Essays on the language of advertising. The language of advertising. No title text

Table of contents

Introduction
Promotional text is a special kind of business text. Advertising (fr. Reclame from lat. Reclamo - "I shout out") is information about goods, various types of services in order to notify consumers and create demand for goods and services.
We are all consumers of advertising and, regardless of age, professional education, social status and level of material well-being, we are able to evaluate it, even at the level of emotions: like - not like.
The advertising text reveals the main content of the advertising message. His task is to attract the attention of a potential buyer with his appearance, headline, interest in the explanation and convincing him to buy the proposed product.
The advertising text is an example of the most effective use of language tools. The pragmatic aspect of the advertising text is directly manifested in its peculiar organization (the choice of grammatical and lexical units, stylistic techniques, special syntax, the organization of printed material, the use of elements of various sign systems). The creation of advertising texts is based on two trends: succinctness, conciseness of expression and expressiveness, information capacity.

Conclusion
The main thing in the advertising text is the formation of an advertising image with the help of various lexical-syntactic and graphic means. The advertising image creates specific ideas about the subject and causes certain feelings that in the right direction affect the behavior of the reader.
When composing an advertising text, it should be remembered that it should be positively received by the specific person to whom he will fall, and not a faceless multimillion-dollar crowd. Advertising should resemble a personal, confidential conversation, which always causes a positive emotion.
The text must be stated in simple language for the consumer. Highly specialized terms and complex sentences are not allowed, including several thoughts, theses, arguments, and multiple participial, participle sentences. In the advertising text, one phrase should contain one thought.
No matter how long the advertising text may be, its separate parts should be logically linked together and together form a single whole. Otherwise, the reader’s attention will be scattered, and therefore, he will not have a holistic positive opinion about the product.

List of references

Averchenko L.K. The psychology of advertising // ECO, 1995. - No. 2. - S. 176-177.

Denison D., Gobi L. Textbook on advertising: How to become famous without spending money on advertising // Transl. from Polish Babin N.V. - Minsk: Modern Word, 1997. - 29 p.

Klushina N.I. Perception of advertising - Russian speech. - 2001. - No. 1. - S.64-66.

Maggeramov I.A. On the paradox and advertising: [Language of advertising] // Russian speech .- 2002.- No. 2.- P.59-63.

Prohvatilova O.A., Slastukhina E.V. Expressive means in advertising texts // Secretarial Affairs.- 2001.- No. 3.- P.24-26.

Practical part

Option number 5

Exercise 1.

Messrs. Business travelers, get travel certificates.

He was a funny guy, as he starts to laugh, you won’t stop it.

The author of the article writes about one requirement of L.N. Tolstoy to the Russian language, about the requirement of simplicity and clarity, understandability.

Task 2.
etc.................

Send your good work in the knowledge base is simple. Use the form below

Students, graduate students, young scientists who use the knowledge base in their studies and work will be very grateful to you.

Advertising Language
Part I

Claude Hopkins

Give them more work so that they work and do not engage in empty speeches.

Bible. Exodus

In advertising, behind the stove, his “Lieutenant Kizhe” took root, calling him “Advertising Language”. No one saw him, but they are looking for him. They are looking for day and night. And they’re unlikely to find it, because it is found exclusively in the inflamed brains of linguists, psycholinguists, psychotechnologists, NLP-issts and other “chumaks” in advertising. And all would be nothing - let them frolic! But the process of “thinking out” the advertising community has gone too far. The Shizan office of Triza-Chance * even put it on the stream. It is time to respond.

THE WHOLE HISTORY of advertising has convincingly shown that elementary literacy and the ability to express one’s thoughts on paper are included in the list of qualities that a creator of an advertising text (copywriter) should have, but these abilities are behind the ability to “get into the skin” of a client and offer him solutions to his problems .

Moreover, if the copywriter does not have the proper marketing training and advertising thinking, paradoxically as it sounds, literary talent becomes more likely a flaw that can successfully bury advertising in pseudo-literary curls.

Schönert, a German copywriter, writes in his book “Upcoming Advertising”: “Schools and universities often turn to advertising agencies with a request to provide relevant examples of the advertising language. And each time the agencies find themselves in a difficult situation, because there are practically no such examples. ” How not? And examples of what then filled his book?

Here is one of them. What kind of reaction will the text “Helps you stay awake and energetic even at an advanced age” cause you? - Most likely, a yawn. And this one? “Yesterday grandma returned home at eleven.” - Noticed how your imagination immediately turns on, how your face spreads out in a smile, as interest arises.

But excuse me, the guardian will say for the idea of \u200b\u200ba special advertising language, both versions are written in the most ordinary language. He is right - the whole point is not in some special advertising language, but in special advertising brains!

Yes Yes! Good advertising texts are written in the most common language. That language, which is desirable to write literally everything, up to boring references. True, you need to know this ordinary language. And this is not a question of advertising, but of school education. Where it is at the level, there is no endless talk about some kind of “language of advertising”. And at the proper level, it is almost everywhere, except for the country of Pushkin, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy ...

Now relax and buckle up - the leaders of the destroyed post-war Germany were worried about the sharp decline in the level of German language culture during the years of the Hitler regime ... Many people even call the zealous Frenchmen for their language “linguistic chauvinism” ... Linguists of Portugal and Brazil gather almost every year and hoarse arguing about the norms of the Portuguese language ... On the table of every English official lies a wonderful instruction in English The Complete Plain Words... you can continue ad infinitum.

In many countries, children from the age of five are taught to coherently express their thoughts on paper. Every week they write essays and essays. In them, strict teachers evaluate only the ability to compose and do not pay attention to spelling and punctuation. Children are taught composition, synonymy, idioms, stylistics and other useful things. No wonder that the population of such countries is able to write reasonably well, that is, to state their thoughts on paper.

This partly explains the fact that Western copywriting books devote only a couple of pages to the specifics of the advertising language, but otherwise they simply refer the reader to the usual textbooks of composition and style, from which shelves in bookstores break. They break there, but not ours.

I didn’t sit with Lomonosov at pithitics classes at the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy, with Pushkin at the classes of graceful literature at Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum or with raznoshintsy in the district gymnasium. But with my three children I “went through” three times what only with a gnashing of teeth can be called a school course of the Russian language and literature. This is our national shame!

If our schoolchildren cannot coherently write two sentences, then it’s not their fault, but our school, which is only interested in the fact that the “wounded soldier” is written with one “N” and the “wounded soldier in the leg” with two “H ". And God forbid you to separate the word “however” at the beginning of the sentence with a comma. - "Nizya-I!" (And why the hell isn’t it possible?) Mastering all this nonsense leaves no time for anything else. So do not be surprised at the squalor of most of the Russian texts - this is programmed by our educational system.

With a shudder, I recall the editors' courses at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. I had nothing to compare with - a couple of years before that I had attended a delightful course in German stylistics at the University of Vienna and had shoveled a couple of shelves of books of Anglo-Saxon linguists before. It is a pity that rhetoric teachers from the aforementioned Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy did not sit at my desk at those courses - they would be ashamed of their descendants.

Have our journalists heard of rhetoric? It seems to me that no. In my suspicions, I was strengthened by foreign editors working in Russian English-language magazines. These poor fellows have to rewrite most of what was created by our journalists. Their verdict is that Russian journalists cannot write!

This could put an end to and send the reader to good books on the Russian language. Most likely, such books are available, but I have not seen them.

Presentation logic

I translated a lot of books from Russian into English. Most often these were the works of our major scientists. All of them were scientifically interesting. But this “interestingness” was stated in such a way that even after editing in publishing houses, it was sometimes a chaotic something - in the elderberry garden, in Kiev, uncle. The author could jump from the fifth to the tenth, return, branch, etc. With excellent scientific logic, the presentation logic almost always suffered.

There is an opinion that the author of a good text thinks clearly and clearly, but “whoever thinks clearly, he clearly states” (Schopenhauer) that “they only write wisely what they do not understand” (V. Klyuchevsky). What happens - does the academic physicist set out confusedly because he does not think clearly, or even understands what he is writing about?

I suffered for a long time over this riddle. Much became clear after becoming acquainted with the system of teaching the native language in the West. Now it seems to me that writing wisely and vaguely is possible even when no one taught you the technical basics of presenting arguments on paper as a child.

The confusion of Russian texts has another explanation. Remember Vershinin’s remark from Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”: “Well? If they don’t give tea, then let's at least philosophize. ” For some reason (perhaps due to a chronic lack of tea in the country), do not feed our intelligentsia with bread - let them philosophize and govern. Is it any wonder that as soon as in Russia there was talk of advertising, linguists, psychologists, cultural experts and other amateurs instantly climbed out of the bushes to “philosophize”. NLP shamans are being pulled up; say astrologers will join soon.

Be that as it may, the nebula and ornate nature of our texts has received international “recognition”. Here is how some Western authors describe the presentation logic of representatives of different nations:

(The dotted line in the figure shows deviations from the main topic.)

Congratulations, gentlemen - we are world champions in verbiage! Reading, say, Klyuchevsky, you are convinced that for centuries, an epidemic of a terrible disease has been rampant in our country, the name of which is diarrhea of \u200b\u200bwords, constipation of thought. We all speak and think only with a “dotted line,” and everywhere - in the Duma, in the press, on TV. This disease also struck our advertising - in terms of the amount of garbage text in advertising, we probably can also claim the champion's title.

Copywriter works with the most expensive words. The "dotted line" in advertising is not only harmful, but also ruinous. The author of the advertising text is simply obliged to ruthlessly cut out the entire "dotted" part - it takes up space and reduces the number of readers to the end. It reduces the overall effectiveness of advertising. She spends advertiser money.

This circumcision is given oh how difficult - I know from my own many years of experience. "Dotted" curlicues often seem to their creators to be beautifully beautiful and witty. Gentlemen, novice copywriters, learn to step on your throat with a forged boot when you want to "sing." Advertising is not a song that caresses your ears, but a guttural cry of a herald. This is not "graceful" literature, but economics and sales. Looking at another curl, always ask yourself a rude sobering question - does it sell? And crop, crop, crop! We will return to this issue when we talk about editing the advertising text.

Texts

Why do people take up a pen? - To convey something to the reader. (This does not apply to fools and graphomaniacs.) The more important, interesting and useful this “something” is, we read with great attention (and sometimes even pleasure). However, interesting and informative is not the only characteristic of the text. You can also talk about his emotional, aesthetic and other virtues. And they are determined not only by the personality and qualifications of the author, but also by the area to which the text belongs.

Tasks and text language

Compare the polar texts - legal and fiction. Each of them is created according to its own laws. A legal document has a strictly defined task - to convey meaning with all the smallest details without any ambiguity. And at all costs, up to terrible deviations from the norms of "high calm", such as endless repetitions ( a la "The house that Jack built"), archaisms, clericalism and other "isms".

Another thing is literary text. We expect from him just pleasure, and not only and not so much from language prettiness. A.S. Pushkin said: "Prose requires thoughts and thoughts - without them, brilliant expressions do not serve anything." Although Pushkin’s brilliant expressions somehow “serve”, Alexander Sergeevich is valuable to us with his thoughts - it is not without reason that his “Onegin” is called the encyclopedia of Russian life. Perhaps among the modern piites there were those who wrote "more beautifully." But where are they? I admire Nabokov's “verbal painting,” but I will often read Leo Tolstoy, who diligently avoided linguistic prettiness. I recall the phrase from Stendhal's Walks in Rome: “It’s better if the reader comes across a clumsy phrase, but he gets all the information.”

It is difficult to talk about the tasks and language of journalism, since a lot depends on the genre and theme, the nature of the media and the readership. It’s easier to talk about the tasks and language of scientific articles, bureaucratic reports, military orders, business proposals, trade documentation. Much can be regulated here, the established tradition of presentation often works, and there are fewer liberties.

And what tasks does the advertising text solve? His only task is to sell, and only SELL !!! (In advertising, the word “sell” is a term meaning “convincing the reader to buy, vote for a candidate, etc.” A person can actually buy in a year.) If the advertisement “does not sell”, then even the most brilliant text is useless!

An advertising text is the most expensive text in the world; money is often paid for its publication, often huge. It follows from reinforced concrete that the highest demands must be made on every word in advertising, and not so much artistic and informational as economic ones - here literally every word should work for sellability. Technically, the advertising text should:

Attract the attention of a disinterested reader (the title solves this problem);
Arouse the desire of this reader to start reading the text (this is served by a subheading, intermediate headings, various kinds of highlighting). It is very important that the reader can appreciate the readability of the text;
To be so interesting that the reader reads it to the end.

Our attitude to different texts

There are texts that we read with desire and pleasure. It can be a work of art, an interesting article, a useful textbook. Enter a bookstore or library - dozens of people spend hours in front of shelves, leafing through, pondering, evaluating, reading. We can reread the works we love so much many times.

There are texts that we read out of necessity, through “I can’t”, realizing that reluctance to get acquainted with their contents can be very expensive. These are legal contracts, orders, official letters, etc. Sometimes the fact of reading is even certified by a signature.

There are uninteresting texts, which, thank God, it is not necessary to read. We fend off them as soon as we can. Alas, such texts include most of the advertising. We make the decision to read the advertisement reluctantly, overcoming the internal resistance, hardly transferring from complete indifference to interest. We can start reading the text and drop it in the middle. There is a joke that only the creator reads the advertising text to the end.

I really like the image created by the American advertiser John O "Tool:" When working on advertising, it is useful to imagine yourself as an uninvited guest in the apartment of a potential buyer who has magical power to make you instantly disappear. "

It is hard to imagine a normal person who would love advertising. Even Ogilvy admitted that he hates outdoor advertising and television advertising, which interrupts something interesting. We approach each new advertisement with the presumption of guilt.

Presumption of guilt

Remember how many times you, seduced by something, plunged into another advertisement and ... stumbled upon another dummy. How many times have you tried in vain to read a completely unreadable advertisement and threw it, rubbing your eyes, sick from tension. How many times have you been annoyed at wasted time. How then will you approach the next advertisement? “With the presumption of guilt, of course.” Advertising is to blame for the fact that it is advertising. (That is why Ogilvy said: “The less advertising is like advertising, the better for advertising.”)

And it is precisely this attitude to the created advertisement that the advertiser must tune in if he wants his advertisement to have some chance of success. Moreover, the advertiser should remember this at all stages of creating the text, including at the stage of stylistic editing, when he polishes the language of the created advertisement.

Headings

I do not know if there are any requirements for the titles (names) of works of art. But they are applicable to legal, military and other documents.

Journalists pay a lot of attention to their headlines. Here we can note certain traditions, both professional and national. The latter are striking when you read many articles on the same topic in different languages. American headlines are usually businesslike and concise, German headlines are spreading through the tree, French ones are a bit more elegant.

But nowhere is the headline as important as in advertising. Here everything depends on it - advertising will work or not work. Only in advertising, they spend much more time on the headline than on the main text. Only in advertising headlines are thoroughly tested. Only in advertising do the headings subtly adjust to the specifics of the given print organ.

Advertising headlines live a very difficult life. The reader opens a magazine or newspaper and runs through the headings of articles, trying to identify what interests him. Advertisements flicker before his eyes, often causing irritation. (The exception is classified sections or Internet sites where the reader looks himself.)

How talented a copywriter must be to defeat articles in this very difficult title contest! Unfortunately, most advertisements play with the articles as giveaways, offering the reader faded, cliched, boring, or frankly silly headlines. Walter Schönert provides the following comparisons of article titles and advertisements on similar topics:

So how? What is more interesting?

No title text

Text without a title creates problems for the reader. Well, if the document is short - it can be quickly read. And if it is long? Imagine for a second that you open a newspaper or magazine and - oh, horror! - all articles without headings. The only way to find something interesting is to read everything in a row, dozens of pages, without much hope of success. Who will do this?

But if no one even reads an article without a headline, much less nobody will read an advertisement without a headline! Advertising without a headline is money that has been purposely thrown away. Ogilvy wrote: "I do not envy the copywriter who will present me with an ad without a headline." Such a copywriter quit on the spot. I wish our agencies adopt this practice!

Blind Headings

Blind are headings that do not give an idea of \u200b\u200bthe content of the document. If blind headings are appropriate in fiction (“How Steel Was Tempered,” “Gadfly,” or even “War and Peace”), then in other texts this is a huge flaw. The title of a scientific article, newspaper article, even an electronic message should give the fullest possible picture of the text. But these texts have at least a slight chance of being read even with a blind heading. Unfortunately, ads with a blind headline have almost no such chances.

How common are headline-free and blind-headline ads? An analysis of a randomly taken expensive business magazine gave the following picture: out of 53 advertisements, 3 had no headlines at all, 15 had blind headings. For example, “Cure against problems”, “Wealth of nuances and clarity in details”, “Achieving perfection”, “Image matters”, “The choice is yours”, “We will solve all your problems”, “For business people”, “Family plan”, “Life is gaining momentum”, “One step ahead”, “Technique of temptation”, “Reliable link of your success”, “Common interests”, “They will not dissolve”, etc.

From the official language to advertising (especially in advertising letters, commercial offers and announcements), the manner came to start the text with phrases such as “Dear customers / residents / patients, etc.” or “Dear comrades / clients, etc.” Enter the operating room of any bank. Its walls are decorated with leaflets on various banking services. Even elementary common sense suggests that the headings of these leaflets should be the names of these services. But with rare exceptions, dozens of calls “Dear customers!” Written in large print will look at you.

In his book “Aggressive marketing plus effective advertising” S. Alexandrov offers the following “aggressive” beginning of “effective” advertising:

Explanations of the “master” to the heading are interesting: “It provokes a potential consumer to decide whether he is“ business ”or not.” Well well! Firstly, under such a “heading” offers of thousands of types of goods may follow; secondly, stationery is needed not only for business people. I’m ready to bet that only masochists will read the words “stationery”. But for them it will remain a mystery why the proposed stationery is better than everyone else.

There was a senseless tradition in press releases, instead of the headline, to write simply “Press Release”. But excuse me, gentlemen, we do not call articles the word “article”, but books the word “book”.

On the bulletin board you can find such a monotonous battery of ads.

Each of them offers something, perhaps even very interesting. But from a distance of several meters it is only clear that one ad invites you to rest evenings. Where are the others inviting?

Email headers

In e-mail, it is important to know the subject of the message and the name of its sender. There are corresponding graphs for this. It’s good if they are filled like this:

Spam has become the scourge of email. People send you an unsolicited message for your money, which already causes you irritation. Do they really expect the annoyed recipient to read this (taken from my mail):

Many emails are generally nameless. This is completely incomprehensible - after all, the mail program reminds the sender to somehow call his message.

It would be nice if other programs had such functions! Perhaps we would have fewer documents without a name.

Text Writers

Texts of different categories are composed by different authors. Literary texts come from the pen of writers and poets, articles are written mainly by journalists, legal texts are written by lawyers, scientific treatises are written by scientists, military orders are written by military personnel, certificates and unsubscribes written by bureaucrats ... And who should write advertising texts?

Why only a copywriter?

Externally, an advertising text may resemble a business document, a scientific article, journalism, and even literary text. Why then can advertising texts not and should not be written by journalists and writers? Or scientists, engineers or officials? In the end, they also work with text.

All this is so. However, their texts solve fundamentally different tasks, and they are created differently. As we recall, the advertising text performs a unique task - to sell, and only sell! This is precisely what non-copywriters do not understand, continuing to remain writers or journalists.

Having accumulated rich copywriting experience, I can now guess with sufficient accuracy the profession of the author of a particular advertising text. It is especially noticeable when the advertiser is the author of the text.

Advertising Writers

Almost all famous 19th century American classics passed through advertising agencies. And none of them won any laurels in advertising. It was a sinful affair, and I tried to introduce several fiction writers to the copywriting trade. The long hours I spent conveying to them the main tasks of advertising did not lead to anything good.

I can offer my explanation for the writing failures in advertising. In his own words, the writer bears good and bright, “burns the hearts of people with a verb.” He is alien to the very idea of \u200b\u200busing elegant literature to solve "base" sales problems. The “advertising” texts coming out from under his pen are distinguished by expression and grace, but ... the sales in them are usually penniless.

A certain, not the best, part of writers always writes only about themselves. So, any opus of Pelevin is dedicated to ... him. His erudition and his narcissism. The reader is almost not interested in him. I agree with Bill Bernbach: "While the writer is interested in what he describes in his texts, the copywriter is interested in what the reader gets from them." Feel the difference?

A good advertising text should have only two heroes: the subject of advertising (product, service, candidate for election) and, most importantly, His Majesty the Reader (Buyer). (Neither the advertiser, nor, especially, the advertiser, are the heroes of advertising.) In this advertisement, the reader should read about himself - about solving his problems and satisfying his needs. If necessary, advertising should explain to him, should train him, should help him, should be a good marketing doctor for him, making it easier for him to choose a purchase.

Some writers, frankly, do not care about the reader. Open for example the story of Victor Erofeev "The smell of feces from the mouth." An unforgettable experience awaits you - a few pages filled with one word “stroke”. What does this star of our literature, not falling off the television screen, think of the reader? I mean about you and me?

The reverse is also true - books written by copywriters usually do not differ in either special grace or other literary merits. Probably to each his own.

Journalists in advertising

Advertise with the journalists too. These representatives do not remember what kind of “power” it is inherent to chase sensation, open, polemize, stigmatize. Some of them include the statement of Niels Bohr: "A journalist is someone who does not understand anything, but judges everything." Superficiality, indiscretion, incompetence, verbiage and love for the "red words" are intolerable in journalism. But in advertising, these qualities are deadly.

Representatives of the print media admit that even an inexperienced customer in advertising understands that the "advertising" works of journalists submitted to his court do not sell anything. It is pleasant to note that some media have begun to realize the need to have copywriters.

Unfortunately, many do not understand the fundamental difference between journalism and advertising. What guided the uncles from Moscow State University, creating the country's first forge of advertising personnel not at the faculty of economics, where these cadres would be brought up in a marketing environment, but at the faculty of journalism? Most likely, they danced from the text. Does this not explain the fact that while we rarely see a decent copywriter. And those who consider themselves to be a copywriters workshop are almost exclusively occupied with slogans and other marginalized people.

Scientists in advertising and advertising

A scientist writes for a narrow isoteric circle, often about complex and even complex things. Scientific texts abound in terms, graphs, and formulas. Without them, many priests of science are helpless, and rarely anyone of them succeeds in simple words to tell the general public about the achievements of their science; even fewer people among them are able to write advertising texts.

When I instructed a narrow specialist to write an advertising (precisely advertising!) Article, I usually instructed him as follows: When you write a dissertation or a message in a special journal, the more clever the better. The main task there is to show how smart you are. The task of the advertising article is completely different - to show the “teapot” that the proposed high-tech solution makes his life easier, gives him certain benefits, that he will master these wonders of science simply and easily. In a word, you should make him want to join this achievement. And God forbid, do not scare! But it was all useless! Always had to redo everything. Now I no longer conduct such experiments and write advertising articles myself.

Psychologists, culturologists, and other “ologists” are very fond of writing about advertising, about which they have a very vague idea. And they do it on a terrible mixture of foreign and Nizhny Novgorod. It recalls what Ernest Gowers, author of the aforementioned book, wrote about the “foggy systematization of the obvious” The Complete Plain Words. In his opinion, representatives of various not very specific “sciences” seem to be trying to say to the world: “You must believe that this is a great science; just look at our amazing new scientific language. ” It seems that linguists were particularly successful in the “foggy systematization”.

Linguists in advertising and advertising

Schönert and other practitioners can repeat these uninvited advisers as much as they like that advertising does not need their services - all in vain. All the magazines are clogged with their “advertising” articles, I won’t save from them at conferences. Some, having come up with a couple of names or slogans, declare themselves copywriters, others - brandologists.

Especially dangerous are their books addressed to young practitioners. We will put ourselves in the place of a former industrialist or economist somewhere in Kruzhopinsk, whom the authorities “threw for advertising”, setting purely practical tasks for him - to sell “bolts and nuts” produced by his native AAA “Kukareku-Nedoinvest” or UUU “Khryu- Oink Reholding. " With what joy he pounced on the book, on the cover of which is written, say, “Advertising text” - this is the long-awaited answer to all the questions!

But it’s too early to rejoice - instead of the long-awaited answers, our hero will have a heartfelt conversation about “conventional implications”, “the essential problems of rhetoric and rhetoric”, “natural language conviction”, “acting potential of the language”, “discursive practice”, “variative interpretation”, “Cognitive theory of argumentation”, “ontologization”, “speech-acting potential of vocabulary” and so on. With a sinking heart, he will read the following revelations: “The linguistic procedure of text analysis is the transformation of discourse syntagmas into the paradigm of suggestive-rhetorical means, since the processing of a linguistic work is carried out in an orientation towards the perception of its suggestive properties.” At a reasonable price, he will be offered the "Relative-associative semantic neuro-linguistic analyzer" for the Internet.

Wading through such wilds, I constantly wonder - well, I don’t understand anything in this verbiage (after 40 years of working as a copywriter and serious studies in linguistics), but does the author himself understand? Well, at least something? After all, “they only subtly write about things that they don’t understand.”

Rangers engaged in the search for "Lieutenant Kizhe" received a worthy replenishment - at the Yakutsk University they are now smartly discussing the "philological aspects" of advertising; soon, probably, they will talk about its astronomical, medical and even agricultural aspects.

Joking as a joke, but I'm afraid that, having read this, the novice copywriter will change his plans, fearing terrible boredom and impenetrable stupidity. I hasten to assure you, young advertising minds, that the linguistic-philological-psycho-semiotic-astrological-NLP-insane feces of advertising described above do not have the slightest.

Who can be a copywriter

I will allow myself to repeat here the words from my article “Advertising Thinking”: “Marketing and advertising are areas that not everyone can deal with. Moreover, some are contraindicated in some of them. There is nothing unusual and exceptional in this, because such "special" areas are enough. The music was mentioned above. Martin Luther, a translator of the Bible into German, said: “Translation is not for everyone.” Not everyone will make a good actor, doctor, politician, director, constructor. What can I say, not everyone will turn out to be a good peasant, turner or shoemaker. Probably, every profession requires certain data from a person, but not in every profession the absence of such data is as critical as in marketing and advertising - the cost of errors is too high (literally). ”

The history of copywriting has shown that the best copywriters come from former good sellers. Everything is explained very simply - a good seller in courses and in practice masters the thinking “from the client”, he is saturated with his needs, he learns to find an approach to various customers, he learns to speak the language of the buyer. It’s easier for him to switch from selling personal to indirect selling, to “selling in print,” that is, to advertising. True, these sellers, as a rule, are not aware of language grace; some (including Ogilvy) admit that they don’t even know grammar.

Could, say, a journalist become a copywriter? Why not. But when writing advertising texts, he will need to learn how to switch from sensationalism to sale. The scientist, among other things, will have to delve into the words of Rutherford: "If you can not explain what you are doing, to your cleaning lady - you are an worthless specialist." The fact is that 100% of the population is the “cleaner” in almost everything that goes beyond their narrow professional field or hobby.

In general, friends, copywriting is an interesting and difficult job for those who can think and feel “in an advertising way”, for those who want to “make” money for the advertiser, and not for lions and donkeys for themselves. This is real creativity (not to be confused with “creativity” and even more so with “creativity”!). This is “algebra and harmony”, analysis, ingenuity and intuition. This activity is for people with two cerebral hemispheres, a la Leonardo da Vinci. That ... yes, hell, it’s easier to say what it is NOT!

To be continued

Next, I will briefly outline elements of what the West calls writing, I’ll talk about the general characteristics of the advertising language, about typical mistakes and prejudices. I will also share my modest experience in creating and editing advertising texts.

Dear friends, I would like to make our conversation as substantive and useful as possible for you. It seems to me that my story will benefit from instructive examples. I have enough examples, but, unfortunately, I do not always feel the real problems of a novice copywriter, and therefore I ask you to send my examples and questions. Your samples can be good and bad, in Russian and Ukrainian.

Alexey Furman (editor of the Ukrainian website www.reklamaster.com) touched upon an exceptionally interesting topic of Russian-Ukrainian advertising bilingualism. What do you think of it? Is there such a problem? If so, how to solve it? Is it possible to summarize the accumulated experience? And so on and so forth. |

Answer left a guest

What is advertising? Advertising can be defined as alerting people in all possible ways to create widespread fame for something or someone, information about remarkable events in economic, cultural, political life with the aim of causing people to actively participate in them. The fact that such a phenomenon of advertising can be discussed forever, there are many opinions on this subject. Everyone considers it in their own way: someone evaluates from the point of view of a quality product, someone as the transfer of information. In this work, she is considered in the light of art, the art of the word. The choice of topic is due to the fact that advertising is an integral part of our life. We see it everywhere: in the subway, on TV, on billboards, in porches, we hear on the radio. Everyone pays attention to high-quality, tasteful, humorous advertising, but at the same time, advertising is rude, unethical, and sometimes illiterate. No one is surprised by the non-normative nature of advertising. Nowadays, there is absolutely no such thing as the ethics of advertising messages. Newspaper editions prudently indicate at the bottom of the advertising articles: “The editorial board is not responsible for the content of advertising communications. And that means the newspaper can publish everything. Unfair and unreliable advertising, repeatedly amplified on television screens, repeatedly led to undesirable results - potential buyers lost faith, and with it, confidence in the distribution channel of advertising messages was also lost. Why it happens? Why are we more and more often reading absurd ads on newspaper pages, day after day we watch stupid commercials on TV? The Russian public is already in the habit of scolding domestic advertising, and I must admit, it really deserves it. They criticize both for the form, and for the content, and for advertising not something, not for those and not so, and for a bad language. When compiling an advertising text, it is necessary to take into account many points, including the inexhaustibility of the possibilities of our language, the optimal compositional structure, and the psychology of impact on the consumer. Indeed, the advertising text is read in a special way! In our time, compilers of advertising texts do not always pay attention to this. “Advertising is the most important problem of our time. Advertising is the god of modern commerce and industry. Beyond advertising there is no escape. However, advertising is a very difficult art, requiring a lot of tact. ”There are a lot of developments on the topic of advertising and announcements in modern media. This problem is very brightly covered in many publications. Famous specialists Z. Freud, R. Jacobson, D. Lotman, Z. Shannon worked in this area. In the study of an exciting topic, various books were used, for example, by such authors as Kokhtev NN, Uchenova VV, Konanykhin KV, Ananich MI and many others. Used articles E.S. Kara-Murza about Russian in advertising.

A bit of advertising history. The very first written history documents already testify to advertising practice. In Egypt in 3320 BC ivory traders called on customers as follows: “Cheap, very cheap this year, the noble horn of the giants of the primeval forests of Ehecto. Come to me, the inhabitants of Memphis, marvel, admire and buy! ” In ancient Greece, such an “advertising” song was intended for the inhabitants of Athens: “So that your eyes shine, your cheeks are red, your girl’s beauty is preserved for a long time, a sensible woman will buy cosmetics at reasonable prices from Exliptos.” The turning point in the history of advertising was the year 1450, when Johann Guttenberg invented the printing press. Advertising received a powerful incentive in the form of the first English-language newspaper Weekly News that began to appear in 1622. The Tatler newspaper advised the authors of the texts: “The great art of writing advertisements is to find the right approach in order to grab the attention of the reader, without which the good news may go unnoticed or be lost among bankruptcy notices.” In Russia, the first advertisements appeared in Peter's Vedomosti. For example, an advertisement about a prestigious resort: “Sewer waters cure various cruel diseases, namely: scurvy, hypochondria, bile, weakness of the stomach, vomiting ...” [“Vedomosti” No. 2, 1719.] What is the peculiarity of the language of the current advertising and announcements in the media? Let's try to figure it out.