In Defence of Cliché

My first job in advertising was a fluke; I had no formal training and never went to ad school. Like many of the uninitiated, I thought copywriting had something vaguely to do with intellectual property and trademarking. 

I was in my mid-twenties and living in Copenhagen during the zenith of Vice Media, who were rapidly shifting from edge-lord gonzo journalism to becoming an advertising juggernaut. To service their growing list of global clients, they needed native English-speaking copywriters, of which there wasn’t a surplus in the Danish capital. I saw a Facebook post from a friend who worked there, an SOS for such copywriters, and I decided to reach out.  

As I explained in my email, while I didn’t meet all the criteria they mentioned, I was a writer. So I didn’t see why I couldn’t learn whatever it was they needed me to do easily enough. I sent them a ‘portfolio’. It included the opening from a novel in progress, a chase scene between a guy riding a rescued dairy cow and a pack of angry police dogs; an article about Danish-government online surveillance that I’d written during an internship at an English-speaking newspaper; and a link to my then Tumblr blog about street food called ‘Good and Greasy CPH’.  
          ‘Great,’ they said. 
          ‘Great,’ I responded.  

Within a few weeks, I was working in Vice’s palatial Scandinavian offices as a copywriter. They had me on a part-time student contract that saw me earn as much as I was being paid before as a waiter. Back then, being paid anything at all for writing was an all-too rare privilege. Little ol’ me? I was stoked. 

Once I finished my Bachelor of Arts, Vice rewarded me with a full-time contract as a junior copywriter. My chest hummed with excitement whenever I strode through the heavy wooden doors of the inner-city heritage building into the capacious, high-ceilinged office. I felt part of an ecosystem of young creatives frolicking in an endless stream of thrilling projects, which we would discuss (along with our weekends’ partying) over complimentary buffet lunches. We drank beers at our desks on Friday afternoons, when they’d turn on the big speakers and blast the trap music that was in vogue. It was awesome, and I was proud to be a copywriter.  

I had been hired by an Australian woo-girl and art director. I think she gave me the job partly as she appreciated having a fellow Sydneysider around. Her 2IC was my first real copywriting mentor, a Danish guy who was nice enough, but had a vulgar sense of humour and a somewhat abrasive, American-ish accent. Whenever we got a new brief, he would begin his brainstorm by making up a rap about the product, to get in the zone.  

Under their tutelage, I learned the ropes of advertising. It quickly became apparent that the bigger the client, the more budget they had for projects, and the cooler these projects would be. The downside was that the company you were helping to look cool was probably evil: multinational corporations, advertising to kids, Big Tobacco, that kind of thing. The more wholesome clients generally needed more basic work done and had less money for creativity and coolness.  

Eventually the time came to leave Vice and return to Australia, where I landed a job at a small agency that serviced even more wholesome (and modestly financed) clients. Their measly scopes tended to mean that any ‘copywriting’ was merely copy-pasting approved brand language for social media, regurgitating iterations of the same asset over and over again, to lukewarm responses from their followers.  

Where my introduction into advertising had felt like entering a utopia of opportunity for a creative, I began to see the sector as an elephant graveyard for struggling or failed artists. That is, of course, a cynical way to frame things; there are plenty of creatives who maintain an artistic practice while working corporate jobs, and many people work in advertising by volition, not because they failed elsewhere. When I first began copywriting, I told myself I was in this category. Yet I was nearing my 30s and finding myself gripped by existential crisis. I’d entered this industry just wanting to write, period, and had been stoked to be doing so for a day job. Now, after sitting at my computer all day, I rarely had the energy to work on a short story or poem, much less a novel. I wanted to relax, watch something mindless, perhaps socialise, indulge in some distracting hedonism. I definitely didn’t want to do more writing.  

What’s more, the further up the ladder I climbed, the more money I was paid, and the more I got used to the lifestyle that came with it. The door to my dreams of being a Capital-W Writer was closing, and I was becoming less and less inclined to attempt a squeeze-through. I realised this when I was at a house party speaking to a Dutch woman who had studied climate science but now worked for an oil company. She’d gone in with the idea that she’d change the industry, for the better, from within. Instead, she found herself jaded and unable to do anything about much at all. Plus, she liked the company car and the salad bar and free gym subscription too much to give it all up. She was in ‘the gold-plated prison’, as she told me it was phrased in Dutch.  

Fuck. I was in the gold-plated prison, too, even if my bars shone with significantly less lustre than hers. Whatever happened to my authorly ambitions? To having my words printed in serif-font on eggshell paper stock, bound in artistically designed covers? Instead, they cluttered strangers’ Instagram feeds and flashed as banner ads that were often blocked by Google Chrome plugins. Why was I wasting my life burn-and-churning out EDMs for insurance companies?  

I attempted to give my place in advertising meaning, trying out unsuccessfully for AWARD School: Sydney and Australia’s premiere ad school, self-proclaimed as ‘the ultimate creative hothouse’. At the open day, we were addressed by various industry speakers, who gave us a flavour of what to expect. The words of one speaker stuck with me, a bald, middle-aged man from California: ‘Remember – you aren’t making art.’ He said this as though it were virtuous, or something to call to mind whenever we felt a bit lost. It reverberated in my ears when my overcooked application was rejected. I knew I was trying to make this thing that was taking up so much space in my life into art. Because that’s what I really wanted to make. And according to this highly respected industry veteran, despite the facade of prestigious award ceremonies in the South of France, studios full of hip young people and big-budget projects, there wasn’t room for art in the ad world.  

Trying to shoehorn purpose into my current life had failed. A realisation dawned: I needed to get out before it was too late. So, I did what any rational person would do. I quit my job and went back to uni to study literature and creative writing.  

Back in the fiscal realities of student life and the arts, I learned that I was right to fear leaving the gold-plated prison, although I was glad I did. Saving money was difficult and I didn’t take an overseas holiday for years. That was partly because of COVID, of course. But due to my income, it took me far longer than most young people I knew to rip the post-pandemic band-aid off and take a proper holiday again. At least my work hours were reasonable, and I had renewed energy to put into my practice and passion. I learned other things, too, about creative creative writing, which was the whole point of leaving the ‘creative industry’ in the first place.  

There were some principles I picked up in media and communications that were still useful, like avoiding the passive voice. Yet there were others that were more like bad habits, at least in the eyes of the people whom I’d now given authority to judge my work. The hardest of these to shake is my tendency towards cliché.  

Where my former mentor had his rapping, every time I got a new brief for a tagline or needed a catchy headline to tie things off, I found myself looking up idioms. A rule of thumb that wasn’t rocket science but a sure-fire way to spice things up and hit the nail on the head. I took immense satisfaction in learning a new idiom or recalling one that was the perfect fit for selling a certain product or service. These catchy colloquialisms could enliven any piece of copy, even an entire campaign, making it feel clever or human. However, when they found their way into work submitted for uni assignments or creative writing workshops, they were immediately called out as clichéd. It’s taken me a long time to accept that where, in copywriting, clichés are ingredients, in creative writing proper they’re frowned upon.  

While I agree that leaning on a cliché might be a prosaic get-out-of-jail-free card, I do think they get a bad rap. The general criticism is that clichés are lazy, which I can understand. Yet sometimes I feel like this feedback itself is lazy or one-dimensional. Similarly to ‘show, don’t tell’ it’s all too easy to look for common idioms in writing, label them as clichéd and suggest their removal. But why is using a common idiom such an issue in the first place? Should art ever be confined to any one way of existing?  

Besides, Australians love a zingy one-liner, and often the more it’s used, the funnier it gets. From not fucking spiders to having roos loose in the top paddock or smuggling budgies… The list is constantly growing, with the next generations and arrivals of new citizens adding their own touches to the informal lexicon. That’s a beautiful thing, in my opinion, something particular to our culture that’s rich and alive.  

I may also like these lingual flourishes because I missed them while I was living in Denmark, where most of the English I spoke was broken, or at least slowed down and sanitised. At the same time, I saw this cultural feature as a link between Australian English and Danish, which enjoys many of its own bizarre yet beloved turns of phrase. Some classics include: Det blæser en halv pelican, meaning, It’s blowing a half pelican, i.e. it’s very windy; and Der er ingen ko på isen, translating to, There’s no cow on the ice, or, it’s all good. 

Clichés or variations on them are a way to immediately connect with an average, non-literary audience in an evocative way, almost with the warmth of an in-joke. Clichés are democratised wordplay, metaphor for the masses. And I like that; although my supervisor – an acclaimed Western Sydney author – hates them. She told me so after reading the latest draft of my doctoral thesis: ‘The clichés are an issue. It’s bad.’ While the average Australian might get a kick out of cliché, the Australian creative writing academy doesn’t. Like it or not, I have to play ball and weed them out. At times, I’ll try to counterpunch the critique by flipping a cliché, rather than doing away with it totally, letting the bathwater out from beneath the baby gently, if you will. Whether that’s successful or not is taken case by case.  

Maintaining a critical eye for playful layman’s terminology does challenge me to engage more deeply with the words I’m writing. Whether I choose to leave, flip or delete, the writing is only improved by interrogating each phrase to see whether it might be replaced with something more considered and original.  

Additionally, I’m embracing being a chameleon, learning to take off my marketing cap and put on a literary one. In fact, since going back to copywriting, on my own terms, I have to switch between these caps frequently. Writing this piece, I’m kinda wearing both at the same time. Sucked in, haters.  

Despite my momentary existential crisis, you might say I’ve gone crawling back to communications. Or euphemise that I’ve gone full circle. Today, I’m fortunate enough to be writing copy and content in a part-time job that supports my literary pursuits. I’m ‘client side’ – a first since working at agencies both big and boutique – and I do the odd bit of freelancing. The part-time arrangement sits nicely, for the most part. I enjoy the stability, the guaranteed hours, sick leave and holidays, while not being a prisoner of a 9-to-5, high-pressure deadlines and the expectation of bringing work home with me. I have the bandwidth to focus on my thesis, as well as other meaningful projects. Now, I can better take what I want from the job while getting less caught up in or bothered by what I don’t like. I’ve still never been to ad school and I don’t think I ever will.  

I’ve accepted that copywriting can be a double-edged sword. It takes up time I could be spending on other writing, yet supports my practice financially. Advertising can feel creative and involved one day, then completely mindless and void of inspiration the next. ‘Killing zombies’ is how an accounts director back at Vice once termed it. You’ve just gotta keep blasting your way through the relentless barrage of tedium to get to the work that really tickles you. For every tired Instagram caption, dry web-banner or formulaic EDM I have to write, eventually I’ll reach something I can really sink my teeth into.  

Now that I’ve had time to ruminate, I’m not sure if I agree with that defeatist AWARD School speaker that marketing can’t be art. While it’s helpful to see the two writing styles as different and separate (just as academic writing is), I do believe that, at their core, creative writing and copywriting share many fundamentals. Arguably, the goal in both is to sell: as a novelist or poet, you’re selling a world, a character, a concept for a reader to buy into, not unlike how a commercial sells a product. The writing must be coherent in order to achieve its goals. Creative flair or emotional insight can take a piece from successful to exceptional. Where fiction is a vehicle for plot and develops character, advertising drives sales and develops brands. As a reader of a novel, I am chauffeured along, not unlike an audience eased through a marketing funnel. Where poetry expresses the self, advertising expresses the company selling it. Just as grammar steers the prose writer, communication guides dictate what the copywriter can say and how. The room for creativity in copywriting may be limited, but that isn’t always such a bad thing for creativity, as the work of literary writers like those of the Oulipo movement demonstrate. 

Over the course of the past seven years, I’ve run a literary project, Fondue, known for putting on open mic nights for local writers to share their work. Each event has a new prompt, often related to the activities of the organisation at the time; our first event after the pandemic was themed ‘Revival’ and our tenth ‘Milestone’. For each of these, I’ve written an original piece, sometimes several, as I attempt to nail the brief: something thematically relevant that’s entertaining for a live audience and less than five minutes long. Fondue’s latest project is our first book, titled shape/shift and featuring writers of short prose from around Australia. With every project, we get more ambitious as organisers, and the challenges never cease to inspire me.  

In my copywriting life, I’ve also done work I’m proud of, that I’d be happy to share with even the most highbrow of literary judges. I’d gladly show my supervisor the work I did for Durex, where we invented a superhero: Captain Condom to the rescue! And I must admit I enjoyed writing in a Zoomer tone-of-voice for Coca-Cola’s blog about the cultural significance of pineapples. The same was true of ghostwriting as a CEO for a leading Australian FinTech company in their white paper about influence. Now, I work for an Inner West craft brewery and get to learn about chemistry and biology, interview local artists and spotlight the up-and-coming restaurants we partner with for our content. It isn’t all bad, I must concede. 

Plenty of Capital-W Writers have gotten their start in advertising anyway. The well-documented list includes some of my writing heroes like Don DeLillo, yet often omits examples from closer to home. Peter Carey began his career as a copywriter, satirising this time in his debut novel Bliss; he’s gone on to become one of only five people to win the Booker Prize twice. More recently, Bosnian-Australian writer Ennis Ćehić published his debut short-story collection Sadvertising, while enjoying a career as a brand strategist, copywriter and creative director.  

Beyond buttering my bread (and corrupting me with a penchant for cliché) advertising has endowed me with an aptitude for following briefs, meeting deadlines and taking feedback. All of this, I feel competent in, where other kinds of writers I’ve encountered may struggle. I’ve actually avoided cliché here, sidestepping the stereotype of the disorganised artist, sloppy with communication and commitments. I might not always deliver a masterpiece first go, but I will deliver something, which I’m happy to shape through constructive criticism that I’m (mostly) grateful for. 

So, what is the point of this essay? Is it apologism for literary writers working in advertising or a critique? A bit of both, I guess. I see the situation as a bit like duck meat: if properly cooked, it can be fantastic – get the recipe wrong and it’s disgusting.  

That might be fence-sitting… What I will say is that if there were more opportunities for creative writers, we wouldn’t need to go into advertising in the first place. That way, the space would be left for the Capital-C Copywriters who really want to be there. 

Support the arts, perhaps that’s the takeaway – a cliché in and of itself. Maybe it’s proof that some statements remain just as potent, no matter how many times we use them.