How to Become a Better Writer

Episode Transcript

Kelly: Today's episode is called How to Become a Better Writer with special guest Allison Philips. Welcome, Allison.

Allison: Thank you, Kelly. It's just such a pleasure to be on with you.

Kelly: I'm happy to have you here. Allison Phillips has over two decades of experience as an advertising and marketing copywriter. Her work has appeared in campaigns for clients such as AARP, Audi, Bloomberg, Blue Shield, Burger King, Citibank, Marriott, and Oracle. So, let's dig right in Allison. We've known each other for over 25 years, and we have had both very unique journeys in advertising. You've worked in four different markets if I'm right — San Francisco, DC, Miami, New York. And you've worked on both the client and agency side and you've also experienced the firsthand volatility of the agency world. But you've been extremely resilient. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal journey and what led you to writing as a career?

Allison: Of course. I'm fortunate in that I always wanted to be a writer. And I always sort of leaned into the marketing side before I even knew what it was. When I was like eight years old, I was putting together scrapbooks of tear-outs from magazines. Because of course, we didn't have digital back then. And looking at advertisements on TV and looking at promotions in the supermarkets, and really sort of realizing, oh, this stuff is great. You know, how do you reach out to people? How do you sell them things? How do you move them emotionally? And so, I was fortunate that I knew that early on — that I wanted to be a writer and that kind of writer. And I started my copywriting career as a sort of very junior copywriter at Better Homes and Gardens. At the time, they had a division that was book clubs — this was in New York. And I don't know how many people remember the old Time Warner Book of the Month Club. But these book clubs were fashioned after that. And their focus was home and garden crafting, that sort of thing. They were a little bit of a precursor to what Martha Stewart does now. And so, I got my feet wet in the door, learning how to write about different products, learning how to make that emotional connection with your audience, and encourage them to do what you wanted them to do in the best way possible. And put things in front of them that maybe they hadn't seen before, in a very engaging way. So that was in New York. And then I used to go to San Francisco on vacation all the time, and decided eventually to move there after working at the Better Homes Book Clubs for about seven years. So, I made the transition from East Coast to West, which is just a completely different thing. And I was lucky enough to get my feet wet in advertising — got into an advertising agency as a proofreader, because I had no experience as an ad agency copywriter, so I had to learn from the ground up. And I started off proofreading, which was great. It gave me a great grounding in learning everything about the ad business first, and learning how to collaborate with people from the account people to the graphic design people. And then I was reading everything. So, I was understanding how to write to different audiences about different products and services. One of the biggest accounts I worked on at the time was AT&T, when they were just coming out with mobile phones. And so, we were literally doing like 200 mobile phone ads every day, which was like insanity. But it was such a great learning experience to just be thrown into that and deal with everything at the same time. And so, I spent about six years in San Francisco. After that I worked for a couple of other ad agencies and started to write and then wanted to move and just get that change of scenery. I like different stimulations. I don't like doing the same thing over and over and over. That's not my personality. And so, I decided to move somewhere tropical so I moved to Miami, which is very tropical — you get lizards in your bathroom day and night.

It's supremely tropical. But it was so much fun. It was just a completely different change of pace. Miamians can be a lot of fun. And there's a ton of advertising there as well. It's sort of an underestimated ad market, I think — there's some interesting ad agencies and presentations going on there. And so, I ended up working for a major digital ad agency. And once again, this was great, because I really started to focus in on everything that was happening in digital all the time, much like the agency out in San Francisco where I started learning all about advertising. Now I was on digital, which was really starting to explode. This was a little over 10 years ago. And everything digital was starting to come up — YouTube was becoming a thing. You were starting to see all the different channels open up, banner ads were popping up everywhere. And so, I had to learn to write those. So luckily, once again, I found myself in a position where I was able to just learn, dive right in and learn everything about digital, which was very helpful at the time. And so, I lived in Miami for about five years. And then a little over 10 years ago, I came up the coast, stayed on the East Coast, came up the coast. And now I live in Arlington. And I've just been fortunate in my career. You do have to be persistent — persistence is really the key to the whole thing. But I've just been fortunate to work for a variety of ad agencies, and then work on the client side as well and in-house groups, and just learn how to collaborate with not just creative team members but the executive side, the C-suite, and determine the best messaging for whatever it is we're trying to do.

Kelly: So, you worked in four markets. I've worked in three markets — San Francisco, DC, and LA. How would you compare the different markets? Are certain markets your favorite? For a new person starting out, which market would you recommend? And what are the differences between the various markets?

Allison: Oh, that's a good question. I would say San Francisco is my favorite market. Because for the first time, I was able to really delve all the way into advertising in a way that I hadn't before. Like, of course, I knew what it was, I'd spent time studying and so on. But it's different when you're dealing with it every day, interacting with people in the industry, working with your team members, dealing with your clients good and bad. And that really was a great launchpad for me. Who knows, I might have stayed a proofreader for years and years if I hadn't had that. It really was a great launchpad for me to realize that I could get my head around all these different elements and these different teams, and these multifaceted campaigns, and figure out how to work them from a writing perspective. In terms of recommending the best market for young people right now, it's tricky, because you have to factor in the post-pandemic landscape. We're getting there — it's slow, but we're getting there. And as I'm sure you've seen, there's been so much turmoil in advertising, from the global groups all the way down to the smaller groups over the last year and a half. And that's probably going to continue for a while. I will say that — so you've got to keep that in mind if you're starting out. I think at this point, I would recommend going for a smaller market. The big cities, yes, they might have more opportunity, but they'll also have more people looking for those opportunities. You might be better off as a junior person or somebody with no experience reaching out to owners of smaller ad agencies or looking to see what roles the smaller ad agencies and marketing groups are looking to fill. And starting from there. In terms of which one was my favorite market, that's tough. They're like my babies. It's hard to pick one. I would say they all have things to recommend them. But again, since we're in this strange, heading-towards-the-end-of-the-pandemic landscape, I'd recommend going with a smaller group. I think that's helpful.

Kelly: It's also interesting that you talk about proofreading because it's really a lost art. To a certain extent, people don't hire proofreaders anymore. And they should, because the mistakes are still made. And I don't see many at agencies anymore, do you?

Allison: I don't. I can't remember the last time I talked to a proofreader at an ad agency. And you're so right, because I read a bunch of major and some minor websites all the time. And I see typos all the time. And you don't want to knock anybody, but if there was a proofreader in the room, that would be helpful. You make a great point about that. I know people use a lot of online tools and stuff like that, but the typos still kind of sneak up there.

Kelly: We all have a story or two — in fact, we did a whole podcast episode about it. And I had plenty to tell. So, tell me a little bit about what skills you think make for a good writer for advertising and marketing?

Allison: Oh, gosh, that's a good question too. There are different kinds of writers, of course, so you have to take that into consideration. Specifically for marketing and advertising, there's certain skills that can be taught, and there's certain skills that some people naturally have. So, you have to think about that balance a little bit too. There's a lot of things that can be learned. And then it's helpful if you have certain characteristics — not everybody has to have the same ones, of course — but it's helpful if you have some of these that you can sort of deploy when you need to. One of the first things I would say is, these days, everybody's taking in so much information. I think I read somewhere that we take in more information in a week's time than our grandparents did in like a year's time — some wild statistic like that, which is mind boggling. But it's true. We're online all the time, we have our devices all the time, we're getting information coming at us like crazy all the time. Keep it simple. Whatever your message, whatever your audience, whether you're trying to sell a product or a service, or promote a nonprofit, keep your message simple. The simpler, the better. If you're trying to encourage somebody to either buy something or take advantage of something, or on a website take a specific action, the shorter, the simpler, the better. Because the other thing we have now is people don't read that much anymore. Video has exploded to the point where people are just reading headlines and watching videos. So, if your headline isn't catchy, or your text is too long, you're going to lose them right off the bat. So, simplicity is the first order of business. To the point you just made about proofreading, you've got to have the basics. You've got to have your spelling and your grammar and your punctuation. Yes, there are a ton of online tools. But you've got to have those basics down. Otherwise, they're going to come back to bite you. And usually at the worst possible time on the biggest campaign with the biggest client.

Understanding who your audience is — whatever your message is, whether it's a Facebook ad, or you're writing a blog post, or writing banner ads, or writing an email nurture campaign — every audience is going to be different. We have so many digital channels, we still have the traditional marketing channels. So, you have to first understand the channel you're writing for. But then more importantly, you have to understand the audience you're writing for. Every writing engagement is going to be different. You can't write the same thing for everyone or every channel. Facebook has its character count and your blog post is only so many words and your email campaigns have to have certain specifics in them. And you really have to understand how the channels work and then even more, how you want to engage your audience and drive them to specific actions. This is another thing that's very basic, and you hear it all the time, but I think it's even more important now with all the digital noise and trying to cut through that clutter and trying to engage not only your loyal customers but also prospects in terms of selling a product. You have to be able to tell a story that not just engages them but keeps them coming back. It has to be a story that makes sense to them. Yes, of course, you want to move your products, you want to promote your services. But if the audience isn't there with you, that's not going to drive revenue, that's not going to drive your company objectives, that's not going to make your brand stand out in the sea of the millions of other brands out there that are popping up seemingly every day. So, storytelling is one of the oldest forms of entertainment on the planet. And I think it's more important than ever, because if you're not telling a story that's engaging, that's exciting to that audience, that has them looking to see what you're coming up with next, you're going to lose them in a second. These days, there's no time to sort of wander around in the forest. Unfortunately, we live in this every-nanosecond-counts digital age, where you kind of have to be on point as much as you can. And of course, I'm not saying there's no room for enhancements, improvements, adjustments and so on. But before you try to sell anything, write anything to sell anything, or promote anything — what's your story? How are you promoting this brand? How are you positioning this brand? What are you telling people about who you are? We want to know all about them — we track them, what did they click on, what did they like — and that's great, but they want to know who you are too. And if they don't like who you are, they're going to go someplace else in five seconds. So that's one of the basics that gets a little bit lost in translation — people talk brand and posts and clicks and links and Google Analytics, and you've got to keep in mind that the story needs attention too. It's helpful if, particularly if you're working on a lot of digital pieces, you have a strong understanding of SEO and keywords, and how the search engines work. And analytics as well. Google, of course, is the beast of them all. And then there's an open source one called Matomo that's really good, has a lot of things you can do to see what your visitors to your website are doing. But yeah, just get a firm understanding of what the analytics are. Especially if you're working on specific complex campaigns where you're going to have multiple pieces, it's very helpful to understand who's doing what as you go through that.

Kelly: I think people in advertising are used to writing or thinking in 30-second segments, right, because that's the standard length of a TV spot. But obviously since social media, we need to communicate in even less time, if you're talking about other digital elements — a banner or Google AdWords, etc. There's so many elements out there to try and get your message across. So, keeping it simple is really the most challenging thing, I think, for all of us in advertising and marketing. If someone asked me to write a plan for this, write an ad for this, I can write all day long on any topic, but to write it to a specific number of characters — that's the challenge. And so that really takes some experience and learning and understanding what the important keywords are, the motivating words, right? And so that's what I find the biggest challenge. I recently had a client ask me to write their marketing plan in one page. And I think it took me a whole week to figure out how to do that. I mean, I can write a marketing plan with my eyes closed, but to write it in one page and really condense it down — I mean, that's really thinking about it. So, there's so many ways that we use writing in our daily lives in this career, no matter what position that you have, but it's extremely important. So, talk to us about what your best writing hacks are, and what are the tools that will help you become a better writer?

Allison: My favorite hack is the thesaurus. I know a lot of people use spellcheck, but it's interesting — as I've talked to people here and there over the years, people don't go to the thesaurus so much. And I love it. Because what it does for me — I drop my word in, it could be the simplest word like "range" or a complicated word like "obfuscation" — I drop my word in and it brings me back a bunch of words, which don't necessarily always automatically give me a word that I'm going to use. But what it does is it starts the engine — or I click on some of the words and I get more words, and it gives me a line of sight into, oh, maybe I could say this, or I could say that. It's a great stimulator to just sort of get your creative juices flowing. And sometimes I walk away — I'll jump on the site, I'll pull up some words. And I'll think, oh, I don't like any of those words. But it'll get me started thinking, especially if I start playing around with them and seeing what comes back. And it just gives me that stimulative point that I need to keep moving with whatever I'm doing. Another thing I use is Word Tune. This is great. It's a free online tool. Whatever you're writing, you just drop it in the little box. And it comes back with a bunch of different suggestions of how you could write that.

Kelly: Where have you been the last 20 years? You did not tell me this piece of information! I guess maybe it just started existing the last couple years. Oh, that's fantastic. Thank you.

Allison: You're welcome. Yes, so that's helpful too. And again, these things are great because they give you these stimulation points that you can work with for your ideas. You might not, again, like every phrase or sentence — or with the thesaurus, every word that comes up — but it keeps the juices flowing, it gives you that stimulation when you feel like you've got writer's block and you can't quite think of the next thing. And that leads me into my next hack, which is — I think even growing up I got this impression that, okay, if you're going to write something, you have to sit there for two or three hours and write it till it was finished. And every word had to be perfect. And that pressure has to go away — I think it's still out there a little bit. It's not going to be perfect the first time you write it. It might not be perfect the 10th time you write it. But as a writer, this is what you're going to be doing. And so what you want to do is put yourself in the best position possible to write something that might not be perfect, but that's great. And so, take breaks. And that goes against all conventional wisdom of — got to write this, oh my God, what's my next word, oh my God, I don't know what to say — you're just staring at a blank screen, which is literally my favorite hobby. Take breaks. I would recommend writing in half-hour increments. That's what I do. And it makes such a difference. Because you're writing, you're writing and you're burning your brain and you're straining and you've got 20 files open on your computer. And let me tell you, you stop and you break for five or 10 minutes — go outside, talk to someone, play some music, whatever you like to do. And then you come back. And it just starts to flow. But you have to do it consistently. You can't sit there for three hours, break for half an hour, and then go back and burn your brain for another three hours. It's got to be relatively consistent. Figure out your parameter, what works for you, depending on your living situation — we're all at home now. And figure out the routine that works for you. Because it makes a huge difference. When you're sitting there straining, it does not come — I can tell you that from 20 years of working through this. It does not come, or stuff comes out but it's not as good as it could be. Whereas if you give your brain the chance to process the information you're working with, to get to the information that you want to put out there, it makes a huge difference. And the other thing — I was joking about staring at the screen — but what I also do, I didn't do this early in my career and I wish I had because it would have been really helpful, but what I've started to do the last few years is start writing on paper. I don't even look at the screen. I get a sense of what the project is, what the messaging is supposed to be, look at the creative brief, talk to the creative team, the account people, get your head around whatever it is — or if you're in advertising and marketing but you're not a writer per se, and you're working on PowerPoints and emails and so on — understand what it is you have to write from a very general perspective. Then just sit down with a piece of paper and take your time with it as much as you can. We all have insane deadlines, I know. But particularly if it's going to be a big, complex campaign, or an important set of emails, just walk away from the computer. Put the computers down, people, and get a piece of paper, get your notebook, and just jot some things down. And again, it's the same process — it doesn't have to be perfect. Jot down your ideas, jot down your sense of whatever it was you got from the creative brief, or the last meeting you were in with the team. And just make some notes. Go outside if you can and make these notes. And then go back to the computer. And then what you do is build an outline — don't write anything except the outline. Build an outline from your notes. Same thing, take your breaks, go to the kitchen, get a snack — or set the snacks on hand, very important. And then come back. Once you've done your notes and your outline, then you're ready to write. That's the point where you start to go, okay, this is what we're going to talk about here and there and so on.

Kelly: I love that. So, I call some of that like marinating, where I need to marinate on something. And I have to walk away from my computer. And the ideas usually come to me either in the shower, or the time between 11pm and 2am while I'm sleeping and marinating on the topic. And that's why I always have my phone or a notebook next to me at bed. And I'm always writing down these random notes on my phone to remind me of my big idea that I came up with. Because your mind has to have that time to process. And like you said, it's difficult if it's a new business pitch, or some campaign and you have a deadline — ideas don't necessarily come on demand, you have to kind of pull them out. And there's different techniques to do that. So, I think you gave some great suggestions there.

Kelly: So, tell me what you enjoy about writing the most?

Allison: I'm always tempted to say well, everything, but that's not true. Sometimes you're just under pressure. And that's always the toughest thing, because you want to deliver a good product. And there's multiple moving parts, and there's changes. And there's specific things that you have to do. So that's the thing — I'm going away from your question, but I'll come back to it. I wouldn't say that's the thing I dislike the most. But that's the thing that's the most challenging, because for me, I want to know everything about what I'm doing. I want to know everything about the audience. I want to know all the analytics. And it's tough when you can't take the time to dive into every single little element and play with it and play with the words. I just want to play with the words more. That's where I'm coming from. I have to say my favorite thing is writing headlines. I know that's kind of random. But I've had to do so many of them. And they're always challenging because it's four or five words, maybe six or seven, depending on your character count. But it's no more than that. And you have to communicate everything in those five, six, seven words — you don't have the benefit of a blog post that's 1,200 words. It's a little bit in that wheelhouse of your client asking you for a one-page marketing plan. I have to communicate a whole campaign, promote a product, sell a service, talk about a nonprofit — in this. Sometimes the first headline you write for the first campaign is going to be the first thing that people see. People come in at different points of the consumer prospect cycle. But a lot of times, that's going to be the first thing that they see. So, there's a lot of pressure on that. You could write "Dancing in the Dark" and it would mean a lot of different things to different people, but does it communicate what you want to communicate about your brand or your service? So that's my big thing. I spend a lot of time doing that. And it's challenging, but I really enjoy it.

Kelly: So, for those young people who are moving into advertising or marketing and thinking about becoming a writer, how do they determine that this is the right path for them? Because a lot of advertising people, including myself, either want to be account people or want to be creatives and are failed creatives who thought that's what they were supposed to do and then kind of moved over to the account side. How do you know that the writing side is really the path that you should follow?

Allison: Great question. And it's tough today, because there's a lot of options out there. Kids can just pick up a computer and start creating video games, or there's the whole cryptocurrency thing. There's a lot of avenues people could choose. So how do you decide that writing, with my head down typing out all these words, is going to be the thing? I think you want to ask yourself a few questions before you do anything, before you talk to anybody, or jump online and go down these rabbit holes. First — do you like being creative? In any form? It doesn't have to be writing necessarily, but do you like what you've seen of creativity to this point in your life? It's helpful to just have that mindset, because I've learned through the years from working with tons of different people in different industries, there are different mindsets. And you don't necessarily have to be 100% creative to be a writer, but it's helpful if you have some creative feeling and understanding of it. Also, do you like to read? Because you're going to spend most of your time reading. It's not something you're going to be able to minimize or get away from. You're going to have to do a ton of research to get your writing going. You're going to have to read emails and creative briefs and white papers and blog posts, and you're going to be constantly doing that. So if that's not something you think you're going to want to do every single day, then you're going to have to think about that. Have you started actually writing anything up to this point? Did you write for your school newspaper? Do you have your own blog? Have you been able to intern at an ad agency? How much experience have you had at this point? Do you sort of know what the actual job would entail? And of course, there's different kinds of writers — somebody who writes for a publishing company as opposed to a marketing group or an ad agency, or an in-house corporate group doing HR communications — those would all be different things. So, you'd have to sort of extrapolate what kind of role you want to do as well. These questions are somewhat simple, but if you sit down and give it some time, and really look at your experience and think about what you want for your career overall, it will help you determine if this is really the direction you should go in. And understand that it's a lot of work. I've had people say to me, oh, you're a writer, that must be such a cool job. And it is, but it's also a lot of work. You're not just getting on the computer for a couple of hours a day and playing with a thesaurus and writing some nice things. Campaigns are very complex now. You've got all the digital channels to deal with, the analytics to deal with. And there's a lot of moving parts, a lot of details, and you have to be on top of these details. Because if you write the wrong thing on something that goes on a website, or on a banner ad, that's not good. So just ask yourself these questions. As Kelly was saying, let it marinate a little bit. And then once you sort of figure it out, if you come out of that with a positive feeling of, yes, this is something that I really could get into — talk to people who work in the field and get their sense. Because it's different now. When I started, there was no digital — it just didn't exist. There was no Facebook, no Instagram, you didn't do banner ads. So, it's very different now. I would highly recommend talking to people who have written not just on the digital side, but also for traditional marketing as well.

Kelly: That's great. I think that's really wonderful advice. Well, how can people get ahold of you, Allison, if they're interested in learning more or connecting with you?

Allison: Oh, gosh, just go to my LinkedIn or email me at aphilips10@gmail.com.