Of Cows and Copywriters

My daughter recently took a cab with a rather nosy driver. He was a grandfatherly sort, too old to be seriously coming on to her, but he asked a lot of smarmy questions. DId she have a boyfriend? Why not? Didn't she want to get married? So to amuse herself and shut him up, my daughter responded, "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?"

That corny old saying came back to me recently as I hovered over a Linked In conversation in an advertising writer's group. A company of architecture and lighting experts was asking for name ideas for their business, and dozens of copywriters happily obliged, only too eager to out-do each other. The architecture-and-lighting-expert was crowd-sourcing his corporate identity, or at least a critical part of it, and saving himself some bucks, and my creative brethren were eager to be his chumps.

Whether one is roaming Linked In out of boredom or necessity, it's easy to get drawn in to playing ain't I clever. These are tough times for copywriters. Unless you're working for the man, or under 35, or made CD by age 40, or have a niche or long-term client base, you're probably screwed. Most of us have fragile egos and need the thrill of competition to feel good about ourselves. It's only natural for a writer who's been unemployed for a while to want to play, just so she can reassure herself that she's still got it. As for the writer who's making a grim if honest living writing mind-numbingly repetitive pharma websites, she's starved for variety. Naming a business sounds like big fun.

(Caveat - playing ain't I clever in the company of other writers is invigorating. Doing it in front of clients is usually a bad idea, Yes, you have a gift, but inspiration doesn't always flow like tap water. Some assignments are hard. Sometimes you get stuck. Why make clients think it's that easy? So they'll question your hours? So they'll want to pay you less because they now believe it only takes you a half an hour to write a 12 page brochure? It's OK to be entertaining and crack up your clients, but not by playing insta-headline. So put away the pen and cocktail napkin, for your own good.)

Back to the Linked In crowd-sourcer. I didn't directly call him out – a sleaze is a sleaze is a sleaze. I called my out my fellow copywriters instead, in the following post:

I don't get why everyone is blithely participating in crowd sourcing on what is basically a brand identity job which any and all of us would normally GET PAID FOR. Then we whine when clients ask us to take a pay cut, or give them a freebie. If you wanted to remodel your home office, would these "best lighting designers and architects" come over and do it for free? I think not. I would suggest that the moderators of this and similar groups weed out posts that trawl for free ideas. It devalues our work in a time when writers are already underappreciated and underpaid. Lets keep the pro bono for Taproot and good causes, NOT for legitimate businesses trying to cut corners. And by the way, if we were truly being professional here and doing an actual branding exercise, we would need to sit down with this person and ask him a lot of questions about his targeting, business plan, competition etc. and factor that into our thinking. It's not just about pulling a cute name out of our happy place.

I felt better after my rant. It also helped to scan the thread and notice that three or four others had made similar comments. But the majority of writers had submitted ideas, the best of which was arguably Beam, which covers both lighting and architecture in one efficient syllable. The architecture-and-lighting-expert suggested the group put it to a vote. When someone asked what he planned to pay the winner, he repeatedly ducked the question. At which point several writers felt their testicles begin to descend and warned that their ideas were "copyrighted". The architecture-and-lighting-expert made a vague, ungrammatical statement about negotiating some kind of compensation with the winner. Good luck collecting: The business is somewhere in South America.

So there you have it. A group of American copywriters, shooting from the hip to name a South American business they know nothing about, targeting a Spanish-speaking client base they have no information on, for a con artist they've never met and can't take to small claims court.

All I can say is moo.