Chipotle knows the value of a great burrito. Chipotle also knows the value of well-written copy.

While eating lunch yesterday ay Chipotle, I encountered the following copy on the chain’s paper cup.

Chips Are Rad!

Chips might seem so little, so inconsequential…but if we didn’t have chips, how would we eat salsa? With a spoon? And then what would make salsa different than soup? And would people want to put soup on their burritos? That would be weird. I don’t mean to judge, but I think most people would rather not put soup on their burritos. And don’t even get me started on how chips can move guacamole. Oh sweet guacamole. The tiny, lowly, underappreciated chip is the salty triangle delivery method that surpasses all others in guacamole transport. If there was a chip-appreciation society, I would probably join it (as long as it didn’t meet on Wednesday nights, because I have my ceramics class on Wednesday nights, and next week I’m making a bowl) but on any other night, I would be happy to meet up with folks and talk about how awesome chips are. Actually, if no one else is going to start a society, I might have to get on that…

Note the use of first person here. First person helps make a connection. I don’t know who the chip-loving, bowl-making person is, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is the fact that someone’s telling a story, and it is a story highlighting the appetite appeal of products available at Chipotle (chips, salsa and guacamole).

Just about every other fast food chain in existence places their logo, or the logo of Coca-Cola or Pepsi on their cups. But Chipotle saw an opportunity to do more. Which leads me to ask how many storytelling opportunities are your clients leaving on the shelf?

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How do you know when it is time to hire a copywriter, a.k.a one who writes text, or copy, for the purpose of marketing a product, business, person, opinion or idea?

If you’re a recruiter at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, you just know. But what if you’re not in that world? What if you work for a design shop or a Web development firm? What if you work in marketing on the client side? In these cases, the question often becomes a difficult and puzzling one. But it needn’t be that way.

The murkiness, of course, is caused by one overriding reason. Too many people think they can do what copywriters do. Which makes me wonder, do these same wannabe copywriters also think they can perform their own root canal, or defend themselves in a court of law? Perhaps, they can do these things, but unless they’re some kind of real life MacGyver, they’re bound to make a mess of things and cause undue pain.

Because AdPulp is here to help — and carefully crafted lists are helpful constructs — please review these 10 signs that you do, indeed, need to hire a copywriter.

1. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you have no idea what prospective consumers find valuable in your product or service offering.

2. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you lack the tools to express your brand’s singular idea in a concise and memorable way.

3. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you are busy doing the job you were hired to do, versus imitating the job of someone you have yet to hire.

4. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you are ready to earn and hold your audience’s attention.

5. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you realize that without a paid professional on the job, you’re actually wasting all the money you’re putting in to “a new look.”

Perhaps, these logical approaches to the problem aren’t working for you. That’s okay, a nimble copywriter can turn on a dime and head in a new direction.

6. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you start to believe David Ogilvy was born in a French Chateau.

7. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you are done messin’ with Sasquatch.

8. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you don’t want to sell your hair to a wig shop, wake up in a roadside ditch or re-enact scenes from Platoon with Charlie Sheen.

9. It’s time to hire a copywriter when the most interesting man in the world says so.

10. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you are no longer afraid to Just Do It.

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PORTLAND–Twitter launched over five years ago, which is eons in Internet time. Yet, Laura Fitton, Inbound Marketing Evangelist at HubSpot and this afternoon’s Keynote speaker at Webvisions is here to say that the disruptive force that is Twitter has only just begun.

Quoting Joel Lunenfeld, who works for Twitter, Fitton says, “Twitter is like an EKG for attention.” It’s a global sensing and signaling network, she says. “Twitter relays whatever is remarkable.”

Interestingly, Fitton notes that influencer modes are subverted on Twitter. “The message is the influencer. I love that about Twitter,” she says.

Facebook is busy converting promise into cash today, but Fitton claims Facebook doesn’t have the same message propagation properties as Twitter, partly because it’s browser driven. There’s a deeply democratic aspect to Twitter thanks to its mobile interface. There are five billion ‘dumb phones’ in the world and all of them are capable of publishing via SMS, without even joining Twitter, Fitton says.

Twitter has revolutionary qualities baked in, but can it also change the marketing communications game for the better? Fitton says we must learn to turn our messages inside out, because it’s not about us, it’s about the reader. She adds that best practices on Twitter can be summed up in two words: Be useful.

“At Hubspot, our marketing solves problems for people,” she says. She advises that marketers approach their marketing like they do their products. “Make your marketing into something people will pay for,” she suggests.

She closes her talk with a discussion of #hashtags, which remind her of starlings. “They flash, form, and disappear,” she says. Fitton started a weekly Twitter-based chat around the hashtag #beonfire. “I have a show now,” she says. “Twitter-based chats are the Rotary Clubs of the future.”

Following her talk, I ask Fitton — who follows 98,228 people at this time — how she uses Twitter (technically speaking). She says she employs a “read only” technique, where she follows about 1000 people on a private account created for this purpose only. She also reads her at replies and direct messages on her @pistachio account, and uses lists to parse the content.

I ask about keeping one’s follower account under control, to reduce the blast from the fire hose. Fitton says, “You want to keep it under control however you’re reading it, but especially if you’re a business on Twitter, whom you follow shouldn’t be how you read Twitter. If you’re a business on Twitter, whom you follow should be all about who you permit to DM you.”

I also ask Fitton which MarCom practice is best prepared to manage a brand’s social media marketing. “I think the talent is lost on a few different islands,” she says. “I think the best creative — ‘like, oh wow, I really want to consume that content’ — talent is still in the advertising industry. But I feel like that’s the last industry to understand social, whereas the publicists were on it right away because they understand relationships.”

Separating fact from opinion ain’t what it used to be. There was a time when the more you read, the more engaged you were with your world. Your city. Your neighborhood. Not some imaginary world you wished could be, but the world as it actually existed outside your door.

Back in these ancient times (otherwise known as “just a few years ago”) being up on Current Events was a thing people aspired to. (See? It was even a proper noun.) The simple act of staying informed separated you from those who lived in a bubble or just couldn’t be bothered.

Part of what made this true was that the main news source for most people was the newspaper, filled with page after page of news items written by professional Writers and double-checked for clarity by professional Editors. Each story began with a simple sentence—the “lead”—that delivered the most important factual information first and ensured that regardless of what happened later (spin, cover-ups, etc—sometimes within the article itself) you at least had some facts to chew on before all the hemming-and-hawing began. Opinions were there too, of course, but they were usually relegated to one clearly labeled page at the back of the paper. Sometimes it was even called The Opinion Page. How cute.

But then came the 24-hour news cycle, niche news channels aimed at specific audiences, online news feeds and aggregators, not to mention email portals and homepages that don’t so much deliver actual news as merely use news-like headlines as filler or decoration, giving people the illusion that they’re being informed before they jump to something more important like checking out a Groupon or updating their relationship status.

Nope, these days if you’re reading about something that has just happened, you’re probably reading about it online. A place where there are many more opinions than facts. Where “What’s Happening” has been replaced by “What’s Trending”—a phrase that couldn’t sound more subjective if it tried.

From Twitter to the Like button, to the scores of Op-Ed pieces from people you’ve never heard of that now grace the front page of every news site and trade publication around, suddenly we readers find ourselves awash in opinion with not nearly enough factual lifeboats to go around. How do we cope? By doing what all desperate drowners do: we start flailing about, eager to grab onto anything that might keep us afloat, which in this case results in people merely clinging to one another for the safety of their shared beliefs. (Which makes things even worse of course, since the only thing more helpless than a world with too many opinions is a world with only one.)

Add in the ubiquitous comments section of most websites and you reach the conclusion that to be an engaged member of the reading public today is to be surrounded by arguments. All of which makes you feel less like a reader and more like a spectator at a shouting match.

I’ve noticed the same thing happening in Advertising. Not the shouting so much (unless you work for a real jerk), but the ever-increasing supply of opinions. Big meetings where small ones used to suffice. Endless comments streaming in throughout the process via email. (FYI: Just because we’re all connected doesn’t mean we should spend all our time connecting.) All of it capped off by the constant inclusion of everyone in everything, regardless of interest, experience, talent or qualification. The more opinions the merrier. And since opinions rule over fact, there are no experts. Which means everyone’s an expert. Hooray! Participation Medals for all! Amateur hour? We call that Crowdsourcing now. A disorganized mess? No, no, no, that’s a Hive. A true buzzword in more ways than one, I suppose. (Speaking of buzzwords, can someone tell me why people stopped calling or emailing and instead started “reaching out?” It’s such a ridiculous term, and one that’s very telling about the conflicted state of the workplace psyche these days. Apparently we’re so afraid of the cutthroat capitalism we claim to love so much that we feel the need to give a cutesy name to even the most mundane workday activities. But does the simple act of rational business communication really need to be described like a rescue attempt or an invitation to join a cult? Bizarre.)

Anyway, the points I’m trying to make here are these: I think some of us are better than others at certain things, and that’s as it should be. When I pay someone for their expertise, I’d prefer they actually have some, thank you very much. I also think it should be corporate policy that some opinions matter more than others. And I think most people at work are happier knowing not only who’s in charge of a given project but that they’re actually qualified to be. Yes, good ideas can come from anywhere. But anywhere’s an awfully big place. And as such, the bad ideas—much like opinions—will always be in much greater supply.

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Could you imagine laboring over a piece of copy the way old-timers like Howard Gossage did? And if you did, what would your current clients do to it after you sent a draft to them?

Thanks to these internet tubes, people everywhere are writing, all the time. Or at least, they’re typing. Has all this collective writing ability lowered the grammatical and stylistic standards of the ad industry?

That’s the conundrum for our industry: the quicker and sloppier society gets with language, the more precise we have to be. We know more precisely than ever that the right words impact sales. If you’re writing for e-commerce, mobile, SEO, or if you’re working on some utility-focused website or app, you’ve seen that even mundane phrases like “click here” get tested and altered to achieve the best results.

As a writer, it’s my obligation to mind the words I write for my clients. But I also have to be aware of the overall effect a piece of communication has. Our audience can respond to any aspect of what we do, or none at all.

It’s the subject of my new column on Talent Zoo.

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I will absolutely not make judgments on agencies that appear on “The Pitch” based on how the show makes them look. The heavily edited, overly dramatic, trainwreck of a reality TV show has taken some decent people and make them look awful. I’ve met some of the participants on a few of the shows so I prefer to trust my personal judgements over some editor.

But I do want to focus on one very glaring takeaway from the most recent episode, which featured Charlotte’s BooneOakley.

We’ve written about them before (although Oakley’s comments in the linked article here are a bit ironic at first glance) and they’ve done some very cool work. But on “The Pitch,” a very big deal was made of the emergency illness of Greg Johnson, the agency’s CMO. Because without his presence, we’re led to believe the creative folks at the agency, even the senior folks, can’t (or don’t) think very strategically and need a reality check only Johnson can provide. And when they do finally make their pitch, with some interesting ideas, they have a bit of trouble explaining the rationale behind their thinking. Keith Greenstein does an admirable job of pulling together some answers when pressed by the client, but the camera shows him struggling to be convincing.

So here’s what I’m wondering: Do most creatives think strategically? I’ve always thought we had to, or else. Are young creatives even taught (or expected) to think strategically anymore? Is there really a gulf between strategic people & planners and the creatives at the most creative shops? Or is it just expected that the creatives should go as wild with their thinking as possible, and that it’s up to folks like Johnson to rein them in?

As I said, I won’t judge BooneOakley by this show, and their rejection by a client who simply wanted some viral buzz. But I was cringing watching all of them struggle without Johnson. Creatives need to be strategic. And it doesn’t have to equate to being conservative or boring.

As you know, I’ve been decompressing from the weight of much too much information. So pardon the self-referential nature of things. I’ll look outward again. Before I do, I want to point to new research from Harvard University that indicates as much as 40% of our speech is devoted to telling others about what we feel or think.

Well, that sure explains Tweetbook.

Apparently, bragging stimulates the brain’s meso-limbic dopamine system, and provides the same sensations of pleasure found in food, sex and money. “Self-disclosure is extra rewarding,” said Diana Tamir, who conducted the experiments with Harvard colleague Jason Mitchell. “People were even willing to forgo money in order to talk about themselves,” Ms. Tamir said.

Martin Lindstrom, writing in Fast Company wonders what this pleasure of self-disclosure might mean for the future of brands. “It’s likely corporate brands will offer consumers a ‘soap-box’ from which individuals can pimp their own identity,” he reasons.

In other words, the new mass marketing is one-to-one marketing.

Make your message for me, or don’t bother bothering me. These are the field conditions. Are you ready to adjust your gear, and your style of play? Because I am not the only one suffering from info inundation. Not by a long shot. Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project sometimes feels “like a lab rat, mindlessly pushing levers in search of the next source of instant but fleeting gratification.” He also reminds that in 1970, Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon said: “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Despite the crushing odds against us, corporate communicators continue to show up at work each morning armed with new possibilities — ideas that may, if perfectly executed, help clients break through the all noise and connect with people, however fleeting that connection might be. Sadly, fleeting connections is all a brand can hope for, when working from the interruption model, which continues to permeate almost everything we think, and do, in Adlandia.

Advertising that lacks an experiential opportunity is dead on arrival.

The question today is not, “What do we put inside the square frame, a.k.a. box, where ads used to dwell?”

No, the question is, “What can we put inside the box to move people to connect with each other and with the brand in real life?” Unfortunately, few ad people have experience in experiential. My suggestion is it’s time to get some, and time to think way outside whatever boxes we might find ourselves encamped in at this time.

Let me put it another way. The creative team that makes Apple ads is partly responsible for how the brand is perceived. But perception is so very thin when put up against the real life experiences happening everyday in Apple Stores. Great advertising doesn’t do much for you, when your iPhone isn’t working.

I don’t want to go into customer service, or become a circus clown to win the favor of my clients’ best prospects. I want to continue to weave narrative threads into brand tapestries. The thing that’s changed for me is I am pushing for the brand story to play live. There has to be a certain taste to it, a smell. Bottom line, people need to feel the brand, in order to care about it, remember it and share it.

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We’re both in the brand identity game. So, let’s put our heads together on this. The Internet needs an identity refresh.

Please understand that this is #probono work, since there is no real client and no one to bill. We all own the Internet, right? It’s a community garden and thus our undertaking to improve it is a just cause. Plus, our investment of free labor in the future of the Internet’s brand will be noted by a Wikipedia editor.

I won’t bore you by presenting the brief for the reinvented Internet brand, but I know you need a strategy statement of some kind. Here’s one: THE INTERNET HAS A REPUTATION PROBLEM THAT GREAT ADVERTISING CAN HIDE.

Okay, let’s roll. I prepared a list of five headlines to get us moving down a conceptual path.

1. Wear Clean Underwear — All Your Friends Are Watching
2. We Make Millionaires Like Brooklyn Makes Pizza
3. Let Your Internal Cat Video Out To Play
4. Not Spanish Castle Magic, But Pretty Magical
5. Sorry for All The Noise

My friends on Twitter also suggested a few.

6. Now With More Stuff Than Just A Second Ago. (submitted by @iamjoelwayne)
7. Google or be Googled. (submitted by @A_Trev)
8. The Internet. Capitalized for a Reason. (submitted by @stevejerman)

Perhaps you think a tagline-less Internet is acceptable in today’s marketplace of ideas. No. We must place a modifier on it like a crown.

Footnote: This post was conceived on, and for, Twitter. But it also plays on blog-like things.

If you’ve been paying attention these past few years, you know by now that the world is most definitely your oyster. Thanks to the game changing power of the Internet, you can disrupt markets, wear a sarong to work and never answer to a clueless boss again.

Sure, it may sound too good to be true. But trust me when I say that doubt will get you nowhere. On the other hand, the more you believe in yourself, the more others will believe in you.

So without further ado, here are TEN THINGS YOU MUST DO TODAY to UNLEASH THE POWER OF YOUR NETWORK and INSURE YOUR LONG TERM PROSPERITY…

10. Put everything you think and do into a list — if it’s not on a list, it’s not worth your time.

9. Promote yourself incessantly on Facebook and Twitter — how else will people grasp the incredible value of your personal brand?

8. Blog like a baller, using lists to organize your content and social channels to drive people to your content about blogging like a baller.

7. Don’t bother creating original content for your blog or your social channels — the name of the game is aggregation, and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

6. Whenever you arrive in a new place, make sure to check in on Foursquare — if your followers don’t know where you are, you can’t influence their behavior.

5. Harvest every email address in your inbox and send these contacts a free email newsletter once a week that highlights the aggregated content you’ve made into lists.

4. When naysayers question you about your real world experience in social media, remind them that social is a world unto itself.

3. Soar with the eagles by attending conferences with other A-list bloggers and social media superstars — it’s not an echo chamber, it’s an awakening.

2. Appear in as many photos as possible that help showcase your commitment to social, and religiously share them on Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest and Flickr.

1. Never use the term “social media douchebag” in public — those who need a bit of guidance (and an intro to best practices) are your best prospects and future bread and butter.

Well there you have it. Commit these simple steps to memory, or better yet print this page and tape it to your mirror. You have nothing to lose but your self respect.

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My recent post where I discussed kicking my blogging habit lacked clarity. Ergo, I’ve got some explaining to do.

I thought this line from the post would carry weight: “By blogging I refer to the light- to medium-weight updates that often refer to a primary source.” But it didn’t.

I also thought this line would also make things clear: “To be clear, I’m not walking away from AdPulp, I’m changing my daily routine.” But it didn’t.

If I simply followed the example set by other well read bloggers, I would have written a post titled, “Blogging Is Dead.” I would have also made a list giving you reasons one through ten to support my claim. But, I prefer to run against the grain, here and elsewhere. And that my friends is the root of the problem. By relying on the stack of press releases in my inbox and MarCom articles posted elsewhere to find something to write about, I lost my way. This kind of blogging is reactive, and I want to be proactive.

When you’re reactive, as just about every ad blog is, there’s a tendency to become a promoter, not a critic. I don’t want to be a promoter. So, I stepped off for a month plus, in order to reevaluate and chart a new path. The new path is this: AdPulp is a side-project, and must be treated as such (so I can focus on making a living). When I do post here, I want the content to be exclusive. And I want every post to be carefully crafted, so it builds our brand and offers you real value.

We’ve moved through many phases in seven and half years on this project. There was a time when I put up four, five even six posts a day. There are ad blogs that do this today. Lord knows, there’s a glut of material to work with. But I don’t want to provide comprehensive coverage of our industry. I want to offer you thought nuggets.

Jim Schmidt of Downtown Partners in Chicago asked the other day: “Why can’t the ad press cover the ad world nearly as well as Gawker or Daily Beast? Too busy blowing smoke up the asses of their favorite New York ad execs?”

I replied: “Great question. I’d say fear. Like White House reporters, no one wants to lose access. The problem with that is there is no access to begin with. Just PR. What advertising pro wants a real journalist up in their grill? When we prop up shitty products, we set ourselves up for the hard questions, but there’s no one there to ask them. Is there?”

I’ve struggled with the idea of being this real reporter and filling this void. This was especially true when I held a staff job, because I didn’t want my work here to come back to bite my agency in the ass. Now, that I’ve been out on my own for three and a half years, these concerns have waned.

To sum up, AdPulp is headed in a new direction. There will be less content, but the content we do offer will be well worth reading. The rush to post is over. This isn’t a race, and buying in to the notion that we must post every day to remain relevant is wrong.

By the way, we will be introducing a series of Sponsored Posts, where we will cover various topics each week — like Search, or Social — and pay experts in the field to produce these original articles (something Ad Age does not do). If you want to write these articles, or pay for them, please let me know.

Photo credit: Library of Congress

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