artist we were working with.
All of this will tie in—shortly—to the gist of this article: Directing other creatives. There’s certainly a fine line between over- and under-directing them. So how do you find that sweet spot? Quick tangent about book design. Regardless of the cute aphorism you were taught in grade school, we all judge books by their covers. In a word, Duh! That’s what they’re there for. You wouldn’t buy a technical how-to guide with a cover that teased a torrid romance, or vice versa. The cover needs to inform the would-be reader of what's inside. It’s as important to the book’s success as a poster is to a movie, or even further back in the day, what a record sleeve was to an album. (Contact us in case you don’t get either of those references.) So. Having worked with the author on this project, literally word-by-word, for months, we knew very well what the book was about. Far more than, say, our great graphic artist. Which is fine. It wasn’t her job to read the entire manuscript, and know who the target audience is, and all that. We knew that stuff. We also knew the mandatories for this project: For example, the author runs a company that figures prominently in the book; the company logo needed to be on the cover. Stuff like that. Who speaks what, visually We quickly pencil-sketched nine different thumbnails as cover ideas for the book. And here’s where it’s important to know your different players well. The author of this book is not a graphics person. So he basically understood the thumbnails, but didn’t get any of them. He needed to see his favorites fleshed out before he could pass any real judgment. So we sent these along to our graphic artist, with fairly minimal instructions. We walked her through each one, explaining its basic intentions, but carving absolutely zero elements in stone, aside from the aforementioned mandatories (company logo, company color palette, etc.). And in this process, we very purposely downplayed the quality of the thumbnails themselves. Sure, there was the very real possibility that one of them would end up being “the” one, and thus the germ of the final cover art. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to inspire our graphic artist to improve upon what we’d sent her. To, for lack of a better phrase, show off. The thumbnails weren’t so dumb as to be negligible. But they were loose enough to require input and interpretation. And that’s the fine line you want to walk when you’re directing a creative person. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Creatives are a lot like athletes. While many creatives are ostensibly introverted, they still yearn to be challenged, and to strut their stuff, to flex their creative muscles, so to speak, and to outdo themselves and what they’ve done before. The winnowing Despite what we’d hinted earlier, our thumbnails were actually clear enough for our client to pick a few favorites before we sent them along to the artist. This worked well: The client/author picked his three faves. We sent all nine to the graphic artist, with the three top choices highlighted; this way, she could see what the client had rejected, and possibly draw some inspiration from elements of the also-rans, if needed. This also had the very pragmatic effect of reducing time and budget. Having that artist work up nine different covers would be quite a bit of work. Three, on the other hand, was pretty reasonable. The good news: It was hard to choose among the three designs that the artist submitted! We had our favorite; the author had his. Guess who prevailed? Of course. The author. It’s his book, not ours. And his choice, while not our tip-top choice, was still among our favorites—and that’s counting back to the original nine. From that point, it was just a matter of iterating and refining. As we write this, the art is finalized, and the book is at the publisher. Importantly, everyone is happy. Our client has a great book cover (by which others will rightly judge that book!). Our graphic artist is justifiably proud of her creation. And we’re delighted to have helped the process along, walking that fine line between over- and under-directing our precious creative resource. Need help with a challenge like this? Contact us. We’d be happy to help.
0 Comments
 Great photo by Antoni Shkraba. Boy do the months ever sail past. Time, already, for our annual round-up of our top posts for consultants from 2024. Here’s your chance to catch any you may have missed, or to brush up on others you may want to re-visit:
As we start working on next year’s articles, we’d like to take this time to thank you for tuning in to our 2024 entries. We love sharing the love, and your comments make our day. Have suggestions for an upcoming post? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you!  Great photo by Beyzaa Yurtkuran "Ghost Email Writer.” Kind of an odd role to put on your resume, no?
It’s on ours. More importantly for you, however, is the answer to this question: Which business emails that you need to send are so important that they would warrant having a pro step in to pen them? That’s what we’ll explore in this article. Touchy subjects There is a common thread when it comes to emails that we ghost-write for our clients. It’s generally what we’d call “the big ask,” which kind of goes hand-in-hand with “the humble brag.” Both of these are hard to do. They put you, as the writer, in an uncomfortable situation. Err in one direction, you look like a jerk. Err in the other, you appear too meek. And in both of those situations, you don’t end up getting what you’d wanted. Talk about a fine line. First things first: You don’t really need to hire a professional writer, like us, to write an email like this. You can really work your tail off, and polish it, run it by colleagues, and even push it through ChatGPT if you want it to sound generically-correct enough. The question is: Is that worth your time? If you’re reading this article, chances are, it’s not. (Spoiler alert: We charge a mere pittance for things like these, for our clients, especially considering the upside ROI they deliver.) But so far we’ve been dealing with generalities. Let’s dive in and give you two real-life examples. Ghost-Written Email Example 1: To a former client We recently helped a client create a series of marketing videos for their B2B consultancy. On their website, they’d had an ancient, but great, testimonial from an old client of theirs. They hadn’t spoken to this client in ages. Can you guess where this is going? Of course. A written testimonial, on a website, doesn’t do you much good when you’re creating marketing videos. Talk about a big ask: We wanted this former client to record themselves, on camera, giving a testimonial about this company that they’d worked with, a long time ago. Yikes. And so our client asked us to ghost-write the big-ask email for them. Confession: It wasn’t easy. But the finished product went something like this: It opened with a “Hello, old friend, we hope you’re doing well,” followed by “we’re so glad that our company has helped your company succeed.” We also thanked them for letting us use their written testimonial on our website. And that was the segue to the videos we were making. We’d already had the first one produced by the time we ghost-penned this email, so we included a link to it, so that the former client could watch it and see how good it was. Then we got down to the big ask: Could they simply read that same testimonial on camera, and send it to us? We even included its text in the email, like a script. We noted that, “By our estimation, this should take about, well, 15 seconds! So hopefully it’s not a huge ask.” And we closed by saying, “Just as we have helped your company, you’d be doing us a huge solid by helping ours.” The email worked. The old client was flattered by the request, and promptly obliged by recording and sharing a quick video. Bonus: Our client’s firm suddenly became top-of-mind for this former great client. Talk about a nice dollop of biz-dev! Ghost-Written Email Example 2: To “the secret handshake club” Whereas the previous example was written to be sent to one specific, known person, this next one was intended to be sent, one-to-one, to a select number of very exclusive recipients who were all total strangers to the sender. We need to be very cagey here, as this one is super sensitive. That said, it’s one of the best emails we’ve ever written, and it’s ended up netting our client millions. This client of ours had carved out a profitable B2B niche doing technical “cleanup work” for large enterprises. But they longed to broaden the business, and their client base, to include the specialists who helped those enterprises create the situations that inevitably required cleanup afterward. Those specialists were the targets of the email. We can refer to them here as “the secret handshake club,” because that’s how close-knit, clubby, and insular they are. Our pitch, which we ghost-wrote for the owner of our consultancy client, went something like this; note how it combines the Big Ask with the Humble Brag: “Hello Mr. or Ms. Secret Handshake Club Member. I would like to help you as you advise big enterprises as they embark on big initiatives. Full disclosure: I’ve never done this before. But I have helped numerous enterprises with the ‘clean-up’ that’s come from all the overlooked issues in these initiatives, which I’m uniquely qualified to spot, given my experience. Would you have time for a quick call this week?” Guess what the response was? It was awful. That’s right. It’s a secret handshake club! Most of the sends ended up with no response whatsoever. The few that did respond, had some choice suggestions for our client, which we can’t reprint here. But then one—just one— Secret Handshake Club member wrote back. “Okay,” they said. “I’ll bite. Contact my assistant to book a call with me next week.” And that was all it took. That call led to a test project. That test project turned a toe-in-the-water tester into a new client. That client effectively provided entry into the Secret Handshake Club. Fast-forward to today, and that consultancy client of ours now splits their billing, 50/50, between their classic “cleanup” projects and Secret Handshake Club assignments. And it all started with one inexpensive, yet really well-crafted, ghost-written email. Have a challenge that warrants a ghost-written email? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. Collaboration is the hot buzzword these days, when it comes to creating documents. Put your doc in the cloud! Let everyone offer input, in real time! The latest technology makes it possible!
Isn’t that great? Not so fast. In this article, we’re going to weigh in on what you might not have considered a contentious topic. It’s not just “Word vs. Google Docs,” as the title of this article has implied. It’s more about “synchronous vs. asynchronous.” More importantly, it’s about creativity vs. chaos. Back in the old days We feel impelled to set up this story properly. Not very long ago, if you wanted to write something, you fired up Microsoft Word, and you wrote. When you were done, you had a document—a .doc, or later, a .docx—that contained your efforts, and was easy to share. It wasn’t just Word. There are a zillion other word processors out there, whose features are largely similar. You open them. You use them to write. You end up with a little document file when you’re done. We’ll lump all of these other apps together with Word—the 800-pound gorilla here—since they all operate in basically the same way. Working in this old-school manner, and knowing, in the business world, that documents are subject to input and revisions, it has always been incumbent on you to handle version control. That is, you wouldn’t take the doc you’d labored over, and then, while on the phone with your client, simply make all the changes that they suggest, into that original doc. Of course not. What would you do instead? Before taking down any of the client feedback, you’d do a “Save as...” and create a copy of your document, likely ending its filename with “v2” or something like that. We’re not losing you on any of this, are we? This certainly isn’t rocket science. But we’re describing this in detail to set up a point we’re going to make. Fast forward Google Docs is also like Word, in that, nowadays, there are lots of online/cloud-based word processors that act just like Google Docs. But like Word, Google Docs is the 800-pound gorilla in this space, so we’ll use it as our example here, representing all apps of its ilk. At first blush, Google Docs is identical to Word. It’s an app (web-based, vs. on-your-computer-based). You open it. You create a new document. And you save it to your Google Drive. So far, virtually no difference. But then things change. Since not only Google Docs but the documents you create with it are hosted in the cloud, it’s technically very simple to make documents share-able. Heck, you don’t even have to email them anymore. (Way too much work!) All you need to do is to grant someone else permission to edit your doc, and they can launch their Google Docs, open up your document, and make changes. So your client can type notes to you right in your doc. Or make their suggested changes, right in your doc. This can even happen while you’re working on it. In other words, you can actually have several people making changes to the same document, at the exact same time. And now, this is nothing like opening Word on your computer and sitting at your screen like a writer. It’s more like sitting in a committee meeting. Or maybe it’s more like a kids’ soccer game, with all the kids, of both teams, crowded chaotically around the ball. What’s better? (Or worse?) “Granting permission” is not some technological breakthrough. It’s been around for as long as there have been computer files. But the notion of making this available for a document that can be revised by multiple people in real time (“synchronous” editing) is relatively new: it coincides with the rise of cloud computing and storage. You can make a lot of arguments for how great this new technology is. You could say that it eliminates the laborious emailing of documents. It ensures a “single source of truth,” since the very latest version of the document is all that anyone sees. It makes sure that no one is working on an outdated version. And plus it creates unprecedented transparency: Everyone can see what everyone else is doing, in real time. Surely you’ve seen this: A little circle with someone else’s initials in it, showing them selecting text, or adding new verbiage, or whatever, like a multi-player online game. Now the big question: Does this make the document better? Follow-on question: Is this process better? We’d argue that the answer to both of these questions is “No.” Writing a document is not a democratic exercise. You’ll hear about a document’s “voice”—not its “crowd.” A good document has structure and logic. If various people are all tinkering with different parts of it at once, the final product will collapse like a house of cards. And what about all those worthless outdated versions that are now history? Well surprise: They’re not worthless. More often than not, you want to look at Version 2 when you’re working on Version 4, to see what was there before it changed: Not all movement is forward, and not all change is progress. Yes, there is a degree of “version tracking” baked into these web-based word processors. But it doesn’t offer the control or granularity of the iconic “Save as...” command. And not to sound too pretentious, but how many hands does it take to hold a paintbrush? We’d prefer to get client feedback on a doc, interpret it to the needs of the doc, and then implement it carefully, rather than seeing an anonymously-named editor (“Wombat,” anyone?) arbitrarily adding and cutting. What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you agree with us? Want to try and convince us otherwise? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you.  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio A client of ours recently wanted us to rewrite their team members’ LinkedIn bios, and then their website bios, in that order.
Would you do the same thing? Should you? In that order? In this article, we’ll look at some of the too-easy pitfalls of team bio-writing, and also give you some good, quick, useful tips that can help you look great, and drive more business. Who’s on first? When that client asked us to start with the LinkedIn bios, we suggested otherwise. In this instance, it was better to start with the company’s own website. That’s because it was more free-form, less rigid than LinkedIn. We could do whatever we wanted. We could steal from it, for LinkedIn, later. And that’s what we did. For your business, you want your and your team’s bios to effectively accomplish two things: 1) You want to establish that person’s credibility. Do they know their stuff? Are they the absolute go-to subject matter expert for their field? 2) You want to make them come across as likable. (Not that they aren’t already.) The goal here is for the reader to think, “If I’m gonna be working with this company for the next several months, I’d be happy to work with this person. They seem cool.” Teaser alert: You can actually address both of these goals in order. But we’ll get to that in a minute. Person to person As you surely know, some website bios are written in first person (“I’m in charge of Finance”), whereas others are written in third person (“Jill is in charge of Finance”). Which should you use? (By the way, “Which should you use?” is in second person. But we digress.) Consider the arguments for each:
So this seems easy, right? “First person” carries the day. Not so fast. Think of Goal 1 from above: Establish Credibility. Here, you’ll want to blitz the reader with name-dropping and awards and accolades, so there’s absolutely no ambiguity about how technically superior this person is. Uh-oh. If you write that in first person, it comes across as conceited. Really conceited: “I have won awards for my work with major enterprises worldwide such as Coca-Cola and Amazon, where clients always told me how great I am.” Uggh. Don’t go there. And so, third person it is. More often than not: “Jill has won numerous client-elected awards for her stellar performance working with major enterprises worldwide such as Coca-Cola and Amazon.” The second act As we’d hinted above, the bio follows a two-act structure, in the order of the two goals ("Expertise," and "Fun to Work With"). So after you’ve wowed your reader with all the awards and name-dropping, you can get into just a few interesting, quirky details which are nice setups for conversation-starters when a client first engages you. We recently read the bio of a client we were going to work with, and it noted that she had previously served in an exotic location overseas, so we were curious to ask her about that. Stuck for ideas—or for getting consistent responses from your team—for this Act II assignment? We once helped an ad agency write their team bios, and we worked up a questionnaire which was circulated to the entire team. The initial questions were predictable:
But then, to button it, we made the last question a fill-in-the-blank:
They loved it. The answers were great and off-the-wall, and there was hardly any work required to edit them down to make them website-palatable. Indeed, the ad agency kept the “Questionnaire” format on their website—a good example of when First Person actually is the better way to go. Tying it all up Some basic pointers:
That said, leaders’ bios should generally be longer than team members’ bios. Twice as long is completely fine.
And that’s about it. It sounds simple, but it’s really more straightforward than easy. The more succinct the bio, the better—and the more challenging. Need help? Contact us. We’ve helped lots of teams with tons of bios. And we’d be delighted to help you, too.  Great photo by Pixabay. We have a client that does a lot of blogging—like a lot of our clients.
And, like a lot of our clients, they hire us to write—make that ghost-write—a lot of those blogs. Also, like a lot of our clients, they also use an SEO firm to create other, SEO-focused blogs for them. A two-pronged approach. So far, so good. But what are “production blogs”? And why does this client hate them so much? Production blogs vs. thought-leadership blogs First off, you can’t really Google “production blogs.” It’s a term we made up. Production blogs can be defined as blogs that are written for a business, using pre-existing web-based materials for their background research, and used primarily to drive up SEO (search-engine optimization) numbers, i.e., search results on Google. You, as a consumer, likely encounter these blogs all the time. That’s your clue that they work: You searched for some information on Google, and up popped one of these articles in the list of hits. Again, so far, so good. But then—and consider how common and familiar this is—once you click on the article, you’re quickly disappointed. It sure contains your exact question or query, probably about a dozen times, in different phrasing, but doesn’t give you much hard information that you’d craved. It feels very regurgitated. It reads like a mashup of other online articles, 1) carefully reworded to avoid copyright/plagiarism conflicts, and 2) like it was written by someone who’s, well, not the greatest writer. Trust your Spidey Sense on this one. You’re exactly right on all counts. Whatever site that blog resided on, just boosted its SEO numbers when you clicked to it. Did you feel satisfied? Did you get the info you needed? Naah. Not really. Importantly—sometimes hugely importantly—you didn’t get one whiff of a professional, well-informed opinion. Which segues, nicely, to the other kind of blogs: Thought-leadership blogs Just like “production blogs,” this is a term that we here at Copel Communications invented. But the name—“thought-leadership blogs”—gives away what they are. In stark contrast to production blogs, these are not written by scouring a lot of pre-existing material online. To the contrary, they’re written by interviewing a really well-informed SME or subject-matter expert. We enjoy writing these. We enjoy doing the interviews. In the best ones, our subjects get pretty adamant, even riled. That’s what we want. We want them to rely on their professional opinion, expertise, and years of experience to dismantle incorrect and ill-informed preconceived notions, and set the record straight. It's arguably an uphill battle: The search-structured web is effectively an echo chamber, where bad information gets reused and elevated to the status of “trusted source,” when it’s actually anything but. So our same SME client, who rages against the search machine, is justifiably mad at the production blogs they’re forced to proofread prior to publication. Why? Lots of reasons. For one, they’re rife with factual errors. While they assiduously don’t break any copyright laws, they do proliferate bad information that’s breeding online. This client of ours also operates in a highly-regulated industry, so the information found by the writer simply might not apply, because what’s legal and permissible in one U.S. state, isn’t in our client’s state. Also, production blogs are generally just hard to read. They have all the appeal of a Wikipedia entry. No hook, no drama, no story, no voice, no personality, no iconoclasm, no payoff. We know. We’re also tasked with proofing these things, and they take us forever. And we’re paid to read them! Two for one Knowing all this, why does our client still do both? For a very good reason. This is a basic tenet of marketing known as the media mix. You can’t achieve everything with either one of these blogs; using both is prudent and smart. The production blogs are better at finding people who are simply Googling at the top of the sales funnel. The thought-leadership blogs are better at converting visitors into believers—and thus prospects—deeper down in the funnel. It’s like mixing paid and earned media: a basic, smart mix. Our client recently asked us, somewhat rhetorically, “How come we can proofread your blogs in about two minutes, with almost no changes, while these other blogs take us hours and tons of aggravating work?” The answer is simple. As we’d noted above, we base our thought-leadership blogs off the SME interviews we conduct, where we take detailed, careful notes. So the SME’s knowledge is reflected in the final product. Credit where it’s due. If you need production blogs, there are plenty of good sources out there. If you need thought-leadership blogs, the field rapidly narrows. Contact us and let us help you advance your business’ mission—and passion—to the world.  Some people positively blink when they ask us this question. “You get paid to write emails?”
We sure as heck do. And our clients love us for it. They keep coming back for more. Which begs the question: “Why?” We’ll answer that one, and the other, in this article. But more importantly, we’ll share some good business-building email tips that you can put to use. No it’s not dead We can’t count the number of articles and stories and pundits who all predicted the utter downfall of email, for years now. But it never went away. Kinda like the telephone. So love it or hate it, email is here to stay. Your job (and ours): make it pay. Fact is, for B2B marketing, email is still really strong. Businesspeople read, write, and send emails. Sure, there’s a lot of spam out there, but if you have a message that promises the exact kind of value your recipient is seeking, then there are benefits to be realized for both parties. And that, in case you haven’t figured it out already, is the crux of it: The value that your email offers. Different situations, different iterations We’ve ghost-written tons of emails on behalf of business owners and consultancies and other professional-services firms, addressing specific executives. It might be an informal proposal. Or a more formal one. Or the cover-note to a report. Something that needs to set the tone, to lubricate the gears. In that case, it’s a balancing act of polite finesse with some subtle storytelling, all with an eye toward the closing. Yep. Even an email to a CEO should end with a CTA, or call-to-action. Otherwise it’s just a postcard. The other types of emails we get tasked with—more times than we can count—are direct-response campaigns. This is when our client will have a big list of possible prospects, and something to offer them. Our job: Get those prospects interested enough to take action. (As in, “call-to-action.” See a theme here?) Done right, these things work. We’re seeing open-rates of 30 percent. We’re seeing responses and, more importantly, sales meetings coming from these emails. So you’re darn tootin’ that clients pay us to write these. It’s some of the biggest ROI we offer here at Copel Communications. Direct. And responsive. Those direct-response emails typically employ a three-email campaign: Original emailing, plus two follow-ups. “Original” and “follow-up” are terms only used by the knob-turners running the actual email programs for us. In other words, there’s no way that you, nor the recipient, would ever know that any of the three emails was the “original” or one of the “two follow-ups.” In other words, each one is, and should be, a standalone statement. In other-other words, never flatter yourself into thinking that your recipient remembered the first email when they read the second one. There’s a good chance that that first one was never read. Harsh dose of cold water: When you send these, they’re “direct response” or “outreach.” When the recipient gets them, they’re “junk mail” or “spam.” It’s not until you can get them to actually open the thing and hook them on your valuable offer, that they become “not spam.” And that’s a big ask. The three-legged stool Any direct marketer will tell you that there are three components to any email campaign:
None of these stand alone. We’ll have to assume, for the purposes of this article, that you’ve nailed 1) and 2). Which is far easier said than done. (By the way, “quality of the list” is right up there with “quantity of the list.” Face it: If you only have ten people to email, you won’t get many responses. If you have ten-thousand, that’s another story.) So. You’ve got a great list, and a great offer. Then you’re into the basics, the weeds, of email-writing. Here are a few pointers: Work, and rework, the subject line. This is an exercise in brevity. You can, and should, sacrifice grammar, even spelling, to make your point quickly. Don’t worry: Everyone expects this. That subject line is automatically truncated by your email app. So a long one simply won’t go through. Example: [Subject:] Exciting must-watch video about a new way to slash logistics costs Ouch. Too long. Try this instead: [Subject:] VIDEO: Logistics cost-cutter Leverage the preheader. Some mail-sending apps, such as Constant Contact and MailChimp, allow you to include this. The preheader is the little bit of text you’ll see in your “in-box” list before you actually click on the email itself. Without a preheader, it’s simply the first few words of the body of the email itself. But the preheader lets you quickly tease what’s inside, such as “Breakthrough app that’s saving millions.” Tell a story. As the adage goes, “No one wants to be sold to. But everyone wants to hear a story.” So you can grab with a story intro, and use it to frame your offer. There’s always a story to be told, because in a direct-response email like this, there’s always 1) the initial problem, and 2) the exciting solution. There’s your two-act structure, right there. Be conversational. Sure, it’s fine to open with a jarring statistic such as (and we’re making this up): “Did you know that 84 percent of recently-surveyed logistics execs cite ‘increasing automation’ as their biggest challenge for the year ahead?” But then you can shift to the more-familiar: “We understand what you’re going through.” So there’s that assumption of familiarity. Sure, the email is introducing a company, and an offer, but it’s being written—and sent—by a person. Another adage: “People don’t buy from companies. They buy from people.” That applies here. Wrap with the CTA. Whatever you want the recipient to do—whether it’s downloading a case study, watching a video, booking a demo, or writing back to learn more—that should be the last thing they read. If you say anything after it, you’re muddying your message—and diminishing your response. This isn’t easy Getting back to our original question: “You get paid to write emails?” Yes we do. And it’s not just because there’s a lot of money at stake, in terms of sales-to-be-made. It’s because not only is the writing of these things time-consuming (time which our clients don’t have), but it’s also challenging. When we were brought in to do these for one of our clients who had previously been attempting it in-house, the response rates shot up. The “two other legs of the three-legged stool” had never changed. So it was obvious to everyone what had improved. Need help with business-building emails? Contact us. We’d be happy to lend a hand.  We’ve mentioned, in these articles, how we do a lot of ghost writing for our clients. Usually the client is a consultancy, and we’ll be ghost writing in the voice of either the business owner or a subject-matter expert, and the audience is often C-level executives.
That’s not the case in the story we’re about to describe. This one was a consumer play. The client was an ad agency. And the person we were “ghosting” for was an internationally-known celebrity. Background action First things first. We’re not going to tell you who this celebrity is. We’re not allowed to; we’re under strict NDA for this client. That said, we can say some general things that pertain to the assignment—and thus this article’s topic—about how do you go about writing for a celebrity? The assignment had two parts. The first was a TV commercial. The second was a longer-form video, which was kind of a behind-the-scenes interview, in which our star was asked about the shoot for the commercial itself. We were tasked with helping to script both. Again, we’ve got to be delicate here, but “helping to script” is different than “asked to script.” Remember we’d said that this was an international assignment. We were brought in because we’re native-born English-speaking. Connect the dots yourself. Original input Initially, we were provided with rough drafts of both the TV spot and interview. And in case you’re wondering, the interview was to be tightly scripted—even though it wouldn’t look that way in the finished product. More about that in a minute. But what we weren’t given—and which we immediately requested—was more info about this star. Regardless of how well-known this person is, we needed more information on background, context, and so forth. We asked. We got. This wasn’t a hard request for the client to fulfill; they quickly sent us a few links: Websites, TV coverage, news stories. Now we could start on the project. Voice lessons The main product here was the TV spot. So we had to learn not only what was being sold to the viewer, but how our celebrity fit into it. That was the main thing. How did this person’s career, and renown, mesh with what was being sold? How could we help it to look as if there really was no “selling” going on at all? That is, how do you make it seem as though this celeb just naturally loves and lives this product, without it feeling forced? The same challenge applied to the behind-the-scenes video. The celeb was to be asked about the shoot, and to talk all about how fun and fulfilling it was, while also, still, selling the product. In case you were curious, the scripting included both the interviewer's questions and the celeb’s replies. The solution to both of these challenges was the same: It resided in the background materials we’d requested. The job was to “climb inside this celeb’s head” and figure out what kinds of things they would say, and how they would react, given 1) what was being sold, and 2) what they’re known for. This, by the way, is different from “what they’re really like.” Every celebrity has a public persona; this one was no different. Honestly, we really don’t know what they’re like, personally. We were writing for the public. We were scripting for their public persona. Layer cake No, we weren’t selling baked goods. We’re referring to the the layers of handlers on this assignment. We worked for the ad agency. The ad agency had their corporate client (whose goods we sought to sell). The celebrity had an agent and PR team. Suffice to say, everyone scrutinized every single word we penned. Of course there were revisions. And of course—we saw this one coming from a mile away—all attempts at humor, which were included in the original input materials, were tricky. That’s because of the language barrier. American-style idioms and even British-style wordplay may well work and be ha-ha funny, but they’ll never make it to the screen unless all of these international clients and handlers and agents can understand that these jokes are 1) genuinely funny, and 2) make their celebrity look great. So that helped to set the guide-rails here. We weren’t going for “Saturday Night Live” style humor; we just wanted some cute, self-effacing lines that make our mega-star come across as humble, approachable, and even a tad vulnerable, in an endearing way. Lights, camera, action The client was happy with the materials we supplied. And then they use them as they see fit. That’s their job. We simply want to make their lives easier. In that regard, writing for a celeb is no different than the work we do for everyone else. And that’s a good takeaway for all you other creatives out there: It shouldn’t be any different for you, either. Need help with that next creative assignment? We’d love to pitch in. Contact us today for a no-obligation consultation.  Boy did this year ever fly past! We hope you’ve stayed productive and healthy.
In what’s become a big tradition here at Copel Communications, we’d like to offer you our annual wrap-up of creative skill-building articles for the entire year. If you missed any of these, here’s your chance to catch up; if you already enjoyed any of these, here’s an opportunity to re-hone your skills. Enjoy!
Have a creative topic you’d like us to weigh in on next year? Let us know. We’d love to hear from you.  How to find and hire a ghost writer—or do it yourself
Halloween it still over a week away, but since it’s October, what better time to address the topic of ghost writing? People always seem to be impressed when we tell them that we do a lot of ghost writing. Maybe there’s some connotation to the term, implying that it’s being done for, say, a celebrity or politician. That’s not the case, in our case. Still, we do tons of ghost writing. You could almost argue that, aside from blog articles like this one, it’s all we do. Put it this way: Whenever you write something that’s ostensibly written by someone else, you’re “ghosting.” But does that mean you’re putting your words into someone else’s mouth? Dispelling the myths The answer to the above question is: “You’d better not be!” The whole idea of ghost writing is to help your “author” express their ideas, only better/faster/more efficiently than they could on their own. Every word should read as if it were written by them. This, incidentally, is why we tag ourselves as a “secret weapon” on our website. By reading this article, you know what we do. But most of the readers of the material we create don’t even know that we exist. And that’s the way it should be. Another myth about ghost writing is that it’s glamorous. We’ll admit that it’s fun, and intellectually stimulating, but “remaining anonymous in the shadows” isn’t exactly a red-carpet activity. It’s a job to be done. And done right, it’s all about helping your “author” to shine. In our case, “shine” means “drive in more business.” This isn’t some touchy-feely branding exercise. This is about helping time-constrained business leaders to get their thought-leading ideas, views, and sales pitches out to their intended audiences, for maximum impact and ROI. So, in case you hadn’t thought about it, our ghost writing encompasses virtually every kind of written communication medium. It could be a thought-leadership article. It could be a book. It could be a sales presentation or video script. It could be—and often is—an email, addressed to, perhaps a C-level prospect. Think about it: Do you honestly believe that our clients—these incredibly smart and busy people—want to spend the time organizing their arguments, let alone word-smithing the copy? They’ve got far bigger fish to fry. Hence the need for ghost writers. Finding the voice Here’s a neat story. We have a client—let’s call her Sue (not her real name)—who, like most of our clients, is downright brilliant. She’s also shy and soft-spoken. Yet we needed to create a piece for her, in her voice, that would sell. There was a mismatch of tone. But after speaking with her at length, and asking her about a certain topic she’s passionate about, that passion started to come through. Indeed, when we probed about specifics, she got even more heated and enthusiastic. And we realized: That’s the voice we need. It’s “Sue, Pissed Off.” So, interviewing her, we got all the facts we needed for this piece. And that’s a job unto itself. It’s important to respect her time and let her go down any rabbit-holes she likes, so long as they’re at least tangentially relevant, and take great notes. It’s not her job, incidentally, to organize these thoughts, or think about the end product’s structure. She just needs to “spout.” Our job—which isn’t easy—afterward is twofold: 1) We need to organize all of those random thoughts, and find the thread which aligns them into the most compelling possible argument. 2) We then need to make that argument in the “Sue, Pissed Off” voice. Is this “putting words into Sue’s mouth”? Hardly! Finding the fit Now let’s turn the tables. Let’s say you need to hire a ghost writer for, say, that upcoming marketing outreach piece that will have your byline at the top of it, or your signature at the bottom of it. What do you do? Well, you can find your list of candidates by whatever means you see fit, whether it’s a LinkedIn search, or through a site such as Upwork, or whatever. But this is not about just finding someone who can write well and will work within your budget. This is all about finding the proper fit. Can that person interview you well and tease out the information that’s needed for the piece and its tactical intent? Do you feel comfortable chatting—indeed, venting—to that person at length? And most importantly, can they empathize? Can they find, and “speak” in, the right voice that you want to project to the world, which will 1) best present your argument, while 2) ringing true as “you”? This is the crucial yet subtle compatibility factor that you really need to weigh, first and foremost, into your hiring decision. Staying on-message Unfortunately, after the interview is over, your work—as the putative “author”—isn’t done. You’ll need to review the draft your ghost writer submits, and check it not only for accuracy but for tone. Does it ring true? Does it “sound” like you wrote it? If you don’t feel comfortable, you’ll need to kick it back. Lest we remind you: Your name, not the ghost writer’s, will be on this thing. It’s personal. This is “you,” to the world. You shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about the product. To the contrary: You should be delighted. When you get a great ghost-written piece, you should be downright elated. We have clients who share our pieces with family and friends, they’re so excited by how they’ve come out. So that’s the bar you want to reach. Have a project you need ghost written? We can help with that. Simply contact us for a no-obligation consultation today. |