An essay on the language of advertising. The language of advertising. Our attitude towards different texts

Advertising is non-personal information disseminated in a certain form about goods, services or ideas and undertakings, intended for a group of people (target audience) and paid for by a specific sponsor.

Among the marketing elements of an ad definition are the following:

the advertising message can pass either one or several types of mass communication to get a larger audience of potential buyers; the purpose of advertising is to influence potential buyers, persuade them to purchase a product or service;

informative (it manifests itself in the fact that any advertising act informs someone about a product or service);

emotive;

aesthetic.

2. Features and patterns of the use of linguistic techniques in advertising texts

The peculiarities and patterns of the use of certain stylistic techniques in advertising messages and the effectiveness of their use largely depend on what type this advertising message belongs to.

Many studies also consider various structural elements of advertising texts - headline, body copy and slogan. In addition to these elements, mention should be made of the subtitle, inserts and frames, stamps, logos and autographs (signatures).

The headline is considered the most important part of the advertising text, since the degree of its expressiveness determines how much the potential consumer is interested in reading the main text. Headers are divided into several types: informing about useful properties, provocative, informative, interrogative and containing a command.

Advertising text should meet the main objectives of advertising in general. It performs very specific functions. The ultimate goal of an advertising text is to convince readers of the benefits of the advertised product. The effect of advertising is based on the correct use of a number of linguistic and psychological phenomena and patterns. Speaking of the language of advertising messages, we are talking about the use of language for professional purposes, the result of which is the generation of messages targeted at a specific audience and performing specific tasks.

The main purpose of the ad copy is to attract attention, generate interest and stimulate sales. To achieve this goal, the compilers of the advertising text turn to the use of various linguistic and psychological techniques. Advertising text should be distinguished by clarity, brightness, conciseness, extravagance. The laws of competition require advertising creators to be as accurate as possible in conveying information, expressiveness, and professionalism.

Slang and colloquial expressions are especially actively used in advertising. As noted in the work "The Language of Advertising Texts", "colloquial constructions are used to create an emotionally expressive coloring, imagery, clarity and effectiveness of an advertising text that is intended for a mass reader, and therefore should be close to him in structure." Indeed, advertising texts are often written in such a way that their sound resembles spoken spoken language.

It should be noted that, despite the attractiveness and even entertainment of stylistic devices, linguistic innovations in advertising are not welcomed by everyone. And yet, in ad copy that aims to sell a product, new words and non-traditional uses of already known words are of great value.

The main task of the advertising text is to draw the audience's attention to a certain product, product, subject or event through a relatively short message. The laconicism and expressiveness of nominative sentences correspond to the fulfillment of this task, which determines their frequent use in advertising texts.

The stylistic effectiveness of this technique lies in the creation of a certain rhythmic structure of the text, which helps it to be perceived more clearly.

Repetition is a fairly common stylistic technique. The repetition of a speech element, attracting the attention of the reader (listener) to it, emphasizes its significance, enhances the emotional impact of the text. The use of this stylistic technique requires special skill from the compilers of the texts: a relatively small amount of advertising text prescribes the rational use of linguistic means.

There are several formal varieties of repetition, differing from each other in the nature of stylistic expressiveness:

.A simple repetition, which is a direct repetition of the same member of a sentence, phrase or whole sentence ("Purity is pure tide!").

.Pickup is a type of repetition in which a word or a group of words ending (less often - beginners) a sentence, phrase or line are repeated at the beginning of the next corresponding segment of speech ("New frying pan" Tefal "." Tefal "- you always think about us") ...

.Framing is a type of repetition in which the element at the beginning of a speech segment is repeated at its end, occupying the most expressive syntactic segments.

.Syntactic tautology, which is the repetition of a member of a sentence expressed by a noun in the form of a pronoun.

.Polysyndeton is a deliberate repetition of service elements, most often a union, for communication between homogeneous members of a sentence or between larger segments of speech.

Repetition of the same word or sentence not only draws the attention of the reader (or listener) to the repeated element, but also adds new shades to its content. The stylistic meaning of repetition is to enhance the semantic weight of the repeated part of the text.

2.3 Slogan language

Tagline -a short slogan or motto in a direct, allegorical or abstract form. A good slogan should have a clear inner rhythm and be a mini-verse from one line.

Consider some of the techniques used to create a slogan:

1)the use of citations or allusions.

A popular line from a song, movie or literary work is considered a "quotation", and a well-known expression from economics, history, etc. is an "allusion". There is a very large number of slogans created by this method: "We ask for the table", "Magnetic cards of the Baltic Bank: a realized need", "How beautiful this world is, look!"

Table of contents

Introduction
Promotional text is a special kind of business text. Advertising (fr. Reclame from lat. Reclamo - "shout out") is information about goods, various types of services in order to notify consumers and create demand for goods and services.
We are all consumers of advertising and, regardless of age, professional education, social status and level of material well-being, we are able to evaluate it, even at the level of emotions: like it or not.
Advertising text reveals the main content of the advertising message. Its task is to attract the attention of a potential buyer by its appearance, headline, by explaining to interest and by the conclusion to convince to buy the offered product.
The ad copy is an example of the most effective use of language tools. The pragmatic aspect of the advertising text is directly manifested in its peculiar organization (choice of grammatical and lexical units, stylistic techniques, special syntax, organization of printed material, use of elements of various sign systems). The creation of advertising texts is based on two trends: concise, laconic expression and expressiveness, information capacity.

Conclusion
The main thing in an advertising text is the formation of an advertising image using various lexico-syntactic and visual means. The advertising image creates specific ideas about the subject and evokes certain feelings that in the right direction affect the behavior of the reader.
When writing an advertising text, it should be remembered that it should be positively perceived by a specific person, to whom it will fall, and not by a faceless multimillion crowd. Advertising should resemble a personal, confidential conversation, which always evokes positive emotion.
The text should be presented in a language that is simple for the consumer. Highly specialized terms and complex sentences that include several thoughts, theses, arguments and multiple participial, adverbial expressions are not allowed. In the advertising text, one phrase should contain one thought.
No matter how long the advertising text is, its individual parts should be logically linked together and all together form a single whole. Otherwise, the reader's attention will be scattered, and, consequently, he will not have a coherent positive opinion about the product.

Bibliography

Averchenko L.K. Psychology of advertising // ECO, 1995. - №2. - S. 176-177.

Denison D., Gobi L. Advertising Tutorial: How to Become Famous Without Spending Money on Advertising // Per. from Polish Babina N.V. - Minsk: Modern Word, 1997 .-- 29 p.

Klushina N.I. Perception of advertising - Russian speech. - 2001. - No. 1. - S.64-66.

Maggeramov I.A. On the paradox and advertising: [The language of advertising] // Russian speech.- 2002.- №2.- P.59-63.

Prokhvatilova O.A., Slastukhina E.V. Expressive means in advertising texts // Secretarial business.- 2001.- No. 3.- P.24-26.

Practical part

Option number 5

Exercise 1.

Gentlemen on business trips, get travel certificates.

He was a funny guy, as soon as he starts laughing, you can't stop.

The author of the article writes about one requirement of L.N. Tolstoy to the Russian language, about the requirement of simplicity and clarity, intelligibility.

Task 2.
etc.................

Reply left the guest

What is advertising? Advertising can be defined as notifying people in all possible ways to create widespread awareness of something or someone, information about remarkable events in economic, cultural, political life in order to induce active participation of people in them. There are many opinions on the fact that such a phenomenon of advertising can be discussed forever. Everyone views it in their own way: someone evaluates it from the point of view of a quality product, someone as a transfer of information. In this work, she is viewed in the light of art, the art of the word. The choice of the topic is due to the fact that advertising is an integral part of our life. We see it everywhere: in the subway, on TV, on billboards, in entrances, we hear it on the radio. Everyone pays attention to high-quality, tasteful, humorous advertising, but at the same time, advertising is rude, unethical, and sometimes illiterate. No one is surprised by the non-normative nature of advertising. In our time, there is absolutely no such thing as the ethics of advertising messages. Newspaper editors prudently indicate at the bottom of advertising articles: "the editors are not responsible for the content of advertising messages." This means that the newspaper can publish everything. Unfair and inaccurate advertising, amplified many times on television screens, more than once led to undesirable results - potential buyers lost faith, and with it, trust in the channel for distributing advertising messages was lost. Why it happens? Why do we more and more often read absurd ads on newspaper pages, day after day we watch stupid commercials on TV? The Russian public has already got into the habit of scolding domestic advertising, and it must be admitted that it really deserves it. They scold for the form, and for the content, and for the fact that they advertise the wrong thing, for the wrong people, and for the bad language. When compiling an advertising text, it is necessary to take into account many points, including the inexhaustibility of the possibilities of our language, the optimal compositional structure, the psychology of the impact on the consumer. After all, the advertising text is read in a special way! In our time, this is not always paid attention to the compilers of advertising texts. “Advertising is the most important problem of our time. Advertising is the god of modern commerce and industry. There is no escape outside of advertising. However, advertising is a very difficult art, requiring a lot of tact. ”There are many developments on the topic of advertising and announcements in modern media. This problem is very brightly covered in many publications. Well-known specialists Z. Freud, R. Jacobson, D. Lotman, Z. Shannon worked in this area. In the study of an exciting topic, various books were used, for example, by such authors as NN Kokhtev, VV Uchenova, KV Konanykhin, MI Ananich. and many others. The articles by E.S. Kara-Murza about the Russian language in advertising.

A bit of advertising history. The earliest documents of written history already bear witness to advertising practice. In Egypt in 3320 BC. the ivory merchants urged buyers as follows: “Cheap, very cheap this year is the noble horn of the giants of the primeval forests of Ehekto. Come to me, people of Memphis, marvel, admire and buy! " In ancient Greece, the following "advertising" song was intended for the inhabitants of Athens: "So that the eyes shine, that the cheeks turn red, that the girlish beauty persists for a long time, a reasonable woman will buy cosmetics at reasonable prices from Exliptos" The turning point in the history of advertising was 1450, when Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press. Advertising received a powerful impetus in the form of the first newspaper in English, The Weekly News, which began to appear in 1622. The Tatler advised text writers: "The great art of writing advertisements is finding the right approach to grab the reader's attention, without which the good news might go unnoticed or be lost among bankruptcy filings." In Russia, the first advertisements appeared in Peter's Vedomosti. For example, an advertisement about a prestigious resort: "These waters heal various cruel diseases, namely: scurvy, hypochondria, bile, indigestion, vomiting ..." in the media? Let's try to figure it out.

A.P. Repyev

Advertising language
Part I

Claude Hopkins

Give them more work to keep them working and not making empty speeches.

Bible. Exodus

In the advertisement, behind the stove, he got accustomed to his "Lieutenant Kizhe", to call him "The Language of Advertising". Nobody saw him, but they are looking for him. They search day and night. And they are unlikely to find it, because it is found exclusively in the inflamed brains of linguists, psycholinguists, psychotechnologists, NLPists and other "chumaks" in advertising. And all would be fine - let them frolic! But the process of "ochumachivaniya" advertising community has gone too far. The shamanic office "Triz-Chance" * even put it on stream. Now is the time to react.

THE WHOLE HISTORY of advertising has convincingly shown that elementary literacy and the ability to express one's thoughts on paper are included in the list of qualities that the creator of the advertising text (copywriter) should have, but these abilities are behind the ability to "get into the shoes" of the client and offer him solutions to his problems ...

Moreover, in the absence of the proper marketing training and advertising thinking for a copywriter, paradoxical as it may sound, literary talent becomes rather a disadvantage that can successfully bury advertising in pseudo-literary flourishes.

German copywriter Schönert writes in The Coming Advertising: “Schools and universities often turn to advertising agencies to provide relevant examples of advertising language. And each time the agencies find themselves in a difficult situation, because there are practically no such examples. " How not? And with examples of what, then, is his book filled?

Here is one of them. How will the text “Helps you stay vigorous and energetic even in old age” evoke in you? - Most likely yawning. And this one? “Yesterday my grandmother came home again at eleven.” - Noticed how your imagination immediately turns on, how your face breaks into a smile, how interest appears.

But excuse me, the guardian for the idea of a special advertising language will say, both versions are written in the most common language. He is right - the whole point is not in some special advertising language, but in special advertising brains!

Yes Yes! Good ad copy is written in the most common language. The language in which it is desirable to write literally everything, up to boring references. True, you need to know this ordinary language. And this is no longer a question of advertising, but of school education. Where it is at the level, there is no endless talk about some kind of "advertising language". And at the proper level, it is almost everywhere, except for the country of Pushkin, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy ...

And now relax and buckle up - the leaders of the destroyed post-war Germany were worried about the sharp decline in the level of the language culture of the Germans during the years of the Hitler regime ... The zealous attitude of the French towards their language is even called "linguistic chauvinism" ... The linguists of Portugal and Brazil gather almost every year and to hoarse argue about the norms of the Portuguese language ... On the table of every English official there is a wonderful instruction in the English language The Complete Plain Words... You can continue ad infinitum.

In many countries, children from the age of five are taught to communicate their thoughts coherently on paper. They write essays and essays every week. In them, strict teachers assess only the ability to write and do not pay attention to spelling and punctuation. Children are taught composition, synonymy, idioms, stylistics and other useful things. It is not surprising that the population of such countries is able to write tolerably, that is, to express their thoughts on paper.

This partly explains the fact that Western copywriting books devote only a couple of pages to the specifics of the advertising language, and otherwise they simply refer the reader to the usual textbooks of composition and stylistics, from which the shelves in bookstores are breaking. They break there, but not with us.

I did not sit with Lomonosov in piitics lessons at the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy, with Pushkin in fine literature lessons at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, or with commoners in the district gymnasium. But together with my three children, I "passed" three times what can only be called a school course in Russian language and literature with gnashing of teeth. This is our national disgrace!

If our schoolchildren cannot write even two sentences coherently, then it is not them who are to blame, but our school, which is only interested in the fact that the "wounded soldier" is written with one "H", and the "soldier wounded in the leg" - with two "H" ". And God forbid you to separate the word "however" with a comma at the beginning of the sentence. - "Nizya-ya!" (Why the hell can't you?) Mastering all this nonsense leaves no time for anything else. So do not be surprised at the squalor of most of the Russian texts - this is programmed by our education system.

With a shudder I recall the courses of editors at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. I had something to compare with - a couple of years before that I had taken an amazing course in German stylistics at the University of Vienna and even earlier shoveled a couple of shelves of books by Anglo-Saxon linguists. It is a pity that the teachers of rhetoric from the aforementioned Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy did not sit with me at my desk at those courses - they would be ashamed of their descendants.

Have our journalists heard of rhetoric? It seems to me that no. My suspicions were reinforced by foreign editors working for Russian English-language magazines. These poor fellows have to rewrite most of what our journalists have created. Their verdict is that Russian journalists cannot write!

On this one could put an end to and refer the reader to good books on the Russian language. Most likely, there are such books, but I have not seen them.

Logic of presentation

I have translated a lot of books from Russian into English. Most often, these were the works of our prominent scientists. They were all scientifically interesting. But this "interestingness" was presented in such a way that even after editing in publishing houses, sometimes it was a chaotic something - in an elder's garden, in Kiev, a man. The author could jump from fifth to tenth, return, branch, etc. With excellent scientific logic, the logic of presentation almost always suffered.

There is an opinion that the author of a good text thinks clearly and clearly, but "who thinks clearly, he clearly expounds" (Schopenhauer) that "it is tricky to write only about what they do not understand" (V. Klyuchevsky). What does it turn out - the academician-physicist expounds in a confused way, because he thinks vaguely, or does not even understand what he is writing about?

I have been tormented by this riddle for a long time. Much became clear after getting acquainted with the system of teaching the native language in the West. Now it seems to me that writing is tricky and unclear even when no one taught you the technical foundations of presenting arguments on paper as a child.

The confusion of Russian texts has another explanation. Remember Vershinin's remark from Chekhov's Three Sisters: “Well? If they don't give tea, then let's at least philosophize. " For some reason (perhaps due to the chronic shortage of tea in the country), do not feed our intelligentsia with bread - let them philosophize and practice. Is it any wonder that as soon as there was talk about advertising in Russia, linguists, psychologists, culturologists and other lovers of "philosophizing" immediately climbed out of the bushes. NLP shamans are coming up; the astrologers are said to be joining soon.

Be that as it may, the vagueness and ornateness of our texts has received international "recognition". Here is how some Western authors describe the logic of presentation among representatives of different peoples:

(The dotted line in the figure shows deviations from the main topic.)

Congratulations, gentlemen - we are world champions in verbiage! Reading, say, Klyuchevsky, one is convinced that an epidemic of a terrible disease has been raging in our country for centuries, the name of which is diarrhea of words, constipation of thought. We all speak and think only in dotted lines, and everywhere - in the Duma, in the press, on TV. This disease also affected our advertising - in terms of the amount of junk text in advertising, we can probably also claim the champion title.

A copywriter works with the most precious words. The "dotted line" in advertising is not only harmful, but also ruinous. The author of the advertising text is simply obliged to mercilessly cut out the entire "dotted" part - it takes up space and reduces the number of people who have read to the end. It reduces the overall effectiveness of your ad. She wastes advertiser's money.

This circumcision is given oh how difficult - I know from my own many years of experience. "Dotted" curls often seem extremely beautiful and witty to their creators. Gentlemen, novice copywriters, learn to step on your throat with a forged boot when you want to "sing". Advertising is not a song that caresses your ears, but the guttural cry of a herald. This is not "elegant" literature, but economics and sales. When looking at your next curl, always ask yourself a rough sobering question - does it sell? And crop, crop, crop! We'll come back to this question when it comes to editing ad copy.

Texts

Why do people take up the pen? - To convey something to the reader. (This does not apply to fools and graphomaniacs.) The more important, interesting and useful this "something" is, the more attention (and sometimes even pleasure) we read. However, interestingness and meaningfulness are not the only characteristics of the text. You can also talk about its emotional, aesthetic and other virtues. And they are determined not only by the personality and qualifications of the author, but also by the area to which the text belongs.

Objectives and language of texts

Let's compare the polar texts - legal and artistic. Each of them is created according to its own laws. A legal document has a strictly defined task - to convey the meaning with all the smallest details without any discrepancies. Moreover, at any cost, up to terrible deviations from the norms of "high calm", such as endless repetitions ( a la“The house that Jack built”), archaisms, clericalisms and other “isms”.

A literary text is a different matter. We expect pleasure from him, and not only and not so much from linguistic beauty. A.S. Pushkin said: "Prose requires thoughts and thoughts - without them, brilliant expressions are useless." Although Pushkin's brilliant expressions oh-how "serve", Alexander Sergeevich is valuable to us for his thoughts - not without reason his "Onegin" is called the encyclopedia of Russian life. Perhaps, among his contemporary Piites, there were those who wrote "more beautifully". But where are they? I admire Nabokov's "verbal painting", but I will most often read Leo Tolstoy, who diligently avoided linguistic beauty. I recall the phrase from "Walks in Rome" by Stendhal: "It is better to let the reader stumble upon an awkward phrase, but he will receive all the information."

It is difficult to talk about the tasks and language of journalism, since here a lot depends on the genre and subject matter, the nature of the media and the contingent of readers. It's easier to talk about the tasks and language of scientific articles, bureaucratic reports, military orders, business proposals, trade documents. Much lends itself to regulation here, there are often well-established traditions of presentation, less copyright liberties.

What tasks does the advertising text solve? Its only task is to sell, and only SELL !!! (In advertising, the word “sell” is a term meaning “to persuade the reader to buy, vote for a candidate, etc.” A person can actually buy in a year.) If an advertisement “does not sell,” then even the most brilliant text is useless!

Advertising text is the most expensive text in the world, and often huge sums of money are paid to publish it. It follows from this that the highest requirements should be imposed on each word in advertising, and not so much artistic and informational, as economic - here literally every word should work for sales. Technically, the ad copy should:

Attract the attention of an uninterested reader (the title solves this problem);
Arouse in this reader the desire to start reading the text (this is a subheading, intermediate headings, various kinds of emphasis). It is very important that the reader can evaluate the readability of the text;
Be so interesting that the reader will read it to the end.

Our attitude towards different texts

There are texts that we read with desire and pleasure. It can be a work of fiction, an interesting article, or a useful textbook. Enter a bookstore or library - dozens of people stand in front of the shelves for hours, leafing through, thinking, evaluating, reading. We can reread the works that we love many times.

There are texts that we read out of necessity, through “I can’t,” realizing that unwillingness to familiarize ourselves with their content can be very expensive. These are legal contracts, orders, bureaucratic letters, etc. Sometimes the fact of reading is even certified by a signature.

There are uninteresting texts that, thank God, are not necessary to read. We fight them off as soon as we can. Alas, most of the advertising belongs to such texts. We take the decision to read the advertisement reluctantly, overcoming internal resistance, with difficulty moving from complete indifference to interest. We can start reading the text and drop it in the middle. There is a joke that only the creator reads the ad text to the end.

I really like the image created by the American advertiser John O "Toole:" When working on an advertisement, it is useful to imagine yourself as an uninvited guest in the apartment of a potential buyer who has the magical power to make you disappear instantly. "

It is difficult to imagine a normal person who would love advertising. Even Ogilvy admitted that he hated outdoor ads and TV ads that interrupt something interesting. We approach each new advertisement with a presumption of guilt.

Presumption of guilt

Remember how many times you, seduced by something, plunged into another advertisement and ... stumbled upon another dummy. How many times have you tried in vain to read a completely unreadable advertisement and threw it away, rubbing your eyes that were sick from tension. How many times have you been annoyed with wasted time. How, then, will you approach the next advertisement? - With the presumption of guilt, of course. Advertising is to blame for the fact that it is advertising. (This is why Ogilvy said, "The less advertising is like an advertisement, the better for advertising.")

And it is precisely this attitude towards the created advertisement that an advertiser should tune in to if he wants his advertisement to have some chance of success. Moreover, the advertiser must remember this at all stages of creating a text, including at the stage of stylistic editing, when he polishes the language of the advertisement being created.

Headings

I don't know if there are any requirements for titles (titles) of artworks. But they exist in relation to legal, military and other documents.

Journalists pay a lot of attention to their headlines. Certain traditions, both professional and national, can be noted here. The latter are striking when you read many articles on the same topic in different languages. American headlines are usually business-like and laconic, German headlines “flow along the tree”, French ones are a little more elegant.

But nowhere does a headline occupy such an important position as in an advertisement. Here everything depends on him - whether the advertisement will work or not. In advertising alone, much more time is spent on the headline than on the body copy. Only in advertising are headlines thoroughly tested. Only in advertising are the headlines subtly adjusted to the specifics of the given organ.

Headlines live a very difficult life. The reader opens a magazine or newspaper and skims through the headlines, trying to identify what interests him. Advertisements flashed before his eyes, often causing irritation. (The exception is classified sections or Internet sites, where the reader looks himself.)

How talented a copywriter must be to beat articles in this very difficult headline competition! Unfortunately, most ads play with article giveaways by offering the reader faded, formulaic, boring, or downright stupid headlines. Walter Schönert provides the following comparisons of article titles and advertisements on similar topics:

So how? What's more interesting?

Text without heading

Text without a headline creates problems for the reader. It's good if the document is short - you can quickly read it. And if it's long? Imagine for a second that you are opening a newspaper or magazine and - oh, horror! - all articles without titles. The only way to find something interesting is to read everything, dozens of pages, without much hope of success. Who will do it?

But if no one reads even an article without a headline, then even more so no one will read an advertisement without a headline! An advertisement without a headline is money that is a waste of time. Ogilvy wrote, "I don't envy a copywriter who will present me with an ad without a headline." Such a copywriter quit on the spot. I wish our agencies could adopt this practice!

Blind headers

Blind refers to headings that do not represent the content of the document. If blind titles are appropriate in fiction ("How the Steel Was Tempered", "The Gadfly" or even "War and Peace"), then in other texts it is a huge flaw. The title of a scientific article, newspaper article, even an e-mail should give as complete an idea of the content of the text as possible. But these texts have at least a small chance of being read even with a blind title. Unfortunately, headline-blind ads have virtually no such chance.

How common are headline-free and blind-headline ads in our country? An analysis of an expensive business magazine taken at random gave the following picture: out of 53 advertisements, 3 had no headlines at all, 15 had blind headlines. For example, such: "Cure against problems", "Wealth of nuances and clarity in details", "Achieved perfection", "Image matters", "The choice is yours", "We will solve all your problems", "For business people", "Family plan", "Life is gaining momentum", "One step ahead", "Technique of temptation", "A reliable link for your success", "Common interests", "They will not dissolve", etc.

From the official language in advertising (especially in advertising letters, commercial offers and announcements) came the manner of beginning the text with phrases like "Dear clients / residents / patients, etc." or "Dear comrades / clients, etc." Enter the operating room of any bank. Its walls are decorated with leaflets about various banking services. Even basic common sense dictates that the titles of these leaflets should include the names of these services. But with rare exceptions, dozens of messages “Dear clients!” Written in large print will look at you.

In his book "Aggressive Marketing Plus Effective Advertising" S. Aleksandrov suggests the following "aggressive" beginning of "effective" advertising:

The explanations of the "master" to the title are interesting: "He provokes a potential consumer to decide whether he is a" business "person or not". Well well! Firstly, offers of thousands of types of goods may follow under such a “heading”; secondly, not only business people need stationery. I’m ready to bet that only masochists will read the words “stationery”. But even for them it will remain a mystery why the proposed stationery is better than everyone else.

A senseless tradition has developed in press releases to write simply "Press Release" instead of the headline. But excuse me, gentlemen, we do not call articles by the word "article", but books by the word "book".

On the bulletin board, you can find such a monotonous battery of bulletins.

Each of them offers something, perhaps even very interesting. But from a distance of several meters, it is only clear that one ad invites you to evenings of relaxation. Where do others invite?

Email headers

In email, it is important to know the subject of the message and the name of the sender. There are corresponding columns for this. It's good if they are filled like this:

Spam has become the scourge of e-mail. People send you an unsolicited message for your money, which is already annoying you. Do they really expect the annoyed recipient to read this (taken from my mail):

Many emails are completely unnamed. This is completely incomprehensible - after all, the mail program reminds the sender to call his message somehow.

How nice it would be if other programs had such functions as well! Perhaps we would have had fewer untitled documents.

Authors of texts

Texts of different categories are composed by different authors. Literary texts come from the pen of writers and poets, articles are written mainly by journalists, legal texts are written by lawyers, scientific treatises are written by scientists, military orders are written by the military, inquiries and replies are written by bureaucrats ... Who should write advertising texts?

Why just a copywriter?

Externally, the advertising text can resemble a business document, scientific article, journalism, and even a literary text. Why, then, advertising copy cannot and should not be written by journalists and writers? Or scientists, engineers, or government officials? After all, they also work with text.

This is all true. However, their texts solve fundamentally different tasks, and they are created differently. As we remember, the ad copy fulfills a unique task - to sell, and only to sell! This is precisely what non-copywriters do not understand, continuing to be writers or journalists.

Having accumulated rich copywriting experience, I can now guess with sufficient accuracy the profession of the author of this or that advertising text. It is especially noticeable when the advertiser himself is the author of the text.

Writers in advertising

Almost all famous American classics of the 19th century passed through advertising agencies. And none of them won any laurels in advertising. It was a sinful thing that I tried to introduce several fiction writers to the copywriting craft. The long hours I spent communicating to them the main objectives of advertising did not lead to anything worthwhile.

I can offer my own explanation for the failure of writing in advertising. With his word, the writer brings good and light, “he burns the hearts of people with a verb”. The very idea of using fine language to solve “base” sales problems is alien to him. The "advertising" texts coming out from under his pen are distinguished by expression and grace, but ... they are usually not a penny for sale.

A certain, not the best, part of the writers always write only about themselves. So, any of Pelevin's opus is dedicated ... to him. His erudition and his narcissism. The reader is hardly interested in him. I agree with Bill Bernbach: "While the writer is interested in what he describes in his texts, the copywriter is interested in what the reader gets from them." Do you feel the difference?

A good ad copy should have only two characters: the subject of the ad (product, service, candidate for election) and, most importantly, His Majesty the Reader (Buyer). (Neither the advertiser, nor, moreover, the advertiser, are not heroes of advertising.) In a real advertisement, the reader should read about himself - about solving his problems and meeting his needs. If necessary, advertising should explain to him, should educate him, should help him, should be a kind marketing doctor for him, making it easier for him to choose a purchase.

Some writers frankly don't give a damn about the reader. Open for example the story of Viktor Erofeev "The smell of feces from the mouth." An unforgettable experience awaits you - several pages filled with one word "stroke". What does this luminary of our literature, not leaving the television screen, think of the reader? I mean, about you and me?

The reverse is also true - the books written by copywriters usually do not differ in particular grace or other literary merits. Probably to each his own.

Journalists in advertising

Advertising has suffered with journalists as well. These representatives do not remember what kind of "power" it is typical to chase after a sensation, to reveal, polemicize, stigmatize. Some of them include the statement of Niels Bohr: "A journalist is one who does not understand anything, but judges everything." Superficiality, indiscriminateness, incompetence, verbiage and love for the "catchphrase" are intolerable in journalism. But in advertising, these qualities are deadly.

Representatives of the print media admit that even a customer who is inexperienced in advertising understands that the "advertising" works of journalists presented to his trial are not selling anything. It is gratifying to note that some media outlets have begun to realize the need to have copywriters.

Unfortunately, many do not understand the fundamental difference between journalism and advertising. What guided the uncles from Moscow State University, creating the country's first forge of advertising personnel not at the Faculty of Economics, where these personnel would be brought up in a marketing environment, but at the Faculty of Journalism? Most likely they danced from the text. Doesn't this explain the fact that so far you rarely meet a decent copywriter in our country. And those who consider themselves to be a copywriter shop are occupied almost exclusively with slogans and other marginalities.

Scientists in advertising and advertising

A scientist writes for a narrow isoteric circle, often about complex and even complex things. Scientific texts are replete with terms, graphs and formulas. Without them, many priests of science are helpless, and few of them manage to tell the general public about the achievements of their science in simple words; even fewer among them are people capable of writing advertising texts.

When I instructed a narrow specialist to write an advertising (advertising!) Article, I usually instructed him as follows: When you write a dissertation or a message to a special journal, the cleverer the better. The main task there is to show how smart you are. The task of the advertising article is completely different - to show the “teapot” that the proposed high-tech solution makes his life easier, gives him certain benefits, that he will master these wonders of science simply and easily. In a word, you must make him want to join this achievement. And, God forbid, do not scare! But it was all useless! I always had to redo everything. Now I no longer conduct such experiments and write advertising articles myself.

Psychologists, culturologists and other "ologues" are very fond of writing about advertising, about which they have a very vague idea. And they do it on a terrible mixture of foreign and Nizhny Novgorod. This brings to mind what Ernest Gowers, author of the aforementioned book, wrote about the "nebulous systematization of the obvious." The Complete Plain Words... In his opinion, representatives of various not very specific “sciences” seem to be trying to tell the world: “You must believe that this is a great science; just look at our amazing new scientific language. " It seems that linguists have been particularly successful in "nebulous systematization".

Linguists in advertising and advertising

Schönert and other practitioners can tell these uninvited advisers as much as they like that advertising does not need their services - everything is in vain. All magazines are packed with their "advertising" articles, and I will not save you from them at conferences. Some, having come up with a couple of names or slogans, declare themselves copywriters, others - brandologists.

Their books, which are addressed to young practitioners, are especially dangerous. Let's put ourselves in the place of a former industrial worker or economist somewhere in Kruzhopinsk, whom the authorities "threw on advertising", setting before him purely practical tasks - to sell "bolts and nuts" produced by his native AAA "Kukareku-Nedoinvest" or UUU "Khryu- Hryu-Reholding ". With what joy he pounces on a book, on the cover of which is written, say, "Advertising text" - this is the long-awaited answer to all questions!

But it's too early to rejoice - instead of the long-awaited answers, our hero is waiting for a heartfelt conversation about "conventional implicatures", "essential problems of rhetoric and non-rhetoric", "natural language belief", "the influencing potential of language", "discursive practice", "variable interpretation", "Cognitive theory of argumentation", "ontologization", "speech-influencing potential of vocabulary" and so on. He will read such revelations with a sinking heart: "The linguistic procedure of text analysis is the transformation of discourse syntagmas into a paradigm of suggestive-rhetorical means, since the processing of a linguistic work is carried out in an orientation towards the perception of its suggestive properties." At a reasonable price, he will be offered a "Relative-Associative Semantic Neurolinguistic Analyzer" for the Internet.

Making my way through such a jungle, I constantly ask myself a question - well, okay, I don't understand anything in this verbiage (after 40 years of work as a copywriter and serious linguistics), but does the author himself understand? Well, at least something? After all, "it is tricky to write only about what they do not understand."

Pathfinders searching for "Lieutenant Kizhe" received a worthy replenishment - the "philological aspects" of advertising are now briskly discussed at Yakutsk University; soon they will probably talk about its astronomical, medical and even agricultural aspects.

All jokes, but I'm afraid that after reading this, a novice copywriter will change his plans, fearing terrible boredom and impenetrable stupidity. I hasten to assure you, young advertising minds, that the linguo-philological-psycho-semiotic-astrological-NLP-marasmic excrement described above does not have the slightest relation to advertising.

Who can be a copywriter

Let me repeat here the words from my article "Advertising Thinking": "Marketing and advertising are areas that not everyone can do. Moreover, some are contraindicated in them. There is nothing unusual and exceptional in this, because there are enough such "special" areas. Music was mentioned above. Martin Luther, the translator of the German Bible, said, "Translation is not for everyone." Not everyone will make a good actor, doctor, politician, director, designer. But what can I say, not everyone will make a good peasant, turner or shoemaker. Probably, every profession requires certain data from a person, but not in every profession the absence of such data is as critical as in marketing and advertising - the cost of mistakes is too high (literally) here. "

The history of copywriting has shown that the very best copywriters are made from good former salespeople. Everything is explained very simply - a good salesperson in courses and in practice learns thinking "from the client", he is saturated with his needs, he learns to find an approach to different buyers, he learns to speak the language of the buyer. It is easier for him to move from personal sales to indirect sales, to “print sales”, that is, to advertising. True, these sellers, as a rule, do not know the linguistic grace; some (including Ogilvie) admit they don't even know grammar.

Can, say, a journalist become a copywriter? Why not. But when writing ad copy, he will need to learn how to switch from sensationalism to selling. The scientist, among other things, will have to delve into the words of Rutherford: "If you cannot explain what you are doing to your cleaning lady, you are a worthless specialist." The fact is that 100% of the population are “cleaners” in almost everything that goes beyond their narrow professional field or hobby.

In general, friends, copywriting is an interesting and difficult craft for those who know how to think and feel "in an advertising way", for those who want to "create" money for the advertiser, and not lions and donkeys for themselves. This is real creativity (not to be confused with “creativity” and even more so with “creativeism”!). These are "algebra and harmony", analysis, ingenuity and intuition. This activity is for people with two cerebral hemispheres, a la Leonardo da Vinci. This ... yes, damn it, easier said than it is NOT!

To be continued

Next, I will briefly outline the elements of what the West calls writing, I'll tell you about the general characteristics of the advertising language, about typical mistakes and prejudices. I will also share my humble experience in creating and editing advertising copy.

Dear friends, I would like to make our conversation as substantive and useful for you as possible. It seems to me that my story will benefit from instructive examples. I have enough examples, but, unfortunately, I do not always feel the real problems of a novice copywriter, and therefore I ask you to send your examples and questions. Your samples can be good or bad, in Russian and Ukrainian.

Alexey Furman (editor of the Ukrainian website www.reklamaster.com) touched upon the extremely interesting topic of Russian-Ukrainian advertising bilingualism. What do you think of it? Is there such a problem? If so, how to solve it? Is it possible to generalize the experience gained? And so on and so forth. |

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