Baboon dismembers my copy!

Early in my career, I witnessed a Baboon dismember one of my copy children.

It started like any other copy assignment…

Over the course of a week, I had crafted a pretty great lead-gen letter, if I do say so myself. I visited the client’s business the next day to review it with him. To my horror, my baby was lying shredded on his desk. Literally! He had taken scissors to every single paragraph and cut the letter into ribbons. Then he had pasted them with rubber cement in a new order on a yellow sheet of paper and had included his own copy in between. What remained was the unintelligible mutterings of a baboon.

I was dumb struck. Never had I witnessed such wanton destruction of my work before.

Sadly, I’m not alone…

If your in the copywriting business long, you’ll run across clients that believe they know far, far more than you do about copywriting.

There are two varieties of these clients: Those who do, and those who think they do.

Yes, I must admit, there have been times when I have had corrections in copy and ideas and arguments made by clients that were superior to my own. Those moments are lessons in humility. But, what makes it near impossible to accept those needed humiliations, are the constant bombardment of “edits” and “rejections” by clients who don’t have a clue.

These clients are the Arch Nemesis of a copywriter.

These are the clients you dream of firing someday – or worse.

Your defenses to these clients bombardments are so well built up after a few years, that you often miss the good suggestions that come from better clients. It is these clients that cause old copywriters to become stubborn curmudgeons that are as prickly as a porcupine and fight like badgers when someone merely looks at there copy. It would take a saint to reach advanced years in the craft in copywriting and not have a bit of a rough edge to them.

Worse still are the clients that don’t have a clue – but have someone in their department (usually a former grammar school teacher or a failed novelist) who knows more than you. They immediately perceive that their job is to defend their clueless boss against the Great Satan of Grammar (read, YOU)

In one instance I had worked my tail off to finish a long copy letter. Imagine my surprise when I received a Fed Ex package the next day. I opened it to discover my work of art had been disfigured with a razor blade of red ink. I mean there wasn’t a sentence in 7 pages of copy that had not been maimed.

And to add insult to injury, there was a note attached commanding me to make the changes immediately and have the floppy disk Fed Ex’d back to them by 10:000 am the next morning. Worse, these demands were made by someone I’d never met within the company.

At that moment, I felt burning lump of rage rise, my throat constricted, my vision narrowed and I reached for the phone…

To my consternation, I ended up with not one, but two former grammar school teachers on the other end of the line. “We don’t end sentences in prepositions.” “We don’t use that word.” “This is too salesy”…and on and on and on… STOP!

I ended up SCREAMING at them on the phone. Yes, I lost it. I had them put their boss on the line. The conversation went along the lines of “If you hire a dog to bark, let him bark.” And, “From this day on, I work Principle to Principle.” “And, “I will not be making a single suggested edit, save one.”

Well, that went well, didn’t it?

On yet another occasion I was doing a “Dollar Bill” letter for a client. When I asked how it had gone, he said it didn’t work. No new customers. Perplexed, as this little response miracle had never failed me before, I asked to see how he had sent it out.

He pulled my letter out of his desk with a PHOTO COPIED dollar bill on top.

I stared for a moment and asked, “What’s that?” He said, “Well, I figured people would just keep the dollars and it would have cost me a lot of money and that a photo copy of a dollar would communicate the idea just as well anyway.”

!#@$%^Q!

I guess that’s all I have to say about that…

I’ll leave you with his philosophical take by Frank Irving Fletcher on why some clients become our worst Nemesis. I think you might agree…

“It was in fact, one of my first discoveries as a free lance, that the significance of any piece of text before it is produced diminishes after it is written. No matter how good it may be, the rule still holds. It loses something the minute you show it; and I long ago concluded that is because the advertiser understands it. Understands it, not merely in the sense of comprehending it, but in the dangerous sense of knowing how it is done.

A man may not like a drawing or a painting, a necktie or a suit of clothes, but whatever his objection to it, he still retains respect for the tools and the technique of an art that is a mystery to him.

Text is different.

Here, you and he meet on common ground. You are working in a medium which everybody employs. The words you use are part of his daily speech, and the fact that he can make sense out of what you have written is proof that he could do it himself.

It may even be true that you have more than ordinary ability in putting words together, but that only aggravates the situation, for it is an affront to a man to insinuate that you are more competent than he is with the same tools. Nay, think of the cavalierly fashion in which he dismisses the task on which you spend so much labor and so much time!

Is it not his and every man’s secret or avowed intention to sit down some day and “dash off” a play or a book? Is not all this talk about the hardship of your craft rebuked by the light-hearted formula of the authors of the unwritten? What other art do you know of that is so universally “dashed off” and what other proof do you want of the low esteem in which that art is held? Is it not a little presumptuous to expect that your work shall excite more than a cursory interest in one who could do it as well or better if he ‘had the time?’”