Any creative team without a good writer is seriously missing out

There are creative teams coming out of college not knowing who's the writer and who's the art director. Fine up to a point. Why make a distinction when the best answer is a great idea that can come from either or both? Unfortunately, it's a more naive and unrealistic position than ever.

Most creative work these days from TV ads to banner ads, from email to radio, from posters to websites, demands words. Some of it demands a lot of words, such as the leaflet explaining home insurance or the web page introducing 'member benefits'. In fact, the web has led to an explosion of copy with online interaction still predominantly a text-led experience.

Employing the best writing craft in all these cases will have a direct impact on the ROI of a campaign. And many consumers, especially those over 40 (i.e. the ones with all the money) still appreciate correct English. So do all clients I've ever met. A basic grammatical error or obvious spelling mistake reflects badly on a brand and erodes its 'trust and reliability' values. If you don't believe me, get a job writing for the BBC or Daily Mail and use "it's" when it should be "its". See what happens. Even the tortuous copy sometimes created for SEO can still be correct English.

Why can't young creatives write compellingly or correctly? When I last looked schools still taught English. Yet when I take the IDM's Introduction to Copywriting course I find most of the delegates (predominantly young clients) would actually prefer a course in correct English (punctuation, grammar, spelling etc) rather than good copywriting. To be a copywriter, you need to master both, although many wrongly assume one equals the other.

Writing is a great career and you don't find many halfway decent writers out of work. And if you still want to work in a team, sort out who will write and then become brilliant at it. You'll always be in demand and you'll have a great career.

P.S. Thank you to Jon Allen for correcting my English in this blog.

Why is Barclaycard mailing people with no income?

My daughter is 21 and full time at Art College.She has no job. Yet Barclaycard have written to her inviting her to apply for a Barclaycard Goldfish credit card. The enticements include a £30 shopping voucher offer and 0% APR on all purchases for 3 months. The card is very much positioned as one with which to do your shopping. The letter invites her to switch all her weekly purchases to Goldfish to earn £120 to spend on the High Street.

So I hope you don't mind, Ms Mockler, Customer Service Director at Barclaycard, but I've taken the pack before she has a chance to apply. She already owes on her student loans and on her bank overdraft. In fact, she has SERIOUS BAD DEBT RISK tattooed on her forehead. Most of the small print is too small to actually read but I'm sure it says somewhere she needs to be earning money for her application to be successful. Maybe you could have put it in the letter?

Or better still, not send her the mailing in the first place. Maybe you need to be tighter with your selections or improve your propensity models? Otherwise the bank will build up all these bad debts and we know what happens then, don't we?

Don't you hate it when brands tell you what you think?

I received a mailing from Volvo. It told me I would rather be "picking strawberries in June (even though it's September), hitting the perfect volley or skiing on the best snow of the season". They say they recognise that I'd rather be doing any of things, because there's more to life than Volvo. Of course this is true for all cars. Most people are not very interested in cars. Customers buy Volkswagens because they simply want a reliable, quality product. They buy Fords for the same reason. They don't understand what happens under the bonnet and they don't care.

What I can't stand is the assumption Volvo is making about my lifestyle. Let alone the cringe-making yuppy imagery in the brochure. I'm almost 50 for chrissakes, not 30. I have three children (probably like most Volvo drivers but not like the energetic singles in the brochure) and I don't pick my own fruit because we have a Waitrose. In Tennis is shorthand for swinging where I live and skiing stories compete with inheritance tax as the dullest dinner party topic of all time.

So unless you REALLY know me and understand that I'm a mad cycling, wine-drinking, Cure fan with a family don't make presumptions. And the truth is I bought a Volvo because my wife feels safe in one. And what better reason can there be than that?