“Most Tone of Voice documents are usually garbage. They’re like three pages long and it’s like we’re funny, we’re professional, we’re casual. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s so open to interpretation that everyone can have an opinion and everyone can be right. So it causes more harm than good.”
– Justin Blackman
In this, the first of my celebrity copywriter episodes, I could think of no one better to ask than the wonderful Justin Blackman.
Because as well as having courses and resources on sale, he’s still a working copywriter, indeed he’s worked with some mega famous marketing types (some of whom even I have heard of).
His superpower?
Brand Ventriloquism, no this doesn’t mean he pops his paw up the bottom of his client like puppets.
Rather that he’s mastered the skills of reviewing and replicating his clients voices, to ensure it’s engaging, authentic and lures customers in like eager hedgehogs to a bucket of grubs.
Today Justin will be sharing a little about his how copywriting journey, as well as sharing some Tone of Voice horror stories and best practice tips.
So if writing Tone of Voice and brand guides is on your list of to-dos, this episode is for you.
Tune in to learn:
- How Justin became a copywriter
- Justin’s biggest copywriting career highlight so far
- Career fails Justin has overcome along the way
- Three factors you need to consider when writing tone of voice guides
- Three major mistakes to avoid
- How far you should take your Tone of Voice guide
- How Justin takes care of his mental health
- Justin’s favourite copywriting tool
- Top tip from the TOV-writing guru
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And big thanks to Debs2575 from the United Kingdom for their lovely review:
“Best podcast for actionable copywriting tips.
I love Kate’s copywriting wisdom and “keep it real” approach. No get-rich-quick copy charlatan crap here, just honest and actionable advice from Kate and her guests (who are all real-life working copywriters). Wanna find out how to write copy like the pros? These copy tips will get you on your way to becoming a wordy wonder. Definitely my go-to copywriting podcast.”
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About Justin Blackman
Justin Blackman has written for more than 429 people and managed to sound like every one of them. He uses an ultra-specific voice mirroring process called Brand Ventriloquism®️ to analyze and replicate the nuances that make your voice unique, and documents it so you can scale your content without sacrificing authenticity.
He’s created voice guides for Amy Porterfield, Stu McLaren, Todd Herman, Bobby Klinck, and Danny Iny — and worked with top brands including Puma, IHG hotels, 5-hour Energy, and Red Bull.
When not embellishing his own bio, he runs workshops about brand voice and shows you how to write exactly like your clients.
Fun fact: Justin can talk backwards
Connect with Justin Blackman
Useful Resources
- ProWritingAid Web Editor
- Analyze my writing
- Gender Analyzer – Text Analysis Tools
- Verbatim voice tool (coming soon!)
- Tone of Voice (TOV) Copywriting Template
Transcript
Kate Toon:
In this, the first of my Celebrity Copywriter episodes, I could think of no one better to ask than the wonderful Justin Blackman, because as well as having courses and resources on sale, he’s still a working copywriter. Indeed, he’s worked with some of the most mega famous marketing types, some of whom I’ve even heard of. His superpower, Brand Ventriloquism. No, this doesn’t mean he pops his paw up the bottom of his clients like puppets, but rather that he’s mastered the skills of reviewing and replicating his clients’ voices to ensure it’s engaging, authentic and lures customers in like eager hedgehogs to a bucket of grubs.
Today Justin will be sharing a little about his copywriting journey, as well as sharing some tone of voice horror stories and best practise tips. So if writing tone of voice and brand guidelines is on your list of to-dos, this is the episode for you.
Hello, my name is Kate Toon, and I’m the head copy beast at the Clever Copywriting School, an online community and teaching hub for all things related to copywriting. And today I’m talking with Justin Blackman. Hello, Justin.
Justin Blackman:
Hello.
Kate Toon:
Hello.
Justin Blackman:
This is pretty exciting.
Kate Toon:
I know it’s lovely to see you, all the way from the USA. Let me tell everyone who you are. How dare they not know who you are. But let me explain. So Justin has written for more than 429 people and managed to sound like every one of them. I love that line. He uses an ultra-specific voice mirroring process called Brand Ventriloquism to analyse and replicate the nuances that make your voice unique and documents it so you can scale your content without sacrificing authenticity. He’s created voice guides for Amy Porterfield, Stu McLaren, Todd Herman, Bob Klinck, Dave, Danny Iny. See I got the first ones right, but not the last ones. And worked with top brands like Puma, IHD Hotels, 5-Hour Energy and Red Bull. When not embellishing his own bio, he runs workshops about brand voice and shows you how to write exactly like your clients. Fun fact, Justin can talk backwards. Okay. Obviously we need you to demonstrate this skill. So can I pick any sentence or have you got some pre-prepared?
Justin Blackman:
I’m a little rusty. Well if we do it pre-prepared it’s cheating. I’m a little rusty?
Kate Toon:
Can you say, the Clever Copywriting School is the best podcast?
Justin Blackman:
The Revelc… Copywriting will be tough.
Kate Toon:
Oh, you should have that one.
Justin Blackman:
I haven’t done that one. Gnitirwypoc. School, Loohcs si eht tseb, copywriting again.
Kate Toon:
Just say Podcast.
Justin Blackman:
Podcast, tsacdop.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, exactly. I love it. Okay, Well, it’s a great story.
Justin Blackman:
A little rusty.
Kate Toon:
It’s a little rusty. I think I can do my name, which is Noot Etak, which I think is actually a better name than Kate Toon. I might change it by deed poll.
Justin Blackman:
I like it. It sounds good. It’s a good alien name.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, Noot is just a great name. Anyway, moving on. So Justin, obviously I’ve chatted to you a fair bit over the years, but you are my first celebrity copywriter guest. So how does that feel? Is that inflating your ego?
Justin Blackman:
It’s a little scary. It’s like the guy in the horror movie, “You go first.” And he walks in the dark cave and like, “Oh yeah, no, everything’s fine.” And then he gets disembowelled and hung by his own eyeball. So I’m worried that that’s going to happen.
Kate Toon:
No disembowelment, I promise. No disembowelment. I mean, I guess when I started this pod it was a bit of a shift from my previous ones where we only talked to super famous copywriters. So on this podcast I’ve tried to actually talk to real working copywriters who are doing the work behind the scenes. They may not have a fancy course or whatever, but you have both.
Justin Blackman:
Lowering the bar.
Kate Toon:
I’m increasing the bar. But you have a bit of both. It’s great that you’re talking the talk, but you’re walking the walk. It’s some amazing brands that you’ve worked with. But let’s go right back to the beginning, because obviously now everything’s glorious and fabulous and Amy Porterfield, but I’m guessing it wasn’t always that. What was your life before you were a copywriter and how did you become one? Where did it all begin?
Justin Blackman:
So I think I’ve always been a fan of interesting writing and the science behind it. I remember as a kid, even just going into some of the bookstores and reading about copywriting books when I was like six, seven years old. No, I’m sorry, not copywriting, comedy. It’s like standup comedy. Reading about how to be a standup comedian. I remember being six or seven in a bookstore, reading a book about standup comedy. Obviously I didn’t understand anything about it, but I was always interested in the science behind it. And the way that I got into it was I worked in field marketing for a long time. So I was in charge of a lot of sampling programmes with Red Bull and 5-Hour Energy. With Red Bull, the Mini Coopers with the big cans on the back, I used to manage teams like that. And then I was part of the programmes and so I spoke to hundreds of thousands of people just in all types of different scenarios, and we spent a lot of time on college campuses.
Eventually I got to the point where they started calling me Sir and I was like, oh, I can’t do this anymore. So I had a move from the front lines to the office, which was cool because I had taken all that knowledge about speaking and then I got into the planning side and I was like, so I know how to talk to them, but now I actually have to tell other people how to do it. So that’s when I started getting into the nuance of language and figuring out some of the cause and effect type languages, and then features versus benefits. And then that’s what really introduced me to the world of copywriting and I just dove in headfirst after that.
Kate Toon:
So when did you decide to go out on your own and start your own business as a freelance copywriter?
Justin Blackman:
So with field marketing, I was on a cycle where about every three years I was laid off and that’s just the nature of that industry. It’s sampling programmes get up, then the companies do well and then they cancel the field marketing programmes. So it’s just the nature of the beast. I was doing that and then got to the point where I was like, you know what? I’ve got enough experience that I might try to create my own thing here. And I said, all right, so I need to figure out how to create a website and I Googled how to write a website, how to write a headline, and as I’m writing all this, I’m like, there’s got to be some type of instruction here. And that’s what really introduced me to content marketing and copywriting. And in fact, since I actually spent six months doing a deep dive into copywriting that I never actually launched the business and I ran out of money and I was like, oh, I need to get a job.
So from there I wrote a really good cover letter and applied to a company, huge hotel company here in Atlanta with IHG Hotels. And they brought me in, not on the first, second or even the third round, but on the fourth round they still hadn’t found anyone that they were looking for. And when I met with the director, they’re like, “We brought you in because you have a great cover letter. You don’t have the experience but you can write and I’m looking for someone who can write.” So they hired me and I wound up writing for 14 different hotel brands at the same time, working on every project. I wrote copy that went on cocktail napkins. I wrote elevator wraps. I wrote tonnes and tonnes of emails, tonnes of landing pages, everything you can think of, blogs, banner ads, literally every type of copy that you can write, I wrote. And it was just a great experience. And then slowly built up, Pretty Fly Copy on the back end. And then when I had enough interest and some clients lined up, that’s when I jumped into my own thing.
Kate Toon:
Well, a fabulous way to slip gently into copywriting with a paid job where you’ve got that breadth of writing all those different things. I love writing labels and weird stuff. You could call it microcopy, but the copy that goes on the little cards in the hotel room and just finding fun, playful ways to write that. It’s like my dream copywriting [inaudible 00:08:37].
Justin Blackman:
The Do Not Disturb signs that you put on the door, I did some of those.
Kate Toon:
There’s so much fun to be had there, and whenever you go to a hotel and they’ve been a bit quirky with that, it just makes me love the brand, which is obviously what your vibe is, that tone.
Justin Blackman:
I got a chance to do that.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. You can aim for clarity and precision and make it really succinct, but gosh, when you inject that personality it’s so exciting. And so Pretty Fly Copy was born. As you said, you waited until you had the confidence and a couple of clients lined up. And obviously it seems to have flown pretty well for the last few years. What do you think has been one of your biggest highlights as a copywriter? What’s something that you’ll be like, wow, I was so proud when that happened?
Justin Blackman:
It’s tough not to say the headline project, although I don’t hold that with as much admiration as most people do. That was when I wrote 100 headlines every day for 100 days.
Kate Toon:
Wow.
Justin Blackman:
That’s what put me on the map. That was a challenge. It near killed me. I am proud of it looking back, but I also remember the struggle and the burnout and there was a kind of dark time when I was doing that. But I am proud of it now. I mean, I’ve got some great client achievements. I’ve had my words on some pretty big pages and it’s been pretty phenomenal and I’ve gotten some great accolades. But it’s funny, if you had asked me, what are you going to say for your proudest accomplishment? I don’t know that I would’ve said the headline project, but right now that’s what’s standing out.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? But I love your honesty there because often these things that look great on the outside, they’re really difficult. I was talking before we started the podcast, I’m writing my book and obviously when it comes out and I’m doing my book tour and I’m having my little moment in the airport, it’s going to be glorious. But right now, it’s actually really, really hard, really challenging to sit down every single day and write. My deadline’s pretty tight, so I’m trying to write three to 4,000 words a day and it’s not fun. Having written a book is fun. Writing a book, not so much. I’m glad that you shared the dark side of that.
Obviously you’ve had some amazing clients, but I’m interested in that because we mentioned Amy Porterfield and all these people. I’m sure they do acknowledge you and I’m sure you’ve got testimonials. But is it sometimes weird that you are this ventriloquist, that there’s Amy using your style and your words to build her business? It’s like being a ghost writer and you don’t really get to claim it and go, oh, I wrote that thing she’s saying now. Is it weird that, or are you okay with that? Because I guess you have to be.
Justin Blackman:
I’m okay with it. I’ve written so much copy that I have learned not to hold anything too close to my heart. I look at copy that I remember being proud of, but I don’t actually remember writing it.
Kate Toon:
That’s so true.
Justin Blackman:
I’ll come across old blog posts. I was like, oh man, I forgot about this. And then I’ll read it and be like, that line was really good. Oh right, I actually remember writing that line. I remember being proud of it or I forgot that I wrote it. And just working with so many brands, they would just come in. My work would go through reviews by as many as 14 different people. Sometimes stuff would get cut. I learned not to take anything personally. I learned not to hold any words too dear. So when the stuff gets through, I don’t feel too attached to it anymore.
Kate Toon:
I think that’s a huge lesson, that detachment. And I think that takes some serious time to view the copy that you produce as a product of you but not you. So when it’s loved, don’t take that too seriously. And when it’s loathed, you don’t take that too seriously either. You are able to maintain a constant bar because it’s also subjective as well. And I think if your heart and soul is in every verb you push out, it’s going to be a very emotional journey because I think a lot of copywriters struggle with that. So any advice for people on how to establish that detachment? Is it just time?
Justin Blackman:
I would say, remind them that you’re never going to run out of words. If you write 2,000 words and someone doesn’t like six of them, you can let those six go.
Kate Toon:
I love that.
Justin Blackman:
You can write six new ones.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, it’s like a never ending pot, isn’t it? You’re so right.
Justin Blackman:
Yeah. Creativity doesn’t run out. I mean, you might need to recharge every now and again, but you never run out of words or ideas. I don’t know. Less is usually more. And the other thing that I’ve found is the lines that people debate over, I’ve found that they’re usually the lines that are unnecessary. There were so many times when I would be writing something and people are like, “I’m getting tripped up on this line or this word, can we change it?” And I got tired of the back and forth, so I just deleted the line and I was like, huh, it’s actually better without the line. I stopped trying to fix it. Let’s just get rid of it and it works.
Kate Toon:
Gosh, I love that.
Justin Blackman:
That was one of my secret weapons.
Kate Toon:
I love that. I mean, it’s so funny, I’ve done so many podcasts and talked to so many people, but even just that little thought of you’ll never run out of creativity is so important. Yes, you may burn out, you may get tired, you may need to replenish your tank, but you’re never going to run out of words. I love that. And then you’re right. Sometimes the easiest thing is just like if no one can agree on it, just delete it. That’s so true. But I think sometimes when we write copy, I’ve had moments, it’s often when I take copy too far without client input. So I’m like, oh, I’m on a roll, I’m going to keep going with this. Oh this is so great, this is so great. Then I show it to the client and they’re like, “We don’t like it.”
And I’m like, but I loved it and I’ve invested all this time. So another tip for me to establish that detachment is to not take the copy too far, to get client input as much as possible, to make them feel like it’s their copy, to be a bit iterative. I think when you try and present a perfect polished draught to a client and go, ta-da, then they feel a bit like, oh God, do I have to love this? And that can cause an actual kind of defensiveness of, “I don’t like this. Do I have to just accept this copy? I wanted some input.” So I find being a bit more iterative helps as well. Anyway, that’s my tip.
So we talked about highlights. I love a good fail story because I love to live vicariously through other people’s unhappiness though. So you mentioned that the headline project was challenging. Have there been any occasions where you’ve gone, “Oh my God, that was terrible. I feel queasy about that. That was a bad moment.”
Justin Blackman:
There are a couple. There’s one that’s actually standing out, based off of what you said with going too far. I was doing a website for, actually it was a company in Australia. It was a branding website and I was working on their about page and I was wire framing it and I was putting in some copy and I should have just used Lorem Ipsum, but I was on a roll. I was writing some stuff and I was happy with this. I was like, I don’t know what they’re about, their origin story. They gave me a couple of bullet points and I went and I fleshed out this whole story that was great and I loved it. And I won’t go to the details about what the story was about, but it was kind of like they met in college and this happened and that happened, and then the company was born. And over time I forgot that I made that up and I cleaned it up and I made it perfect and I was so proud of it. And then I showed it to them.
They’re like, “Cool, all right, so do you want us to tell you the real story, so you can write that now?” And I was like, oh, I just wrote an entire fiction piece forgetting that it was fiction.
Kate Toon:
Oh yeah, that didn’t happen. I’ll tell you once I left some Lorem Ipsum in a copy deck and sent it to the client, and they were quite a nervous client, hadn’t worked with a copywriter before. And the comment came back in the edit bar, “We love this, but we think that Latin might not be quite right for our audience.” I think they thought I’d deliberately left it there. It was like cave canum or I don’t know, and they thought it was deliberate. So there you go. Don’t use Lorem Ipsum without telling the client what it is, because we think everyone knows what it is. Have you seen those cool Lorem Ipsum generators that will generate rap Lorem Ipsum?
Justin Blackman:
Yes.
Kate Toon:
I love those.
Justin Blackman:
There’s [inaudible 00:17:13].
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Yeah. I prefer that to my own copy quite a lot of the time. But there you go. So you are the guru of tone of voice copywriting, and you’ve written, as we said, guides for some of the biggest names out there. Obviously for a lot of copywriters, tone of voice is part of the project, but they never get to do maybe the in-depth work that you do. And it’s quite hard convincing clients to take the time to think about their tone of voice before you go and write a giant copy deck. So what are some tips for copywriters who are trying to encourage their clients to pause and think about their tone of voice before they start writing?
Justin Blackman:
Well, from what I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot of voice guides, most of them are not voice. They’re brand personality. And one of the examples that I used, and you might have heard me say this before, is we’re friendly. Our tone of voice is friendly.
Friendly is a personality. Again, I’ve used this example, so if you take the cast of Friends, there are six friends in there. You’ve got Monica, Chandler, Joey, Ross, Phoebe, Rachel. They’re all friends, they’re all friendly. Every one of them has a very unique voice. Friendly is a personality. It’s not a voice. We need to figure out what the verbal identity of the personality is. So that has to do with the three elements of voice, your vocabulary, the word choice that you use, the tones, which are the emotions, the underlying feelings behind everything, which is usually tied more to brand purpose. And the way it’s coming out is it empathetic, is it sympathetic? It’s not just levels of happy. But happy can mean content. It can also mean giddy and boisterous. It can mean serene. There’s all types of level of happy and you need to get granular onto those tones.
So you’ve got those. And then you’ve got cadence, which is the rhythm of your writing.
Sorry, do you hear the phone going off?
Kate Toon:
I do. That’s okay. We’ll keep trucking. So vocabulary and cadence. Are you good? So, I’m just going to stop you there for a minute because yeah, I think even the tone of voice guideline that we have, that we sell by the store, yes, it talks to values, brand values, but that’s not tone of voice. And yes, it talks to brand personality, but that’s not tone of voice. And I think unfortunately a few copywriters don’t go beyond that to actually produce samples again. So we want to come across as knowledgeable. Okay, great. What does that mean? And how do you do that? Does that mean you write long sentences? Does that mean you use big words? Does that mean you use a lot of metaphor or how does this eventuate? Just saying, oh, we want to be knowledgeable. What does that mean? It doesn’t help me in any way. So we talked about vocabulary. Take us back through cadence and what you mean by cadence.
Justin Blackman:
So cadence is the rhythm of your writing. If you read my writing, I write short. My average sentence is eight to 11 words. Most people write about 15 word sentence, 15 to 20 words. So I replace a lot of commas with periods. It’s short, it’s choppy, it’s bouncy, it’s notably shorter than average. If you read some stuff from life coaches that have a more ethereal feel, they can have sentences that are up to 30 words long. They’re long and flowy and gentle and have this rhythmic feel to it. And when you read it, you slow down. You can do that and that’s great. It’s very different if you chop that up. If it’s short, it could be flowy, it could be rhythmic, it could be powerful, it could be deliberate. It’s very different than that softer feel. And those are really, really important.
And you could even play with it. And if you go short, short, short, really long, you could actually make the reader read that long sentence quickly and it could pick up steam. And it’s almost like a rollercoaster that’s going uphill and then goes downhill. Goes longer and longer and your hands are up in the air and you’re screaming and you’re waiting for it to end, and it just never does. So you can change the pacing based off of that. And everybody has an inherent style to it. And that impacts the tone just as much as the words do. So everybody has a style. And as copywriters we tend to write shorter than average. Most of our clients probably write normal, normal in air quotes. So being able to identify the client’s patterns and their cadence is really important because that’s how you begin to pick up their style more than just injecting yours into theirs.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think I’m a short writer as well, partially because I don’t know how to use semicolons. I don’t know how to use them, so I just use full stops. But again, I’m writing my book at the moment and having it read by several people, and some people get my tone and others don’t. They’re like, “Why have you chopped this sentence into three bits?” And I’m like, “Because I want to.” And then, “Why does this paragraph have comma after comma?” And it’s because as you said, I want it to feel breathless. I want people to be like, huh, huh, huh, because then I’m going to bring them down with a big heavy short sentence. You’re feeling this and you’re stressed and you’re trying to do this and then, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Full stop. And it’s like, okay, we’re going up and we’ll come down. I love that.
Justin Blackman:
Yeah. I want your eyes to get hot readiness. I wanted to pick up speed. It’s really important, and it changes the feel of everything.
Kate Toon:
So vocabulary and cadence, what role do you think idiom and slang and metaphor and simile have as well? We were talking before about AI and we might touch on it, but taking the copy from stuff that could be generated by a bot to making it really feel human and knowing. I’m a big believer in humour in copy, but I don’t mean thigh slappy humour. I mean a knowingness where the reader’s smiling and nodding or looking in horror. It’s that kind of humanness in copy. How do we bring that in?
Justin Blackman:
So this is something that Abby Woodcock and I were talking about recently. AI is not great at this yet, but there are some workarounds. AI by nature is programmed, well, I guess not by nature, but by programming, is designed to be happy. You can’t really make it angry. It doesn’t want to do violent, harsh, vicious stories. It will tell you, “We can’t do that.” As for instance, I was writing a story, showing my daughter how to work with this, and it was a story about pirates being lured to the rocks by the sirens, the mermaids who sing. And I was like, make a story about that where the pirates all die. And no matter what we did, the story always had one survivor who could tell the tale. We’re like, make it more violent. It says, “No, we can’t do that.” So it’s designed to be happy.
So that’s okay. That’s great. And I actually like that that’s programmed into the tool. It can’t over agitate and it can’t really upset people, which is a great fail safe. Really happy that that’s there. But it doesn’t do some of the darker tones. One of the ways that I have found that it can be a little bit more playful or a little bit different, is if you ask it to write like someone who’s darker, write it like Stephen King, and then all of a sudden it might get a little bit darker. So there are some interesting things where it does dialogue very well and it does dialogue in a different cadence than it writes.
Kate Toon:
Wow.
Justin Blackman:
So there are some interesting ways to pepper some of the things that you can’t get it to do with natural prompts, by getting it to emulate somebody else.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I put Chuck Palahniuk in. Do you know Chuck Palahniuk? I’d love to do him. But I mean, I’m wondering if this is all as a [inaudible 00:25:29] fourth law that robots can do no harm. So robots can’t write dark copy because it might do damage to humanity. Maybe that’s been coded in to the AI, which is probably a good thing. Although I can see a lot of me as a goth teenager would’ve really been pumping it out for some dark poems. I can see Morrissey would’ve had some fun with AI if it was a bit-
Justin Blackman:
There you go. Getting a little Wednesday Adams on you.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I think going back to we’ve got AI, but even just I think a lot of copywriters are quite fearful about tone and quite fearful about injecting too much and being too playful and being too humorous. Because often the client will say, “Oh, we want some really bouncy fun copy.” And then you present it and they’re like, “Not that bouncy.” Do you know what I mean? So again, there’s this myth that to be professional, to be seen as a business leader, to sell well, that we have to be taken seriously. And I think you and I are probably the antithesis of that in that it’s the truth that you can be as playful and as silly as you like and it doesn’t detract from your authority and your intelligence. But how do we convince brands of that? Because often that’s what happens. You go a bit left of centre and they’re like, “No, no, bring it back. We want more long sentences, please.”
Justin Blackman:
Well, it’s a tough battle. I’ve stopped trying to convince people to do it. I only work with people that are ready to do it and are willing to do it and have probably tried it once before.
But the challenge that I have found is once brands actually do try something funny, copywriters tend to go a little bit off the rails and they want to inject humour everywhere and they put it where it doesn’t belong. If you look at some of the really great funny ads that are out like the Harmon Brothers style ads, whether it’s Harmon Brothers or one of the many other me too type of agencies out there, and there’s some great ones. If you remove the humour, it’s still a great ad. The humour adds to it. I’ve seen brands and I’ve been hired by brands who are like, “Hey, we did something that was really funny and it’s great, but now everything is a mess. And our CEO hates everything that we do.” So it’s like, show me the original, then show me what’s spawned after that. And the original is great and it’s focused and it’s a good ad with a little bit of humour. Everything after that is the copywriters trying to be funny.
And they’re very often freelancers who are brought in. They’re like, “We want more like this.” And they don’t really know how to do it. So they try to put jokes in everywhere rather than support the goal of the ad, which is to convert. So it’s not quite the question that you asked, but there’s a reason why brands are hesitant to get humour and it’s because if you don’t understand it properly and to the right level, you’re probably going to do it wrong.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, and it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous as well. There’s a whole cancel culture and what some people find funny, others don’t. And are you willing to be divisive with your marketing and have people not like it? Bland is safe. It may not have cut through, but it’s safer. I think, I find with writing, if I sit down and try and write a joke, I’ll be there all day. If I try to write copy and something funny pops up, then it works. But if I try to be funny, I think that’s where it fails. So that’s why I talk to knowingness. You’re writing about accountants, they don’t want to joke. And to them, an accountant joke might be like, gosh, end of year tax is a pain in the arse, isn’t it? It’s not funny. But it allows the readers to go, “Yeah, it is, it’s really hard. And thank you for acknowledging that and not just being dry.”
So I think it’s when you try to write a joke, I think that’s really true. So just for the copywriters listening who are thinking that this is something that they’d like to get into, obviously I’m going to share links to all your courses and whatever, but in practical terms, what does producing a brand voice guideline look like? Is this some 80 page beast? Is it a PowerPoint? Does it take you six months? How do you even scope this? How do you even cost this out? It just feels vast.
Justin Blackman:
There are a lot of different ways to do it. The brands who I work with have a well-defined voice. Most of the brands I work with have a well-defined voice. And it gets granular and it’s really important to get everything. And it’s not just about choosing the right words, it’s about the brand ethos and the way that it’s coming to life and really getting deeper into the heart of the brand. Some of my guides are like 127 pages long. They are brand bibles. And that’s not all my writing. It’s a lot of documenting and it’s giving the examples and the references to go off of. I’ve got sample rewrites, I’ve got some before and afters, but there’s a lot of detail and a lot of depth. My shortest ones when I’m creating a new brand, when they don’t have any content and it’s just based off of discovery and going in, those are usually about 27 pages long.
I see a lot of them that are created by writers who upsell it and that’s great. I’m okay with that. But the fact is they’re usually garbage. They’re like three pages long and it’s like we’re funny, we’re professional, we’re casual. Doesn’t mean anything. It’s so open to interpretation that everyone can have an opinion and everyone can be right. So it causes more harm than good. And that’s the challenge that I’m fighting against. And it’s not just the three pages from copywriters. I’ve seen agency ones that have the same thing. They’re just presented in fancy PDFs with bigger logos.
Kate Toon:
It just looks sexy. Yeah.
Justin Blackman:
Right. But they’re garbage.
Kate Toon:
Yes.
Justin Blackman:
They’re absolute garbage, and I’ve worked for big brands that had garbage ones. And as a copywriter it’s set me up for failure. And that’s where my work was getting reviewed and everyone’s like, “Oh well, I’m interpreting it this way.” “I’m interpreting it that way.” “I’m interpreting it this way.” And they’re all right.
Kate Toon:
Yes, I love that. So specificity and granular seems to be the thing. I mean, most brand guidelines I’ve ever been given just tell me how to use the logo and how many pixels to fit around it. And then I get writing guidelines which are like, “we use full stops like this.” And it’s like, okay. So I love that granular.
I think for me, one of the most powerful and compelling ways to convince a client, especially if they’re small business clients who don’t necessarily realise the value of this, Red Bull, they’re going to get it. But if you’re working with say a local business, they might be like, “What are you talking about? We just talk how we talk. We talk how our boss Bob talks and he talks fast. So we want the copy to sound fast.” I find those makeovers, those before and afters really illuminate it. Because you can talk in abstract till the cows come home, but when you take some dry copy and you make it warm, I mean we all love a makeover, don’t we? I’m obsessed with them. And the makeovers with copy I think really help convince clients. So doing small sample before and afters, I think that could be really helpful as well.
Justin Blackman:
Those are great. I like to do those a lot. And what’s nice about that is you can pinpoint exactly what the changes are. Oh, before it was this, we took out that word, we swapped it, we made the vocabulary different. You go to Hemingway app and measure the vocabulary and the readability. Oh, we actually increased the readability, we made it higher, we made it more difficult to read and now it has a different feel to it. We changed the sentence length from 11 to 19. So everything feels a little bit more heavier. It’s not just a quick scan that we’re reading to consume. We have to slow down and now we have to digest it. And that’s the feel that we want. We want that heavier, weightier, more important feel to it. Or it could be the opposite. But by knowing that, by getting into the weeds of the vocabulary, the tone and the cadence, that’s where you get very specific and that’s where you know how to apply these frameworks to all of your copy to keep it consistent.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I love that. But I love what you said there. It’s like we increased the sentence structure and this means that we took all the semicolons out and put full stops in and this means that. We added four more adjectives and this means that. Because I think often the copywriters will be like, “This is what I did.” But they’re not that great at explaining what impact that has therefore had. Wow. It reads so much better. Why does it read so much better? Often the client’s not going to be able to get that, and you need to explain that to them because again, you’re still selling in the copy. Even when you’re writing, it’s not just the proposal, it doesn’t stop there. You’re selling in the copy. We’ve worked with agencies and you would never just send a deck. You stand up in front of the people and you read the copy out and you talk about it and you pitch it to them.
So I think we miss that step sometimes and we assume that they just get it. We reduce the sentence structure, the sentence length, and that makes it slightly easier to digest. Other people might not realise that. They’re not copywriters. You have to go that extra step.
Look, I could talk about this all day. This is one of my favourite topics and I so highly recommend that you follow Justin online and look at his courses. I think there’s no one better at this kind of thing, and the way that you explain it just makes it so doable.
But I wanted to talk before we wrap up a little bit about just the life of a copywriter, because that’s what this podcast is about. From your bio, everything sounds great and glamorous, but you just admitted there that you’ve had some difficult times. How, as a copywriter, do you keep yourself balanced? How do you look after your mental health? How do you keep on trucking? Because you’ve been doing this a while now. How do you turn up every day and stay on top of things?
Justin Blackman:
Poorly.
Kate Toon:
Good. Good, good. Me too.
Justin Blackman:
I do it poorly. Look, I don’t do a lot of social media because I don’t like it and it burns me out and when I post, I feel this need to go and then I’ve got to comment on it and then I’ve got to reply to the comments and then I need to work the algorithm. And the next thing I know, I’ve checked Facebook 47 times in the last 20 minutes and I don’t like doing that. So, I don’t. I mostly focus on email because I can control that. I can respond to it at my time, I can write what I want. I’m not concerned about character length. I’m not concerned about algorithms.
I only work at my desk. I can walk away from it. I miss having an office with a door. I don’t have that right now, but for the most part, I keep my office space as creative as possible. I mean, you can see, well not on podcast, but I’ve got pictures of Muppets and Star Wars and things that inspire me behind me. In front of me, I’ve got even more. I keep it silly, I keep it light. Even over my camera, I’ve got Lego figures. So even if I’m recording a webinar, just recording a video by myself. Yeah, there you go. You’ve got that. I’m looking at Hans Solo, I’m looking at Indiana Jones. I have someone to talk to and it keeps me grounded. But I know my creative times are in the morning. I do wake up at five o’clock, not because I want to work, it’s just because I’m old and that’s what I do.
I would love to sleep later, but I know that my productive times are between 7:00 AM and 11:00 AM. So I get my heavy work done in then and then I can do admin stuff the rest of the day. When I’m tired, I walk away. I don’t try to fight through it. I used to do that. Now I can go take a nap in the middle of the day. I’ve learned to know my circadian rhythm and if I’m tired I don’t work because I know the work is going to be crap and it’s going to be a struggle. If I’m feeling good, I’ll do the stuff that I’ve been trying to put off. But yeah, then I try to get out. I got a dog recently, so that gets me out.
Kate Toon:
Oh, lovely. I love it though. It feels like, slight ridiculous segue, but you’ve understood the cadence of your own working methodology and I think that takes us a while because there’s a lot of hustle culture and push through. And sometimes when you’re on deadline and you’ve left it a bit too late, you do have to push free. But that shouldn’t be all the time. I’m the same. My office, as you can see behind me is full of bright colours and fun stuff. I’ve got my Lego, I’ve got my Star Wars over there. I’ve got a giant cutout of Benedict Cumberbatch in my office for no good reason.
Justin Blackman:
Oh nice.
Kate Toon:
It’s just whatever gives you creative joy. But I love that. And I like what you said there about you work at your desk and you can walk away. I think that’s important.
One little tip. I used to share an office with my partner and he used to breathe really, really loudly, which was super annoying. But also there was no division, so I got one of those room dividers. I reckon you could get a room divider to be a door. Yeah. Might work.
Anyway, we talked a little bit about tools like Hemingway app. Obviously Grammarly does an AI job of telling you the tone of your copy, oh this copy’s happy. Do you use many copywriting tools to get you started to review things? What copywriting tools do you like?
Justin Blackman:
So I don’t use copywriting tools to write. What I use them is to analyse copy when I’m creating voice guides and I use a ridiculous amount. I use ProWritingAid, I use Hemingway app, I use gender analyzers, I use tone analyzers. We’re actually creating one right now. It’s being built. It’s close to being done. It’s going to be called Verbatim and it’s going to be vocabulary, tone and cadence. And the goal of this one is to allow you to measure two pieces of copy side by side so you can see the differences between them. That’s something as a voice guide expert, I’ve been trying to get for years. I usually have not just 20 browser tabs, but I’ve got Firefox and Chrome and Brave and Edge open so I can run the same site on multiple different browsers without overlapping. I have a ridiculous amount of tools open when I measure copy. But honestly, my favourite copywriting tool is still a pen. Nothing beats getting the pen on paper and just kind of letting everything flow.
Kate Toon:
Unfortunately, I think I’ve lost the art of actually writing with my hands. So for me, I’ve got a ridiculous typing speed and it actually is the only thing that’s able to keep up with my brain. My hand can’t. So yeah, it’s interesting.
Justin Blackman:
I get that too.
Kate Toon:
This is a bit of a segue question, but it’s just something that occurred to me. You mentioned Abby Woodcock, I met you at TCCIRL I think, and one thing that strikes me about you is you’re very well connected and you’re very well respected by your peers. Everyone refers to you, and I guess from the outside people would be like, how did Justin achieve that? I mean, you’re obviously a very nice person and you’re always very generous with your time, but how does everyone know who Justin Blackman is? Is it just the quality of your work, do you think? This is a very odd question to answer about yourself, I appreciate, but did you work at that or did it happen naturally? What have you done to achieve this wonderful network that you have?
Justin Blackman:
I don’t know, really. I think, one of the things that I’ve done is I’m not afraid to ask for help and I’ve constantly reached out to people and I’ll tell the stories and they’re like, “Oh my God, you just emailed them?” I’m like, yeah, I had a question for them and that created dialogue and then back and forth, and people have been generous to me and I just pay it forward. I guess the fact is I’m not looking for anything when I start these relationships. I’m just genuinely interested in meeting people and talking to them. I’m not using them as gateways to anything. I’m just genuinely being curious and talking to them and yeah, I mean, I’ll help anyone I can because people have been good to me.
Kate Toon:
And I think one feels when someone is connecting you so that you can maybe be a stepping stone to another thing or when they’re just generally interested in you or have a question, I think you can feel that.
Justin Blackman:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. So lovely. Thank you for that. I guess we’ll finish up. We’ve talked about tone of voice, but we’ve talked about lots of different things today. If someone is listening and they are starting out as a copywriter and they’re excited by this episode and thinking what next, what would be your one tip for a newby copywriter in getting started?
Justin Blackman:
I would say, remember that you’re never going to be as bad as you think you are, but you might not also be as good as you think you might get.
Kate Toon:
Oh, boom. I have to put that on a meme. That’s beautiful. I love it.
Justin Blackman:
I don’t know if it made any sense.
Kate Toon:
It did. It made sense to me, but I’ve had a lot of coffee. Justin, it’s always a delight to speak to you. Where can people find out more about all the wonderful things that you do?
Justin Blackman:
The main place right now is prettflycopy.com. Easiest way to remember that is all the people say, I’m pretty fly for a write guy. It’s a terrible pun. If you’re a Gen X, you probably know it. But yeah, that’s the main thing. And we are actually doing a full rebrand of all the voice guide trainings. Hopefully by the time this is up, you should be able to go to brandvoiceacademy.com and all the good stuff should be there.
Kate Toon:
Fantastic. I know a lot of the members of the Clever Copywriting School have done your courses and rave about them, so thanks again for coming on and being our first celebrity copywriter. There was no disembowelment, no eyeball hanging, so hopefully it wasn’t as terrifying as you thought it might be.
Justin Blackman:
This is the time when it’s going to happen.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, right now when I turn the mic off, it’s all going to happen. Thank you so much, Justin.
Justin Blackman:
Thank you.
