If it’s readable, it will work better.
For technical products, should advertising text be readable? Hardly anybody ever reads advertising copy, even if it is the very best. So why go to the effort of making it readable? Some people think the idea of “readability” is a concession to morons, a dumbing down, an insult to the seriousness of their corporate intentions. […]
Technical copywriting and me.
Why do I think I’m qualified to do technical copywriting. I’ve done a lot of it in the past, but I’m an adbiz guy, not a technical writer. I know how to separate out the boilerplate and chaff from a company’s literature and pare it down to the red meat of their story. What I […]
Copywriting for menubars? Yep.
I was researching something else and came across these two tech companies with diametrically opposed menubars. One is so completely generic that you cannot get the slightest glimmer of what it is that they do. Sangfor presents zero information about themselves in the menubar. It’s up to the visitor to want to press in further to […]
Cannon Fodder
I keep seeing sites of companies who feel they don’t have to explain themselves. The other day I saw a CraigsList ad: “Cannon is hiring a temp technical writer!” I looked into it because maybe they wanted technical copywriting for a marketing campaign. Also, the company is located just a few miles up the freeway […]
Clear plain explanations
By converting your technical information into a clear plain explanation, I can display your competitive advantages to a wider audience. How to break out of the center-of-the-world complex. If you’re trying to expand your customer base, you have to be specific about what you are offering. Here’s what I did for TorrLube, a small company […]
What is “copy?”
I’ve been a copywriter for forty years but most people don’t know what a copywriter is. My dad was a commercial artist in the Detroit ad industry so I grew up with an awareness of the word. In the ad biz we called the text “copy.” Copy is what copywriters write.
Santa Maria TechBrew meeting
Monday I went to Figueroa Mountain Brewing Company for this month’s Softec TechBrew presentation. “Like a TED talk with beer,” is how Softec bills it. The presentation for this month’s meeting was by the chairman of the board of directors of Poly Canyon Ventures. I looked at their home page before going to the meeting. […]
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I’ve styled myself as “Colin Campbell, Copywriter” since the 1970s. My travel-writer pal Jerry Dunn had this made for me at a bazaar in India in the 1980s: The Arabic is supposedly a phonetic transcription of “Colin Campbell, Copywriter,” although it could say “Go home, yankee vermin,” for all I know. I’ve been a copywriter […]