“Must be a good speller” has of course never been on any creative agency job description, in the same way “must be able to feign interest” has never appeared on any state DMV job spec.
It’s just honesty in what matters when being true to your company’s DNA.
(I actually was once presented an agency pitch where they spelled our company’s name wrong on the front page. And I say – Fine! Part of me suspected this may have been done on purpose, to subconsciously demonstrate the agency’s creative bona fides).
Companies hire agencies not for their spelling, but for their right-brain creativity, an ability to channel the zeitgeist of the current culture, see the unseen, peer around corners, delight the masses – – or at the very least recite the end benefit dictated by the client, clinically articulate some sort of reason why, and spend weekends furiously preparing work for a Monday morning deadline that the client will not bother to read until late the next week.
On the other hand, everyone else in the client’s creative development food chain is supposed to be boring left-brainers – – you know, MBA brand managers, corporate lawyers, etc. – – the adults in the room. Their job is generally to mold the work into something that will ideally retain a speck or two of passing resemblance to what the agency presented and was approved, but mostly to keep everyone from getting sued.
Complicating things, in this culture where calculators have replaced the ability to do simple math and watching John Oliver counts as keeping up on current events, the written word has come increasingly under attack – – my auto-correct gives me ‘gonna’, ‘wanna’, can’t tell a plural from a possessive, etc. – – and the word ‘literally’ can now be used to imply exactly the opposite.
But the techno-world has accommodated these realities – – through Grammarly, spellcheck, etc., we can check copy automatically to make up for the increasing absence of people who know that ‘gonna’ isn’t a word.
So it was a bit surprising that a full-page, back cover color ad in today’s WSJ ($300k+) has a prominent misspelling on probably the focal word in the message – ‘rarified’. We may give the agency a pass, but a clear fail on the client’s word police, and also potentially the paper (after all, the correct spelling – ‘rarefied’ – is used in an editorial piece just a few pages away.) Is no one in the ad department checking the copy?
I don’t want to hear ‘but if no one knows the correct spelling, who cares’, or ‘a misspelling will change the purchase intent of exactly no one’, or ‘what they used is technically an alternate spelling’. All are probably true.
But my points are more true.
Rant over. I hope this generates furious conversation about the merits and importance of good spelling in ad copy.
But more than that, with all the negativity surrounding us these days, I hope this has provided a few minutes of (admittedly mindless) distraction.
Happy Holidays. Now get back to work.
The Armchair MBA 