There is only advertising

A reply to Suzanne Pope, fifteen years on.

14 October 2025

A simple cover for Suzanne Pope's An Inconvenient Truth for Copywriters: How to write headlines and why your career depends on it. Suzanne Pope, john st., Toronto. Beside it, her example of hyperbole, an ad for The Economist by Mad Dogs & Englishmen, New York.

Suzanne Pope wrote An Inconvenient Truth for Copywriters around 2010. Group creative director at john st. in Toronto. Seventy-one pages, forty-odd ads, every agency credited.

Part One is the warning. The industry had gone visual. The awards were going to ads without a headline. Some agencies had started hiring two art directors and no writer. “If we as copywriters agree that words are now redundant, we ourselves will soon be redundant.”

Part Two is the way out. Rhetoric. Metaphor, personification, hyperbole, irony, paradox, puns, parallelism, anesis. Two thousand years old and, she says, still amazingly sharp. Practise them like scales.

Her best line isn’t hers. She takes a bad pun to Jerry Goodis, her first boss, and he hands it straight back. If you’re going to do a pun, it has to kick both ways.

Her examples

A print ad: a photograph of a boot print in moon dust beside the line JOHN KENNEDY'S FINGERPRINT. and the John F. Kennedy Library & Museum logo.

Metaphor. John F. Kennedy Library & Museum. The Martin Agency, Richmond.

A print ad on a pale yellow background: "Margarine is, like, so freaked out right now." above a tub of Gay Lea Spreadables, with the line Butter that spreads.

Personification. Gay Lea Spreadables. john st., Toronto.

A black and white print ad of a Mercedes-Benz convertible driving fast, under the line "Priced so you can feel the wind in your hair while you still have your hair."

Parallelism. Mercedes-Benz used cars. The Martin Agency, Richmond.

A print ad with the headline "Send in the clones." over a photograph of a black Honda Accord sedan and columns of body copy.

Pun. Honda Accord. Rubin Postaer & Associates, Los Angeles.

You can name the device in every one. It tells you nothing about why they’re good.

The device is a slot. What goes in the slot is the job.

Special Buys

Not “weekly deals”. Not “limited offers”.

Special Buys. Faintly wrong. Slightly foreign. “Buys” as a noun, which it barely is. People say it out loud in the aisle without embarrassment.

CBA’s can (M&C Saatchi, 2012). It shouldn’t hold. It held.

Bankwest, the just enough bank (Bear Meets Eagle On Fire, 2025). An apology right up until you notice it’s a boast.

KFC cut its three most famous words down to FLG (Ogilvy, 2025).

DiDi’s Yes, I DiDi (Sunday Gravy, 2025). Kicks both ways. Lodged in my head against my will.

I’d rather advertising just be advertising, but Pope credited everyone, so there they are. Except Special Buys. I couldn’t find who named it.

A word somewhere it had no business being, and then it can’t be taken out. There’s no name for that in her list.

Mine

Send Joy, for Inke. You-shaped property, for Shape Property Group. 24/7/7/11, for 7-Eleven.

Two of them you haven’t heard of. None of them came out of a method.

The machine

A language model is a next-likely-word engine. Ask for twenty headlines using anesis and you get twenty, four of them kick both ways, and it takes eleven seconds. Pope’s scales are the most automated thing in the building.

Has one ever handed me the right weird word? Not yet.

Weird is cheap now. Right-weird never was. That still takes something closer to divine intervention, or desperation.

If I’d been a creative in the fifties

Some things that might have happened.

A photograph that looks like 1970s slide film: riggers craning an enormous painted jaw into place on a rooftop billboard of a cowboy, above the words STRONG JAWMAN with the last two letters unpainted. The image is machine-generated; the billboard never existed.

Hyperbole.

A photograph that looks like it was taken through a car windscreen in 1970s Los Angeles: a billboard showing a vast burgundy sedan with a very small man in a suit standing beside it, and the words MORE CAR. LESS MAN. above the invented brand name Orvant. The image is machine-generated; the billboard never existed.

Parallelism.

A photograph of an open magazine on a wooden table: a full-page furniture advertisement showing a young man sitting alone on a red sofa in a tidy living room with price labels on the lamp, shelving, sofa and coffee table, under the headline SELF ASSEMBLY. and the invented brand name Velmora. The image is machine-generated; the magazine and the advertisement never existed.

Pun. And a jump forward to the grungy nineties.

The lines are mine. A machine made the pictures.

So whose job was that?

Is it still a copywriter’s remit? Or is it the world Pope was warning about in Part One, come true by a different road, with the roles merged completely.

No copywriter. No art director. Only advertising.