My work in copy
Welcome to my private portfolio. Rather than a series of links to my entire body of work (which you can find here), I want to walk you through a few stories that demonstrate how I work with copy.
Working with what I’ve got.
Often, clients come to me with vague ideas of what they want, scant information about their products and services, but high expectations over content. Ideally, I can sit down with them and work through these issues, to build mutual understanding, and tease out what would work best for both of us. Sometimes, however, the work is desired urgently, and the client has no time to provide more information.
Take, for example, the brief pictured on the right. The details are few, and I had only a couple of hours to research, plan, and write the article. It was a ‘take it or leave it’ situation. Click the button below to see the result. What it demonstrates is an ability to research around a topic, come up with a compelling angle, adjust it to the tone of the audience (mature, semi-interested office planners), and integrate keywords in a short space of time.
It was published Sept 2022, and has ranked 1st on Google for ‘soundproofing covid’ ever since.
Explaining new concepts
I’m often presented with situations where I’m asked to explain concepts that are fairly new, or at the very least new to most readers. They’re often complex, they need distilling into simple language and demonstrating through real-world examples. In the past I’ve handled this with DeFi, NFTs, various ideas in robotics, art and even philosophy.
One example that stands out in my memory is a piece I wrote about KOC marketing. Not only was the concept only a year or two old at the time of writing, but I personally had never heard of it. The target audience was in-house marketing professionals and business developers, with the intention of generating queries for a marketing agency. It had to be engaging, and toe the line between being informative enough to pique interest, but with enough gaps for the queries to be generated.
I was pleased with the result, which you can see by clicking the button below. It was published 14 months ago, and still ranks on the front page when Google searching ‘What is KOC Marketing?’
Getting personal
Some of the most exciting copy work comes when asked to write from a first-person perspective. It’s also possibly the most perrilous, because when writing one’s own view, it’s important to get the tone right without appearing performative, and when representing another person’s view, getting their voice right, in spite of desires to edit, can be tricky. In both cases, the master key, the holy grail, is authenticity.
Below are three samples. The first two come from a content drive in my old marketing agency where we each shared things we liked, loved and hated on a given topic. It worked out well for both myself and the readers, as I got to stretch my cultural analysis muscles a bit, while injecting some personality. The third is one of many interviews I conducted with artists in 2019. The questions were always the same, the challenge came in writing true to their voices.