(UPDATE) Copyranter Has Relaunched on Substack (now 100% Free)

Thanks in very large part to social media, very few creatives think visually anymore, which is a damn shame. Because it is still inarguably the best way to create a great ad. And by “ad” I mean anything: Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok/whatever-the-fuck posts, TV, YouTube, pre-rolls, billboards, beer coasters, etc. I’ve already written…

(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…

Lawyers loathe creativity because creativity means “unconventional” even “risky” thinking, going out on a limb. Corporate lawyers hate limbs. Below are a hypothetical in-house lawyer’s responses to ad creatives in hypothetical internal tagline meetings. The lawyer’s counter-taglines are on the right. LAWYER: What does “good” mean to you, dipshits? Well…

For about 20 years — late 1930s to late 1950s — disembodied living human heads ruled over American print advertising. For celebrity endorsements, it was a way to get famous faces up big in the layouts. I tried and failed to find the person or agency that started this creepy…

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. …