Being touched by a writer

This post is a response to Ran Stallard's blog post earlier this year, entitled "why do you like it?".

I was delighted to see that someone else had picked up on one of my favourite quotations, from Alan Bennett's The History Boys.

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

Even out of context, it's immensely powerful. But Ran posed a further question, which is why we like a particular piece of advertising. And although it may seem insufferably pretentious to compare an advert to an Alan Bennett play, it's actually for a not wholly unconnected reason.

A good advert should feel like an undiluted message from the writer to the reader (or viewer). It shouldn't appear to be filtered and approved and altered and tweaked, it should feel like they wrote that headline on a piece of paper and passed it to you across a table. It should feel human.

I don't believe a great ad can be written by a copywriter whose first thought was "is this on brand?", or who was sticking to a brief or watching their tone of voice. I think most were written after the second whiskey, at 3am on a sleepless night, or perhaps in a contemplative moment on the toilet.

Inspiration doesn't always strike. Sometimes an advert has to be forced out through a convoluted haze of logic, lists, and Roget's. But you're never going to reach out and touch someone with work like that.