There is an old snobbery that says advertising is where writing goes to die. You sell your soul to sell soap and whatever talent you had drains out through the deadlines. It is a tidy story. It is also, on the evidence, complete nonsense. Copywriters who did a runner into literature Consider Kari Hotakainen. Before…
Everybody wants to go viral. I understand the appeal because we have done it more times than I can count. Very Finnish Problems, which began as a bet to reach ten thousand people, now reaches around fifteen million a month across its channels (a figure I still do not entirely believe). We have watched a…
Nobody knows what a copywriter is. I do not mean the public are a bit hazy on it. I mean nobody knows, including the people married to one. A very bad prediction When Anna told me she wanted to be one we were somewhere in the middle of Chile more than twenty-five years ago with…
Something strange is happening to the way the world writes and once you notice it you cannot unnotice it. Every company has started to sound like the same overfamiliar customer service assistant who has had three coffees and read one book about empathy. The words are frictionless. The tone is exhaustingly nice. Every sentence arrives…
Finnish does not translate. I do not mean it is merely hard, though it is. I mean that a great deal of it refuses to cross into English at all. The longer I live beside it (and beside a wife who translates it for a living) the more I think that is the best thing…
I have spent the better part of two decades watching people try to win with words on a screen and I have done my watching all over the world rather than only here in Finland. I have written about it for the Sunday Times and I have spent years helping the European Parliament and the…
There is a particular corporate horror that only social media can produce. One moment a brand is posting quietly into the void. The next it is the main character of the internet for all the wrong reasons. Somewhere a marketing manager is watching the numbers climb with the face of someone who has left the…
