Hey copywriter, what’s your process?

Every copywriter works differently, but here’s my method.

Something I’m often asked as a copywriter, by colleagues, students, interns, and even superiors is, “What’s your process?”

It depends on the idea and the ad, but generally a headline is a great place to start for simple print, overall concepts, and full 360 campaigns. There is no perfect process. Some people follow a guide they learned in ad school. Some come up with their own. Some just kind of wing it and have a knack for finding what works.

I’ll share my process, but I can’t say for certain it’s the best, or it’s perfect. Some writers might even look at this and tell me it’s completely wrong. In any case, I’ll share the one that has worked for me over the past eight years of my career.

We’ll start with a brief. Dodge muscle cars, “excite the customer” and “only use imagery of the product we have.”

1: List the most relevant words.

Power, strength, speed, heritage. All pretty standard vocabulary we use on the brand, and how customers frequently refer to it.

2: Try to find synonyms

No matter how close or loose they are, some of them just feel “right”:

• Power: force, energy, ability, control, dominance.
• Strength: tough, durable, spirit, skill, roar.
• Speed: race, charge, accelerate, smoke, spin.
• Heritage: legacy, lineage, descendant, roots, tradition, culture.

3: Expressions

Some call this a shortcut, frankly websites like idioms.thefreedictionary.com, powerthesaurus.com’s “expressions” filter, and rhymezone.com’s “phrases” filter all give you not just idioms, but general formulas of how the words are often used, beyond just existing idioms.

• Power: absolute power, power-up, under control, dominance, dominant.
• Strength: give me strength, strength in numbers, free spirit.
• Speed : up to speed, “ready to race?”, take charge, “thank you for not smoking”.
• Heritage: descendant-of, leave a legacy, back to your roots, human culture, break with tradition.

4: Go with some off-the-top-of-the-head stuff.

Don’t think too hard, just play around with what you already have.

• Dominate the roads
• Skill is what you make of it
• We bring the strength, you bring the skill…

Well, some of these are alright. Let’s keep going.

5: Experiment with styles

This is where I go back to the Suzanne Pope guide and my “how to write a headline” article. Start doing rhetorical exercises. Alliteration, anesis, parallelism, enallage. Find ways to combine some of your existing words. Twist some of the ones you like, combine concepts and words, start with one line and find out how you can turn readers into another direction, find ways to combine a thought into a parallel sentence that tells a story.

• No need to control yourself
• Strength in numbers — 797 to be exact (the horsepower of the car)
• Descendant of domination
• Brake with tradition
• Thank you for smoking

Now there’s some cool ones. I really like the one that uses the horsepower, but it feels like there’s other ways to play with it. The alliteration one isn’t great, but it can be reworked.. The twist of the idiomatic expression about smoking really stands out.

6: Reduce, reuse, recycle

List the ones you like the most, then try to play with how some of the others that you think need more work can be twisted in other ways. Go back to the headline article and see how they can be adapted into other rhetorical devices.

797 line — the anesis is great, how can I use another one, like parallelism?

• “At 707 horsepower, you’re afraid your heart might stop. At 797, you’re afraid it might not.” (707 being the top speed of the former year’s model).

This feels great, it uses insights into the product’s features, it uses multiple rhetorical devices including anesis, parallelism, and rhyming.

• “Thank you for smoking”

This one feels good already, it’s going forward on its own.

• “When it spins, it roars”

On a whim, I tried RhymeZone for “roar”, and saw “pour”, which led me to the phrase “when it rains, it pours.” Okay, what’s a great way to work with that phrase, if I replace “pour” with “roar”. This one felt like one of the best lines I feel I’ve written in awhile.

*1–6: use your AD

At any and all points in this process, there’s no harm in sitting with your art director and brainstorming how some of the more vague ones can work.

• “Leave your legacy… on the road”
• Or maybe, “leave your marks, leave your legacy.” (over an image of the car doing a burnout and leaving streaks on the road)

My AD came up with the perfect visual to make this work. Love it.

I’ve settled on a handful, now it’s time to see the CD, the strategy team, the client, whoever is next.

Out of perhaps 10, they’ve picked three:

Now, this is a very simplified version of the process. Generally you want to go back after point 5 or 6 and do it over again from 1. Maybe skip around a bit and jump between steps, forwards and backwards. Each ad is different, each campaign is different. But in general, this is my flow. Start simple, build some vocabulary. Let your mind wander, then start to really dig into interesting stuff. Go back and revise what you have. Work with your art director throughout to find ones that can work differently.

It can work with any type of brief, really. Maybe you only have product shots, and you’re limited to that, but the client wants it to feel relatable. The tagline for this ice cream campaign, “life is bitter, ice cream isn’t.” It was one of the one-off lines that, when juxtaposed to just a product, gave the chance to tell a story without showing one. Now the headlines fall in place through the idea.

Maybe you have a little more freedom for ideas, the visuals and concepts come first, then you need to write lines that connect the brand to the visual. Here, the insight was “every artist starts out somewhere” and, while it felt like that could work as a good line, sometimes using an existing expression was a bit too obvious. So, I rewrote the tagline to “masterpieces start here.” That also drove an insight of how overrated modern art is, and again, the lines fell into place—we get a mixture of telling a story and using facts, then adding anesis to make each one a punchline.

Again, it’s not a perfect process. Sometimes I go off the rails and do it differently. Sometimes it comes in my head during a meeting and I just get stuck to a great one. Many writers will often tell you that after an hour or two of writing, one of their first lines was the best. Others will say it took an entire two hours to get the right one. But in general, this is the process I generally use. We’re lucky to have thesauruses and references at our fingertips through the internet. We’re lucky to be able to format a document, copy and paste, and collaborate in seconds.

Now, let’s do a hard-stop, and go write some lines.