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Getting the most from a freelance copywriter: a guide for the smaller ad or design agency

In my own experience, the majority of agency-copywriter relationships work professionally, productively and fruitfully for both parties. However, if you’ve ever had difficulty getting what you want from a freelance copywriter, this guide may show where you’ve gone wrong – and how to make it work properly next time around.

You’ve found a freelance copywriter via LinkedIn, Google or word of mouth, and now you’d like to get their unique magic working for you and your clients. Here’s how to start, and maintain, a mutually happy relationship.

1.     Call up the copywriter, introduce yourself and explain why you’ve chosen him, perhaps referring to his agency or client experience or a particular piece of work that you like. Explain how he’ll be a good fit for your agency and client base. Invite him in for a short try-out gig and agree a mutually satisfactory daily rate.

2.     When the copywriter arrives at your agency, make him feel at home by leaving him in reception for some time to orientate himself. This way, he can get a feel for the agency without any pressure. He can look around, see what kind of décor and publications the agency values and learn how your water cooler or coffee machine works.

3.     Welcome the copywriter with enthusiasm, go to a meeting room and take him through the brief. Chances are he’s brought his own writing pad and pens with him – the kind he’s most comfortable working with - and won't need access to your stationery cupboard. He will hopefully also have brought his own laptop, in which case, great, it saves a lot of IT bother on your end – and on his side, he won’t have to fiddle around creating a new account and so on. He’ll probably need access to your WiFi though – someone can sort that out for him later.

4.     Once you’ve gone through the brief and dealt with the copywriter’s suggestions about adding a proposition to the brief, make sure he has enough workspace to get on with the job. Giving him his own desk is obviously ideal, but you can also put him between two of your staff, so each ends up with two-thirds of a desk, which is almost as good as each having a whole desk. 

5.     Something to consider: until the copywriter gets used to your work environment, he will probably find your office chit-chat a bit distracting. So it’s a good idea to position him as close as possible to your server: the ‘white noise’ will help him stay focused. And if it’s the middle of winter, the heat will be welcomed.

6.     Having his own laptop, the copywriter will obviously not be able to access your network printer. This is another mutually beneficial thing. Because rather than print out his own copy to check over and craft, he’ll have to email it to you to print out. You can then see exactly how he’s doing, forward the copy to colleagues and your line manager, collate comments and come straight back to him with your own headline suggestions and copy tweaks – all before lunch.

7.     By the end of the day, you’ll probably find that your copywriter is fine with email conversations about copy tweaks and new briefs, rather than bothering with face-to-face communication. This means that he won’t even need to work in-house, a huge advantage for both of you. You can negotiate an hourly rate, meaning that you won’t have to pay for any downtime caused by delays and meetings on your end – and he doesn’t have the bother of a commute.

8.     It’s commonly known that freelancers are typically quite flush and will thus happily help to buffer your agency’s cashflow. The copywriter will obviously bill you as and when he completes your projects, but you will only need to pay him when he actually requests payment (and even this is open to some flexibility). The first payment request is likely to be at 30 days, but obviously, every extra day is a plus for your agency finances. It is never wise to pay your copywriter too quickly, as once he is no longer owed money by your agency he has less incentive to drop everything for the next brief you send through.

9.     As your copywriter becomes more familiar with your clients, you will find that you can spend less time developing and refining your copy briefs. By simply sending pdfs of reference material and urls of related websites, you can brief him perfectly adequately and create more valuable time for your real work.

10. As time goes by, you will inevitably find that your copywriter’s eagerness to put his other clients aside for your briefs will wane to some extent. It is then imperative that you rekindle the spark. An ideal way to do this is to remotivate him with a pitch project. Not a pitch in which your agency is pitching for a client, but a copy pitch – in which your copywriter writes part of a job on spec and quotes for the rest should his initial work be approved by your client. Obviously, the more information you send him the better, and it’s probably best not to provide too tight a steer on the job – after all, it’s always interesting to see what a copywriter comes up with when given an open brief. (This modus operandi is obviously perfect for when you’re actually not quite sure what your client is after in the first place.)

11. Nothing lasts forever. So it may now be time to revisit LinkedIn or Google to find yourself a new copywriter. No problem: using this handy guide, and the valuable experience you have gained in its application, you can be sure that you will have no problem initiating and developing a new and mutually beneficial agency-copywriter relationship.

Ecclestone’s Bahrain F1 Grand Prix PR cock-up

On the day before the Bahrain F1 Grand Prix, you have to ask: how did Ecclestone get it so wrong?

Instead of siding with another repressive regime, he could have used the Bahrain Grand Prix as a massive PR opportunity: a real opportunity to change people's lives.

Bahrain’s ruler had already agreed to a negotiated list of reforms – but since ignored them. Ecclestone could have pushed hard to bring these back on the table in a ‘this is what you’ll do or you’ll never have the Grand Prix again’ gambit.

It would have had a fairly good chance of working: I get the impression that Bahrain’s royal family cares far more about hosting a Grand Prix than denying human rights to their subjects.

Instead Ecclestone’s gifted Bahrain’s activists with a golden opportunity to get the publicity they’re so desperately seeking – but at the inevitable price of who knows how many lives?

Especially after that Yates bloke has astonishingly given the Bahrain goons a rubber stamp to machine gun their population… (something that doesn’t bode well for next time the G20 rolls into London either, obviously, if his views are shared by his old colleagues).

I’m not an F1 fanatic but I watch a fair number of races. But a lot of people like myself will be finding something else to do on Sunday afternoons now.

And the message for any other big-bucks sport is now clear: you can’t avoid activists using your events for their own ends, but, managed correctly, you can make a huge difference to how that affects the general public’s perception of your sport.

For F1, FIFA and the IOC (and many others), autocracy is now looking like a very outdated strategy.

Global adjectival recall announced

Announcing the new 'new'

The glory days of the super-selling adjective 'new' are long over – in fact, marketers admit that its salespower has been waning since the late 60s. Now, finally, its global recall and replacement can commence.

Assigned to craft a replacement for the soon-to-be-retired adjectival workhorse 'new', copywriter Alistair McKechnie of Londoncopy.co.uk scoured the natural world in the search for inspiration.

Plumbing the depths

Work with psycholinguists led to an exploration of the animal kingdom for a 'sonic archetype' with universal appeal. Puffins, meerkats and kittens were all shortlisted, but the winning 'soundbit', as tested on a group of boutique-jaded WAGs, proved to be a vocalisation from a Cardiff Bay dolphin.

All together now... dolphins pitch in for the ad industry

 

The winning sound sample

Transliterated into the Roman alphabet, the sound sample is best expressed as 'Faa'. A worldwide recall and replacement scheme is now underway to replace the defective advertising power-word 'new' with its successor. The examples below show how the new adjective could soon be used:

First with the faa: predicting a self-inflating sales bubble

 

FTSE climbs as industry prepares to embrace the 'faa'
With the FTSE 100 climbing out of its recent lows on the news, a number of product launches and promotions are being readied to take advantage of the adjectival roll-out currently underway. As one marketing director remarked, 'The upturn starts here.'

First come, first served

Larger corporations will not be given any advantage over their smaller rivals. And local economies stand to gain too. Mothballed Welsh coal mines are re-opening to store the lorry-loads of printed 'news', and thousands of obsolete PC hard drives are being brought back into service to store the digital teraflops-worth expected in the biggest ad word scrappage scheme since the withdrawal of 'gusto'.

From the man in the street
Asked for their reaction to the neophyte adjective, consumers have already taken to using it with enthusiasm, even if their usage is still a little unpolished. Asked how much difference they thought the word would make to their lives, a group of builders immediately replied: 'Faa call. Faa call.'

Register for your adjective recall and replacement now

Or visit Londoncopy.co.uk

Why is the UK Conservative Party’s propaganda so poor?

“We’re in all in this together”: a gift to the left wing.

“The greenest government ever”: looking more hypocritical every single day.

And finally, “the big society”: the rotting but still-breathing corpse of this slogan has finally been given the stake through the heart by the recent charity-tax-cap muddle.

This isn’t a diatribe against the Conservative government. Who knows, history may yet show that they only appear to be a three-legged man in an Olympic final and they’re actually Usain Bolt after all. No, this isn’t a criticism of their policies, it’s a criticism of their embarrassingly poor communications with the public.

This is the government that famously employed ‘nudge thinking’ experts, then sold us a ‘pay what you can, when you can’ university funding scheme as ‘university will now cost you £9,000 a year, OK?’ – instantly deterring thousands of young people from helping themselves to a great education.

But what can you expect when their main communications strategy was simply to keep News International onside by hiring Andy Coulson – a mediocre red-top editor trying to do the job of a PR strategist?

And now that every newspaper in the country seems to be gunning for them, they don’t seem to have anyone they can rely on for soundbites anymore, let alone a real communications policy.

Even Polly Toynbee is so embarrassed by their feeble attempts to explain the proposed tax cap on charitable donations that she’s having a go*.

In a country that’s absolutely stuffed with real marketing and communications experts, it’s just unbelievable.

*Although she still hasn’t quite got to the nub, which seems to be that you can pay tons of money to your own charitable foundation, staffed with your own family, get 100% tax relief, and government will still kick in an extra 25%.

Online / email copy: best practice, best shpractice

Copywriting is anything but a science, but the digital consultants couldn’t care less. As far as they’re concerned, because you can chop online copy into boxes and derive statistics from it, success is best achieved through following rules and ‘best practices’.

Rubbish.

What the consultants call ‘best practice’ can only be discerned from whatever has been done in the past. But as everyone knows, the more often you do something in the marketing world, the less effective it becomes.

And ‘best practice’ has no way of assigning numerical values to ‘interesting’ or ‘new’ or ‘creative’. So these factors can’t be figured into ‘best practice’.

So when a creatively written email beats a generic email, the number cruncher will decide that it’s because of the position of the call to action, or the length of the paragraphs.

Whatever makes a nice chart.

Most ‘best practice’ is just common sense. But an awful lot of it is just an excuse for generic, boring, inbox filler... machine copy.

Next time your email isn’t read, don’t ask if it was ‘best practice’. Ask if it was provocative.

(This isn’t to say that split runs aren’t a good idea to see what works best. Just don’t let the results dictate what you think is good or bad practice from then on.)

In the meantime, check out MIT mathematician Tom Lehrer on the subject of sociology as a science.

Trenton Oldfield: guerilla marketing genius

Well, Trenton Oldfield set out to get under the establishment’s skin and he’s succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

For the price of a wetsuit he got way more than his 15 minutes on national TV, plus an escalating pile of column inches in the press.

What’s more, the ‘establishment’ has unwittingly colluded with his aims by taking his message viral on Facebook and Twitter. Every time someone calls him a ‘c**t’ or pleads for his immediate execution (and I’m amazed at how many do), his message is reinforced and amplified for those sympathetic to his views.

So whether you like his viewpoint or not, you have to admit his campaign is having an incredible result.

Even if everyone stops banging on about Trenton today, he’ll be given another feast of media space during the Olympics and at next year’s boat race.

In the meantime, he’s got plenty of breathing space to bone up on his media skills and push his story in more traditional media, where he’s now assured of a readership that’ll let him convert his ‘awareness’ into ‘sales’, at his leisure.

So what’s the message? Fearless, provocative and subversive guerilla marketing can succeed beyond all expectation. 

And of course, having a name that adds fuel to the fire doesn’t hurt either.