Copywriting: it's not the same on tinterland y'knows

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Hey there Copywriter gal/uy!

I saw how you slaved over that wicked triple entendre pun. And how you honed those eighty words of radio against your mental whetstone, deep into the Stygian night, until they were as unto a scimitar so rare as to be almost invisible, capable of effortlessly cutting through the clutter (ClicheMate!™) and slicing into the very brains of the traffic jam chumps.

Your agonisingly chosen and utterly unrandom vowel/consonant selection.

Your preciouss.

Your babies.

And so with brokeny bits of scalpel you stabbed the voodoo chile what you made of the art director because he/she/it could not see the glorious symmetry of YOUR vision, the... the... the numpty! And always those wheedling, nasally, not-looking-you-in-the-eye, pusillanimous words like acid, leaching your very soul: can you make it shorter. Not even a question mark from the punctuation-dodging missing link!

Will nobody tell them stop? Does nobody care?

Er, yes, actually. Nobody cares. And what's more, my Mont Blanc-wielding smith at the forge of cool, it's all becoming fast redundant anyway with this web thing everyone's talking about these days. Get over yourself. You were hired to sell shit, remember?

If you want to be a doomed artist, I recommend a copywriting variant of this one-way ticket found on the desk of the eternally effervescent Assistant to The Brand Manager. An assistant not to be trifled with, unless there be sherry in him. Oops, there I go punning again, like a bad Xerox of a poor copywriter! And with the screamers too!!!

And as if it wasn't enough to be getting assaulted by gen txt, u now hav gen tinterland to consider too. Google Adwords don't clap much at clever headlines at all. SEO has its own internal logic, a little bit different from McManus's Shoe Stores, Main St, Cavan and their delightful radio ads from the mid eighties. The same graceful wit need no longer apply. As a sharp lesson in common sense, I can heartily recommend anything at all from the queen of active inspiration, Sabrina Dent, but this post on Facebook pages is a good starter for us advertisey types.

I must give thanks to my twittwerpals at Irish International for bringing this lovely post to my attention. Ten Writing Tips for Web Designers from the Webdesigner Depot. If the title is making the skin on your back want to crawl off then I suggest that it is perhaps you, Mr/Ms Writer, who have the problem, not them. And by 'them' I mean of course those people who at least have, in this present climate (ClicheMate!™), fucking jobs.

Web writers. The world needs 'em. Think about it.

• Do not copy the print brochure!
• Keyword optimise for search engines!
• Avoid landing pages!

These, my dear and erudite copywriting fellows, are the new pearls of Shakespearean pith. The freshest tablet downloaded from the Holy Mount. The rules, m'lud, and rules is what must be followed if we is to survibe in this grizzly new frontier. (Survibe was a typo btw, but fuck it, I kinda like it enough to allow it to stay. If you don't dig it, mis-type it out on ya own damn blog and then correct it.)

To sum up, it's bad but it's not all bad. So lighten up there, Simone de Beauvoir. At least you can still write, right? And not everyone can, right? Whereas, in the new frontier, absolutely every fucker can art direct. ;)

Ah God the Humanity! There are caps Everywhere!