When I was first learning to be a copywriter, I was told that powerful advertising writing exists in the verbs. Not the adjectives.
Many advertisers don’t understand that. Real estate clients are quite guilty of this. And restaurants. But this is quite a doozy:
Hey @McDonalds–I don't think "artisan" means what you think it means. pic.twitter.com/RzjqdPLdCO
— Tom Furtwangler (@tomfurt) April 30, 2014
Do words like “artisan” and “handcrafted” lose their meaning when even McDonald’s uses them?
This desire for authenticity in products doesn’t have to be costly, either. Where I live, yes, you can meet the farmers that grow and sell vegetables locally, and in a “Portlandia”-esque sense you can probably learn the name of the animal you’re eating. I suppose people enjoy or appreciate things more when they know where it was made and who made them.
But leave it to advertising people to bastardize the terminology and cheapen what might be a truly unique benefit for a product. Ever since someone decided “New and Improved” could adequately describe the addition of an artificial flavoring additive, ad folks love to trot out complete BS words and phases and overuse them.
It’s the subject of my latest column on Talent Zoo, which I hand-crafted on a computer.
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