Page 89 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

38 HAVE FUN

Making and spending money is a serious business. How else to
account for the numbers of people in prison who took someone
else’s? Generally speaking, in copywriting circles, humor is treated
gingerly. Claude Hopkins, one of the pioneers of advertising
copywriting, remarked in his book Scientific Advertising that, “People
don’t buy from clowns.”

But does that mean every word we write, every piece of copy we
produce, has to be unremittingly serious? I don’t think so. You can
be playful, witty, provocative even. If you know your reader well
enough and if your style is appropriate to the medium and job that
the copy has to do.

The idea

From Malmaison, a hotel chain
A couple of years ago we were staying at the Malmaison hotel in
the area of London called Clerkenwell. Home to the famous—and
smelly—Smithfield meat market (think large blue plastic barrels
with a dozen cows’ heads staring sightlessly out at you), it’s trendy, a
bit bohemian, and stuffed with hip restaurants and bars.

The Malmaison is definitely upmarket but not in a corporate way. We
saw no suited execs with wheely suitcases checking their BlackBerrys
in the bar. Instead it was full of people who looked as if they worked
in fashion, or the arts, media maybe . . . guests at what appeared to
be a lesbian wedding . . . and a couple of distinctly rockstar-y types
with shades even though the bar was in the basement.

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