on 15 September 2009Talking to a new client today about marketing copy and the importance of tone of voice: to answer your customers’ unspoken questions before they wander away, you have to talk to them, not just list information. Serendipitously, on the way back I picked up the US edition of Wired and found gatefolded within it the most gorgeous example of copywriting wrongness courtesy of Nokia, apparently via Nathan Barley.
The misbegotten bound-in is promoting the Ovi Maps app on the N97, so it’s presumably been designed by at least two committees. ‘Life’s Destinations at Your Fingertips’, it begins, asyntactically, adding helpfully: ‘GOING PLACES WITH NOKIA N97 AND OVI MAPS’. Below is a picture of a disembodied hand holding up an N97 in front of a mug of coffee and a doughnut on a plate (a very large doughnut, relative to the mug, on – wait – an even larger plate. Which is sort of tilted. Maybe the mug is actually very small? Or maybe somebody cut all this stuff up in Photoshop and put it back together with no attention to proportion? Fortunately they’ve done that thick-outlined fake-hand-drawn posterised effect on it, like in A Scanner Darkly, so nobody will notice. Except not on the handset, because one of the committees decided they weren’t allowed to mess with the product).
Anyway, these culturally signifying artefacts belong to Alex Harding, director of business development at a growing tech company. We know this because it says underneath: ‘Alex Harding, director of business development at a growing tech company, travels frequently to meet investors and cultivate clients.’ Umm… does he? And we care because? ‘As a person who’s always in the know about the latest technology products, he’s been following reports that the N97 is the ultimate mobile phone and personal navigation device – designed to connect its users with life’s destinations.’
Following reports? Ultimate what? Hang on a cotton-pickin’ minute, you Nokia rascals. There is no Alex Harding, is there? You’re just describing some halfwit’s conception of the kind of imaginary person that a Wired reader would identify with, if that Wired reader wasn’t busy blogging about your half-wittedness. And this isn’t copy, is it? What you’ve done is written a brief for the copy – or, in fact, a pitch for the meeting where you might have decided to commission the brief – and then you’ve gone and printed it in the ad, like it was copy.
It gets worse. Inside the gatefold, Alex, who bears a striking resemblance to Sean Penn in one of those films where he’s grown a Village People ’tache, uses his N97 and Ovi Maps to get through his busy schedule. Christ knows what a director of business development does in real life (surely with such an impressively technical title it can’t be sales, can it?), but in the Scandinavian imagination it seems to involve a working day comprising one lunch meeting, for which our hero drives into Manhattan, where Ovi finds him a convenient and reasonably priced parking space (yeah?), followed by a shopping trip facilitated by Ovi’s remarkable disclosure that department stores exist on Fifth Avenue. Perhaps the next version will help bears find woodland rest rooms.
The point about all this guff is that the people writing it don’t seem to have thought about what happens when someone reads it. Will they think it’s a real story? If so, it’s extraordinarily dull. Or a comic? Even duller. Will they keep going to the end to find out all the things Alex can do with his N97, at least three of which, no doubt by order of the committee, are packed into each sentence? Or will they turn the page and read the equally geeky but more interesting stuff in the mag proper, which isn’t dressed up with a silly storyline?
I know which I did.
adambanksdotcom He must be older than me. Still, good #IanTomlinson story (in the Mail! Really!) by Stephen Glover