I wrote an e-mail today to a million people. The copy I wrote consisted of about four words. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. Writing by committee. That is going to take some getting used to.
“Think Smart. Stay Sharp.”
July 12th, 2007 | Work Related
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Here is my copywriter mantra that I use when caught in a shit-storm of committee-writing:
“I get paid regardless. I get paid regardless.”
The key for a copywriter is to remember that your name doesn’t go on this stuff, and that you get paid regardless of how chewed over the copy is. This is NOT part of your canon. You will not love every line of marketing copy you write any more than a prostitute would love every John she sleeps with.
And that’s what copywriters are: word whores.
That said, I’ve never gotten used to writing by committee. There are some great articles online about how to deal with it, though.
Though I am an occasional poster here, I need to remain anonymous for this one. Years ago when my company was going through some major changes, it was decided that we should craft a mission statement. We were told that the entire staff would meet for two full days for an off-site retreat to tackle this very important task. Near the end of day two we were to break up into several small groups to distill the sessions down into several proposed mission statements. Then we would reconvene and hear each group’s best effort and combine them all into the one perfect mission statement.
When we broke up into groups on the second day, I let everyone else talk for a while. Then I flipped my notebook back to the first page and I read them the mission statement I had written at the beginning of day one… before the sessions had even started. Jaws dropped. There was no further discussion. The rest of my group agreed that mine was perfect and that we should submit it exactly as it was. I never admitted to them that I had written it in under five minutes while waiting for everyone else to arrive on the first day.
When we presented it to the rest of the staff, it was pretty much agreed without further discussion that we had nailed it and ours (mine) was the mission statement we would adopt… exactly as it was.
Later on someone let slip to the boss that I and I alone had written that mission statement. (To this day they still don’t know that I wrote it before we wasted two days in a circle jerk.) When he realized that it had not been a group effort, the boss tossed that mission statement out, despite the fact that it had been enthusiastically accepted by the entire staff, and he cobbled together an awkward, confusing string of random phrases and ideas based on bits and pieces of all the proposals. Thus we have an obtuse mission statement that has never accurately reflected who we are or what we do. But everybody got to feel like they played a part in it. So the lesson is: better to do it half-assed together than to admit that one person can do it better on his own. Or as the old Despair.com “motivational” poster about meetings puts it: “Because none of us is as dumb as all of us.”
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