COPYWRITERS were never a dime a dozen. But it used to be that for every Bill Jayme who had retired, there was a Rosalie Sachs Levine in her prime, and a new kid on the block breathing down her neck.
The problem seems to be that no one knows where to find new writing talent, and if they do find it, they don’t want to use it because it costs too much money to trust a direct response package to an untested writer.
Marty Davidson, a graphic designer from New York, says there just isn’t any new talent.
Hal Levy, president of Hal Levy and Associates, a New York firm that places creatives, agrees that DM isn’t attracting the best and brightest copywriters. “There are more inviting avenues in the world of commerce.
“The new generation of copywriters are smitten by MTV and quick headlines and strong visuals,” he says. “They don’t know how to do long and persuasive body copy and there’s no time or energy in the direct marketing world to teach.”
Levy is also skeptical about whether the situation will ever change for the better. He says he’s had it with people who have a flair for writing headlines. When Levy looks for writers he looks for those who like to write, who can turn a phrase. If he or she is a short story writer, Levy might try to win the writer over or at least “consider the lucrative world of direct marketing.”
“Turn over a rock and find one,” says Herschell Gordon Lewis, chairman of Communicomp in Fort Lauderdale, FL and a veteran copywriter.
“The schools are not teaching marketing,” Lewis continues. “What the schools are excreting are writers who want to be auteurs rather than communicators. The effect is the cult that equates different with good.”
While Lewis acknowledges even the best targets get tired of the same approach time after time, he nevertheless feels that “wildness is nothing to be lionized.” Nor does he regard art directors as natural creative directors since he believes art reinforces the message.
“When art is the message,” he says, “form overcomes substance and response is not what it might be.”
He also claims that agency copywriters who start at a junior level do more grunt work than writing. In order to attract attention, they can’t just do workmanlike copy, which Lewis regards as dangerous.
“The samples I’ve seen are indicative of these attempts to do something different,” he notes, adding, “I’ve never seen a sample book that included a four-page letter.”
Lewis sees writers as coming out of traditional liberal arts backgrounds, or perhaps some marketing or journalism sequence. He does not see them as emerging from direct marketing graduate programs.
“If they’ve graduated in direct marketing,” he says, “chances are they’re not writers.”
But not everyone is as harsh about the MTV generation of copywriters.
Judy Finerty, president of Finerty & Wolfe, Chicago, says there are no classes just for writers in the schools. Aspiring writers are usually folded into the same class with aspiring art directors. A class in creative for marketing might have three or four who are interested in copy, while the rest are interested in art or design.
“No one hires junior writers,” Finerty says of advertising agencies. “It is the industry’s responsibility to teach.”
She suggests that direct marketers are more likely to spot new writing talent in bank tellers or someone pouring coffee.
Andrea Trotenberg, executive vice president/creative director at Rapp Collins in Chicago, for one, cites a young writer a recruiter found for her who had been a waiter. She speculates that the recruiter-a young person himself-recommended the writer simply because young people want to hire young talent. Likewise, older recruiters go for more seasoned writers.
“Recruiting on any level is getting tougher,” Trotenberg says. “It may be that fewer are entering the field or perhaps there’s higher demand because business is good.”
Trotenberg is skeptical about judging young copywriters solely on their portfolio books, especially graduates of direct marketing programs. “They produce great books in the programs,” she said, “but don’t deliver when they’re out of the program. The book is no guarantee they will be able to do it for you.”
When Richard Eber, senior vice president/executive creative director at New York’s McCann Relationship Marketing, does interview new writers, the college background is less important than the portfolio.
“Is there an ability to write?” says Eber. “Can the writer present products or services with a twist? Is there any imagination?”
Eber says McCann doesn’t have that many junior writers. The few young writers that are around, he says, usually “get into direct marketing because there is an opening. Then they discover it’s interesting.”
While Eber has hired writers from college programs, he doesn’t believe such programs have produced a steady stream of new talent.
“College kids are not really wowed by direct marketing,” he says. “They’re impressed by general advertising and what they see on TV.”
If a portfolio is good, Eber doesn’t care whether the writer came out of a junior college or Harvard. But to some, the workplace is a better training ground than any school.
Hal Crandall, president of Crandall Associates, a recruiting company for direct marketing talent in New York, swears by Prentice Hall as a direct marketing school.
“They generate the finest trained copywriters in the industry,” he claims.
“Not only are they well trained in writing,” he says, “but marketing as well. “
But does new talent get the jobs? The answer may be no.
Sandy Clarke, a direct marketing consultant who’s based in Stamford, CT, calls this need for the security of using a seasoned pro “an unnatural hesitancy to use new copywriters.”
Clarke says he uses new copywriters-new to him, that is. But there is another simple, practical reason experienced writers get the work: “The older writers are known. They’re easier to track down.”
Beginning writers need to pick up the phone and market themselves, a task Clarke acknowledges can be “a lot more intimidating than writing a package.
“There’s no shortage of work, and a new writer can undercut prices pretty well,” he says, adding that young writers also have the technical savvy to make more sense of new media than their senior counterparts.
The lack of new blood might not be a problem limited to copywriters. Pat Wheelless, head of the Chicago placement firm The Wheelless Group, notes that “there’s a dearth of all creative talent, but especially writers.”
“Writers at any level,” agrees Eber, “are a commodity.”
IT SEEMS ODD to be writing a sort of tribute to Hank Burnett nine years after his death instead of on the more traditional anniversary that next year will be. But so what. He was an industry guru, and you can write about those guys whenever you want to. Especially if one was your father.
As a kid I had a hard time understanding what it was my father did for a living. I didn’t grasp why he got paid to write letters for people. I wrote letters, and no one paid me for them. And if he really had won a Gold Mailbox, why wasn’t it out at the end of the driveway for the whole world to see?
Now, of course, I understand what it was he did. I know that to say he wrote letters is like saying Steinbeck wrote stories. You can’t define talent like that so narrowly.
Dad liked to write on a typewriter when everyone else switched to word processors. He preferred instant coffee to brewed, and complained nostalgically about the absence of a decent hot dog on the West Coast. He followed pro baseball avidly, and played pingpong as well as the Koreans who taught him the game during his Army days. He loved Christmas and koalas, and volcanoes and classical music. In other words, he had a regular-guy side to him. His other side, probably the one that made him choose a northern exposure for his office, was a bit different. This other person was insightful and sensitive, sometimes brooding. He took pleasure in lending a hand to young writers. He was hilariously funny, yet seldom more than chuckled at his own jokes. He was humbly confident. He could go anywhere and fit in comfortably.
According to Webster’s, to be sympathetic means to operate through a mutual association. My father could do that. He could evoke a “We’re in this together” feeling through his writing that was an enormous part of his success. It was as if he had millions of tiny pieces of himself, each one having a perfect match with each of his readers. He would find the fragment he needed; he would examine it, slip both feet into its shoes, and walk until he had arrived at who his reader was. In what turned out to be his last work, a prospect package for The Simon Wiesenthal Center signed by Robert Clary, he wrote:
Dear Friend, My ghosts are restless.
True that in the past 45 years or so they have slept very little. But now in the still of the night, they come to me more often. They plead with me, beseech me, implore me to remember.
As if I could forget.
Because they were the friends with whom I shared a waking nightmare called Buchenwald. They did not survive; most of us didn’t. But somehow I did, and became their emissary to the future, the bearer of an urgent message to generations unborn: ‘This evil must never happen again.’
He called on his reader’s sense of compassion and sympathy by identifying what most of us want very much to protect:
I have loved living in America because it is a country that allows me to live in safety without fear of persecution for my race or religion…
It’s true there are other writers who have this ability. But these days, it seems that a lot of copy has its roots in panic induction, like the letter that warns its reader if he doesn’t subscribe to the latest health magazine, he risks missing important information that could help him live longer. The message is buy or die. Or the letter that promises to uncover exactly where your deleted e-mail is going and who is reading it. You can call it consumption based on the fear that you cannot live without something.
My father didn’t need to prey upon widely available human emotions like paranoia and self-doubt. He coaxed deeper emotions. He courteously asked for his reader’s attention. He cordially invited.
In the Johnson box for the 1980 launch package for Islands magazine, he wrote:
Somewhere out there, beyond the blue horizon, lies the island of your dreams…isolated by oceans from trouble and strife, from concrete and plastic, from politics and pollution…a place where geography grants immunity from the impositions and incivilities of day-to-day life in an over-civilized world…
By conceptually describing such a place, he lets the reader fill in the blanks with his own version of this dream. He then goes on to name the characteristics not only of the magazine itself, but of its potential readers:
…the magazine with the soul of a poet, the spirit of an adventurer, thee eye of a scientist and the insatiable curiosity of a social anthropologist…
Some say there are no good writers anymore. As an idealist like my father, I say there are good writers who think writing copy is just advertising. That depends on how you perceive yourself in relation to other people. Dad didn’t really see a difference; not on the most basic levels where it counts most.
I think if he were here now, he would say to new writers, “You need to reach a little further. You need to find the fragments, and you have to look for them in places you’re not used to going.”
My father was admired for his gift for writing. I admired him more for the source of that gift: a heart whose depth he was not afraid of, and the capacity to reach to its bottom for what it took to create some of the finest copy ever written.
NINE YEARS INTO into his career as a copywriter, Gary Scheiner isn’t exactly a new kid on the block. And he certainly isn’t a member of the old school. But he is typical of the new generation of DM wordsmiths.
Now a vice president/associate creative director at McCann Relationship Marketing in New York, Scheiner admits to having no intention of making a career in direct marketing when he started with the agency as a writer.
“I knew little about direct marketing, and what I knew was negative,” he says.
Scheiner attended Syracuse University, which at that time had one of the top advertising programs in the country. Like most of his classmates, he planned to go into general advertising.
He got into direct marketing by what he calls a fluke-a family friend made the connections-and he “fell in love with the people more than the industry first.”
It’s clear Scheiner-who’s worked on campaigns such as the Ford Envoy promotion-has gained a respectful affection for the business as well as its people.
He says one of the most fascinating aspects of direct marketing for him is exactly what makes it such a useful medium for marketers: its direct and measurable impact on a client or customer.
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