(UPDATE) Copyranter Has Relaunched on Substack

(I was about to start this post last month when my best friend of 40 years was killed by COVID-19. It then went from the back burner to behind the stove, where it was partially eaten by large rats.) Here’re are five of the worst ads from a shit-awful year. …

Nine ads. They are not “great” ads. I saw zero great ads this year. I also bookmarked about 20 better than average ads, but that’s “better than average” for 2020, which is just not very good. 2020 was the worst year in advertising creativity that I’ve ever seen (and that’s…

Fellow veteran creatives: how many stock photos have you looked at in your career? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? You know the mental pain of pathetically endlessly scrolling through absolutely awful images for clients who don’t want to pay for photo shoots. When you actually find a usable image…

Writing good ads is not hard. You do not have to be a good writer to write good ads (See: Me). And yet there are many, many writers — many of them very good writers — writing ads who shouldn’t be writing ads. See below (in no particular order). Dasani…

The Incomprehensible Language Of Modern Marketing Digital Marketers have rejiggered English. Why? Opaqueness. They need to make themselves seem like they know things you don’t (They don’t.). What better way to do that than to invent a sub-language, a language that takes existing words and uses them in new, befuddling “insidery” ways. These newspeak-ers— compare to…

I watch ads. I watch (or look at) almost every produced (and fake) ad every year, year after motherfucking year. It is not a rewarding experience. This year was especially unrewarding. …

Ad creatives — at least the good ones — are always trying to “push the envelope” on their concepts, continually challenging themselves: “It’s good, but could it be better?” But sometimes creatives, particularly art directors, don’t just push the envelope, they put a letter bomb in it and ram it…

Like. Share. Comment. Post. Accept. Confirm. Tweet. Favorite. Retweet. Forward. Reply. Connect. Follow. Heart. Pin. Send. Add. Subscribe. Message…click Click CLICK. Please, stop. Why did you do it? Why did you retweet a tweet that moved you not at all in any way whatsoever? Do you want to have sex…

Real estate ads, in general, are hyperbolic and douchey. But New York City real estate ads raise both the hyperbole & douche bars to high-rise levels. I collected these ads from 2005–2012, scanned from the New York Times and local magazines, or shot on the subway and streets. “Exquisite…Extraordinary…Exclusive…” The…