Boston translation

When you're a copywriter, you're always noticing stuff that other people have written.

You sometimes wish you'd written it yourself.

Often you're glad you didn't.

It becomes quite easy to be cynical and to pick other people's stuff apart. Probably over-analysing it in a way that no regular person would.

(I remember a friend of mine, who was a neurologist, telling me how much pathology he saw in the street. Every time he went out shopping, he noticed tics and shuffles.)

For me, the obsession with words perhaps goes a stage further than with other writers, as I train people in copywriting skills - predominantly in the UK, but also in the USA and continental Europe. As a result, I'm always on the lookout for examples of the good, the bad and the semi-literate.

Inevitably though, there's a degree to which your own culture can wash over you. Living in London, I become so immersed in the world around me that it perhaps becomes hard to see the wood for the trees. So holidays and overseas business trips are always fun. You're plunged into a very different environment and naturally look at stuff afresh. It's like a crash course in marketing mindfulness.

I went to Massachusetts earlier in the month, spending time in Boston, but also travelling out to Rockport for the solar eclipse and down to Providence in Rhode Island. Watching American TV from the comfort of my Residence Inn by Marriott, I was reminded of just how overwhelming the pharmaceutical advertising is.

In the UK, we have a dangerously socialistic healthcare system, which allows me to visit a doctor free of charge. Medications I do pay for, of course, albeit a nominal amount and a fraction of the true cost.

Regulations prevent prescription drugs from being advertised directly to the public in the UK, but in the States, they are advertised relentlessly. The pattern of the commercials is pretty uniform and they drive people to visit their doctor's office and request a specific pill by name. Here's the schtick:

You suffer from Condition A.

Pill B is only doing a partial job at alleviating the symptoms.

Perhaps you should talk to your doctor about combining it with Pill C?

But then there's a problem for the copywriter. While American regulation is much more liberal, it still requires you to list all the potential side effects of this wonder drug Pill C. And when you hear that it's potentially going to give you a head-to-toe rash or put you in a coma or something, you might baulk at singing its praises to your clinician.

The workaround here is quite ingenious. It's to script the commercials so the side effects are voiced in a way that makes them sound vaguely positive. In a sing-song tone - which matches the earlier paean to the product benefits - you listen to disclaimers such as: 'May cause catatonia or result in complete paralysis. Do not use if planning to drink liquid within the next 48 hours. Tell your doctor if you have ever driven a car, taken Tylenol or owned a pet.'

Ok, I made that up, but hopefully you're getting the idea of the format and approach.

Here's something I didn't make up. Because I honestly couldn't have.

On the Boston subway, there was a poster, which read as follows. (I wrote it down, because it would have looked very weird to take a photo.)

Is eosinophilic gastritis with or without eosinophilic duodenitis affecting your daily life? Explore your options.

Where do you start with stuff like this?

Across the carriage, there's a patient thinking: 'Oh my God! At last! Someone who understands me!'

The stars really are in alignment here, folks. The long-suffering Bostonian - with or without a dodgy duodenum - has finally won the lottery on the Red Line. It's taken two years of navigating the transit system, but it's finally happened! They're face to face with the ad that was written for them. Perhaps it's the solar eclipse effect.

Anyway, enough of the medical conditions.

What about some recreational drugs? When the Bee Gees sang that they were going back to Massachusetts, I doubt they could envisage a world in which they'd be picking up pot. Well, given they came from the Isle of Man, I suppose they probably wouldn't have known what to expect, although today someone will pick up the pot for them (see below)! And deliver it too. Did somebody say Just Weed?

Of course, many copywriting principles are constant across cultures. I often make the point in courses that headlines don't have to be complete sentences. Occasionally, they're what grammatical obsessives would call 'nominal', as they manage to survive without a verb. Or what about the rhetorical ellipsis below that confronted me in the area around the Central subway in Boston?

I'm not told what I can do. Which I guess means I can do anything.

Jargon, of course, is a danger in any culture or language. I'm sure all the locals in Rhode Island know what weatherization is and can therefore make sense of the the flyer below informing them of the career opportunities in the field. A poor Brit like me would need a bit more explanation. I can earn good money. It's been a thing since 1976. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. But I have to read to the fifth bullet point to get a clue as to what I might actually be doing.

Harvard students would certainly know difficult words like weatherization. It's probably included in the tests they do to get in. But the posters on veganism for a campus campaigning organisation (see below) have a slightly other-worldly and didactic quality about them, befitting the setting of a top Ivy League college. An equivalent poster in the UK would probably say VEGANISM NOW or THE CASE FOR VEGANISM. The use of 'moral urgency' sounds strange to British ears. But that could say a lot about us on the other side of the pond.

I can be in Baron's Court, Blackfriars or Borough and be confronted with the sweet wafting scent of incomprehensible corporate blandness, but somehow it becomes much more noticeable in Boston - the first place where I've ever been addressed as growth.

And no review would be complete without a little word play. I know from my training courses that folks in the US love a pun just as much as we Brits do. There are no flies on the insect repellent industry.

My advice to anyone fascinated by good copy is to take an active interest in the words that are all around you. In the street, on the bus, on your phone, on the radio. Listen to conversations in cafes and soak up the interactions on your socials. There's always something to make you think. And when you travel, there's always something to make you think again.

? Phil Woodford, 2024. All rights reserved.

www.herecomesthecavalry.com