THINKING AND WRITING IN STYLE: Kamikaze Copywriters, make sure your ADs, GDs, WDs read this

There are two kinds of Style.  The first is a technical-anthropological-cultural-sociological phenom created within the collective conscious.  The second, a personal expression of who we are and how we articulate our vision of ourselves to the world.  This week we’re going to focus on the first, Style as expressed by the collective conscious.

As a Kamikaze Concepting Creative, there are some truths you need to grok before we can start:

Concept can be expressed with Style

Style is never a Concept.

There are many different advertising styles. In TV alone, there must be thousands across the decades.  Think Drill Sargent, Animation, Late Night TV (Sham Wow, Valuable Collectibles, Hair Goo, Yelling Car Guy), Slice of Life (Smart Kids/Stupid Parents, Dumb Dad/Smart Mom/Smart Kid, Horny Teen, Lawnmower Lust), High Tech (digitized synthesizer music, techie images, references,flashing LEDs, etc.), Talking Food, Talking Babies, Talking Animals or inanimate objects, Rock Video, Police Interrogation, put your least favorites here _________. 

You could hardly call any a Concept.  Yet all are used for products of every size, shape, function. They’re merely vehicles for driving the client’s message home. Treatments, translations.  Style.  Most fall under the category of Monkey See/Monkey Do.  As a rule, they’re painful to watch, so similar, even the most ardent viewer couldn’t tell you who/what the spot is about.  Many wouldn’t remember seeing them at all.

On broader terms, ad styles include Industrial Financial Editorial Fashion Pharma Children’s Corporate High Tech Senior Medical – almost as many as there are categories. What they all have in common - trying to motivate a specific market.  All well and good, but to truly attract, affect and motivate, style must be relevant to your Kamikaze Prospect and fall out of your Kamikaze Key Fact/Concept: Iinner commonalities among highly diverse people, all categorized by one external characteristic.

Other styles define the decades from which they spring.  20s Flappers, 30s Dust Bowl, 80s Disco.  90s high tech, 70s punk/post-punk and today, the Great Recession.  Decades can be defined by music, fads, circumstances art fashion advertising.  Style can also be localized (the beach, a particular city, wilderness, Wall Street, Texas), popular culture (comedy, amusements, dances, food, transportation, class, fashion, music, industry, circumstances, popular TV/movies, etc.).

I knew a creative team in Houston, working on a catalog/installation guide for drill pipe and connectors, who swept all the big award shows in their category (brochures, direct, promotional) with what would normally have been a dry, boring manual.  Their piece mimicked – in copy and graphics – the military/WWII General Patton.  I’ve done the same tapping into cowboy/cowgirl rodeo culture, Film Noir murder mysteries and 30s movie newsreels.

The thing about this kind of style:  as much fun as it can be, it also requires semantic and visual accuracy to a degree that sent us all to (pre-internet) libraries (public, military, film, history, etc.), had us renting movies, listening to music we might not have otherwise discovered, attending sporting events, even visiting VA hospitals and retirement homes, VFWs, Am Vets, etc. 

You can’t fake it.  To work, you must be spot-on accurate.  As soon as you miss something, hundreds of people with nothing better to do start writing letters to the client (and sometimes the agency, if they’re ambitious) gleefully pointing out inaccuracies, anachronisms, misquotes and bad examples.

What can working in an established cultural style do for your creative?  Normal Rockwell illustrations and period design + copy got one Circus grad and his art director a big fat Athena check.  If your style is one your Prospect resonates to, is compatible with the product, it’ll show dividends for the client, as well. 

  

Writing in culture driven styles can be lots of fun.  One of the most hilarious days I’ve ever spent banging out copy was doing Rodeo-Beer-Babe-Promotions.  Freelancing in Chicago at the time, my considerable mastery of rodeo speak really wowed them, even though it was merely stuff I’d picked up living/working in Texas.

What determines which – if any – Cultural Style you can use to dress up a strong concept or In place of one?  As always, it starts with the Prospect.  What Prospect commonalities suggest which Cultural Style?  Does this style work with the Kamikaze Key Fact?  Will it support the Promise, make a rational connection to the product?

Are there pitfalls?  As with all copy, one of the biggest problems is falling in/out of tone/language of concept (the Cultural Style’s lingo becomes your Language of Concept).  You can’t fake it.  Using all the stylistic terms you know in headlines, then reverting to mere conversational or expository writing won’t cut it.  It gives the Prospect – and award judges – an easy out to dismiss the work as dilettante, sloppily/lazily done. 

It may be perfectly fine for the graphics to attempt subtle updates to compensate for changing media and production requirements.  The copy, however, must stay true to voice, true to vocabulary, true to structure.  If not, you’ll loose your audience as soon as you break down into Today Speak.

This Week’s Assignment

For my Advanced Circus students (and anyone who wants to give it a shot), I’ve devised a sort of reverse-engineered Cultural Style assignment.  You have your choice of One (1) of the styles listed below.  Determine what Prospect, then what Product, could be best tied conceptually to the style you choose.  Write a KCWP (Kamikaze Creative Work Plan), then submit KCWP and copy by 9 a.m. Thursday, 1/24/13. That’s one piece of body copy, with headline, written in the style you chose from the list below. Accompanied by the KCWP which inspired it.  Body copy must be at least three paragraphs long.

For my first-time Circus students, this Cultural Style assignment is optional.  If you want to give it a shot, be my guest.  Regardless, you must submit three paragraphs of body copy (preferably w/headline), either new or something you’re working on in a teams or other class, by 9 a.m. Thursday, 1/24 (if your skype session is on Thursday), 5 p.m. Thursday 1/24 if your skype session is on Friday. Even if it's something from another class, it must be accompanied by a supporting KCWP.  Submitting the advanced Cultural Style assignment is, again, optional.  The only one that counts is the required copy.

Any non-Circus class readers/writers who want to give it a shot, go ahead.  Have fun.  If you’d like me to take a look at it, I’ll do that on a first come/first served basis as time allows if you submit it in English, as a separate Word doc. (or pdf I can copy to word for edit).  I can’t promise an immediate response, but do promise to go over it and make comments, then return to you as soon as my schedule allows.  The styles listed are pretty much USA – if you do one from another country, please also send me some background on the style you use.  You can email them to kamikazecreative@gmail.com.  Use subject line:  Non-student Cultural Style Assignment.

CULTURE-BASED STYLES:  CHOOSE ONE

1920s-30s – Flapper Culture (Gatsby, Thin Man, F.Scott and Zelda, Prohibition, Al Capone)

1920s-30s – Depression/Dust Bowl (Margaret Burke-White, WeeGee, Grapes of Wrath, New Deal Propaganda)

1940s – WWII (Music, War Machinery, Fashion, Cultural Norms/Social Changes, Military, Allies, Celebrity USOs/Stage Door Canteen)

1940s - Film Noir (Cinematography, Stars, Stories, Fans/Cinemas, Dashiell Hammett, Bogart & Bacall, Ida Lupino, Black/White Film, B-Movie Stars)

1950s – Happy Days (California – Cars, Stay-at-Home Moms, Music, Fashion, Popular Culture, Leather Jackets, Ladies Home Journal, Automatic Washing Machines, TV, Doris Day/Rock Hudson)

1950s - Beat Generation (NYC – Long hair, Black leotards/turtlenecks, Poets (Ginsburg, Ferlinghetti), Coffee Houses, Goatees, Literature (Kerouac)

1960s – Hippie Culture (Woodstock, Communes, Organics, Long Hairs, Underground Newspapers, Weed, Jane Fonda, Mini-Skirts, Carnaby Street, Beatles, Motown, Pop/Modern Art)

1960s - Vietnam (War, Protests, Veterans, War/Warrior Culture, Music, Choppers, My Country Right or Wrong, The Great Society)

Whatever your choose, be sure to check out the movies/movie stars, news, fashion, food, transportation, art, magazines/literature/ newspapers, advertising, new products introduced.  Because we’re all writers here - the slang, literature, film dialogue, etc., will help you stay in voice.

Good luck.  Have fun.

 

As always, ©2013, Doreen Dvorin/Kamikaze Creative