Philip Pullman is my favourite author. He’s also one of the most outspoken critics of education in the UK. Every couple of years or so, he fires a broadside against our system. Particularly what he calls the ‘fetishisation’ of exams. How it reduces the glorious, human experiences of reading and writing to a set of tick boxes. And how it greatly reduces the chances of children becoming successful authors.
But it’s only recently dawned on me, a couple of years into my copywriting career, that those same issues also apply to copywriting. In fact, the effect is even more profound with copywriting. At least kids are exposed to fiction writing in schools. At least authors are celebrated. Copywriting, despite being a far more viable way to make a living through words and ideas, is invisible.
“Copywriting… something to do with plagiarism, right?”
I’d never heard of copywriting until I was about 28, when I was working out how to escape my teaching career. My nieces, all currently in high school, had never heard of it. They couldn’t recall ever writing anything related to sales or business.
How can it be that so many young people go through education oblivious to a profession that’s critical to every business in every sector? How, in all the thousands of hours I’d spent writing in school, had I never learned how to write to sell? The very concept had never been touched on.
So why do kids write? In primary school, kids write stories to entertain; diaries and newspaper articles to recount; and plenty of reports to inform. In high school and beyond, it’s all about academic arguments, justifying your opinions with cold hard logic. But ultimately, it’s all superficial. Kids are’t daft – they know they’re only writing so their teachers can assess it against a set of criteria and give them a grade. After twelve years of that, writing loses any sense of purpose for most kids.
Writing to sell? Never.
Selling? That’s a dirty word
As well as the rigid, box-checking, dehumanising English curriculum our schools follow, there may be a wider cultural element at play. I recently saw a LinkedIn video from a chap called Jason Horsman, co-founder of a prominent Leeds-based sales and marketing agency. He spoke about how hard it is to find young salespeople these days. So many lack the knowledge of what sales is, the skills and processes involved, and how crucial sales is to every organisation. He believes there’s a stigma around sales, which could be why it’s so absent from our school curriculum. Naturally, this extends to copywriting, which is salesmanship in print.
I think he’s right. In fact, I viewed sales and marketing with suspicion for many years, because I’d never been shown what good sales and marketing looked like. So my views were warped by a few bad experiences with scam artists and junk emails. How many good people are deterred from fulfilling careers because of similarly misguided views?
It’s almost like ‘selling’ is a dirty word in education. It’s as if we should only be teaching kids to do something more, I dunno… noble. Selling often seems to be at odds with academic success and spiritual growth. Talented kids are encouraged to pursue law, medicine, engineering, the sciences, academia. No mention of sales, marketing or copywriting. There’s an almost complete absence of sales-related skill development in schools. Perfunctory events such as an annual ‘Enterprise Week’ are too few and far between to have any lasting impact.
Even the Business Studies A-level seems to focus only on admin and managerial elements. At degree level, there are almost no copywriting courses, only marketing or advertising courses that briefly touch on copywriting. This is why so many copywriters arrive into the profession late and by accident. It’s why they often have to tear down and rebuild what they know about writing, cobbling together their expertise from whatever courses, books and mentorship groups they can find while trying to keep a roof over their head.
Wherefore dost thy pen so many essays about me?
Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t teach kids to analyse Shakespeare and all that. Education should provide opportunities to explore and delight in literature and language. But it’s a question of proportion.
Let’s be real here, how many kids in your average state school are going to make a living out of analysing literature? How many business models incorporate the narrative structure of Jane Eyre? Compare that to the number of kids who’ll go into roles where they’ll need to sell something (even if their job title doesn’t include ‘sales’). Compare it to the number of organisations – not just businesses, but charities and public bodies too – that need to sell on a daily basis.
So surely it makes sense to spend a bit less time writing essays on Dickens, and a bit more time learning how to write to sell. Surely the economy and society in general would benefit from more young people equipped with skills that all employers need.
This would do nothing to restrict kids’ imaginations and diminish their love of learning. Of course, we should still encourage learning for learning’s sake. I love learning and hope I never stop. In fact, curiosity and a wide knowledge base are essential for copywriters. But we also need to prepare kids for the real world.
Some lucky kids find a vocation, some line of work they’re uniquely drawn to. Medicine, law, education, sports, music. It could be anything. The point is, they have a focus. But what about the majority of kids who are a bit lost, who don’t really know what they want to do? Teaching them to sell gives them a string to their bow, an opportunity to develop crucial, valuable, door-opening skills without forcing them to absorb a tonne of knowledge about subjects they don’t really give a shit about.
Even the kids who don’t go into sales and marketing roles would benefit from learning copywriting. Job applications… Training materials… Presentations to a board of directors… Internal emails to 300 employees encouraging them to read the new 84-page health and safety policy… Every type of business communication could be improved by applying copywriting principles.
Let’s start taking this shit seriously
You might argue that the last thing we need is more people trying to sell us something. Aren’t we bombarded with enough ads already? Perhaps. But I reckon we get annoyed because there’s so much bad advertisement out there. So much marketing material that’s shallow, spammy, irrelevant and poorly executed.
Therefore, wouldn’t it be better if there were more people who understood and cared about the quality of marketing communications? Wouldn’t that mean the quality of advertising and marketing would improve?
It might even be possible that, if copywriting were taken more seriously in schools, we’d get fewer people believing the shit they see on LinkedIn, thinking copywriting is a shortcut to making $10k a month pissing about on their laptops in coffee shops. We’d filter out the charlatans, and get more young people viewing it as the credible, challenging profession it is, worthy of dedicating themselves to the craft. Surely standards would rise.
So how do we do it?
I don’t think it would actually take that much of a pivot to achieve this. You could easily incorporate copywriting into the curriculum without getting rid of all the scholarly stuff. We already teach many of the associated skills and concepts. It’s just a case of tying it all together in the context of sales writing.
If kids can pick apart Macbeth to see why it’s so powerful, then they can easily pick apart a million-dollar sales page to see why it’s so persuasive. We already teach psychology at A-level, so why not introduce some of those basic concepts a bit earlier, in the context of understanding your audience? And of course, kids know all about testing variables through their science investigations, so you could easily teach them about A/B testing copy to reach the best results.
What’s more, the copywriting curriculum already exists. It’s there in a century’s worth of books, all the way back to Claude Hopkins’ bible, Scientific Advertising. All it takes is someone to curate the best bits and make them accessible to kids.
Some people might take the rather depressing view that there’s no point teaching kids copywriting since AI will soon be doing it all. But AI is being used to interpret chest X-rays and identify cancer more efficiently. Does that mean we shouldn’t bother training any more doctors? Of course not. Across the board, AI is speeding up the processes involved in work, but there’s still a need for humans to exercise judgement, combine ideas and make decisions. Copywriting is no different. The human element will always be key.
Maybe, one day, when I’m making enough money to leave room for some passion projects, I might launch a campaign and lobby the government to teach copywriting in schools. It can’t be that hard. If someone can convince them that preschool kids should learn to read by looking at made-up words and pictures of aliens, then surely someone can convince them that kids should learn copywriting – one of the most important economic skills.
Or maybe someone will do it before then, and I can pursue another of my passion projects, like building a massive treehouse for my kids, safe in the knowledge that the future of copywriting is in good hands.
Until that time comes though, I do need to make sure my kids have an actual house to live in. So give me a shout and let’s get your marketing messages working for you.