Watch out for camels! What to do about copy by committee.

A camel is a horse designed by committee. You want a sleek, muscular thoroughbred to win prizes and plaudits at the Derby. What you get is a weird, flat-footed beast, swaying slowly across an empty desert. Usually in a very bad temper.

All of which makes it the perfect metaphor for any piece of copy or content that has also been written by committee.

It doesn’t matter if everyone is piling in in the name of democracy (“Join in everyone. We’ve no hierarchies here!”) or autocracy (“We are in charge. We need to approve everything that leaves the building!”), committee-writing is guaranteed to get you lumpen, plodding text and uncomfortable results. The bad temper comes as standard.

The thing about camels is they’re hard to disguise. They can’t be mistaken for anything else. And the same is true of copy by committee. The wandering narrative. The halting sentence structures. The stops and starts, and odd gear shifts when it comes to tone and voice. And – like its humped counterpart – copy by committee goes on forever. For Ever!

Even original briefs can turn into camels.

“I really like what this very large bank has done. Can we do something similar but completely different.”

Or… “It’s important that we get these points across, but we don’t want to tell the public about them!” (This example is real and recent!)

Both are classic camel characteristics.

And yet, despite the very obvious problems they cause, camels can be found wandering marketing departments the world over with distressing frequency.

Watch out... they spit!

There are times when the process of writing copy is a team sport. And there are times when it really isn’t. Producing content requires collaboration, but not all the time. The trick is making sure that everyone who needs to have their say has it at the right point in the process. After that, they can politely but firmly be told to go away and do something more constructive with their time.

Of course, when senior management are running interference on the copy development process, it is hard to stop them. Many of the camel’s progenitors are distinctly political, and it takes a political solution to create a better way of working.

Assuming that the politics problems have been solved, what can you do when it’s open season on your copy, and someone is spitting in your face?

First up, you can accept that your beautiful racehorse has gone to the knackers’ yard, and make the best of a bad job. This might be making a few extra tweaks yourself so you end up with something closer to a draught horse: inelegant but dependable, and eventually gets a job done (even if it’s not quite the same job you originally planned for).

Or you could propose an alternative way to give everyone their say: a series of shorter bits of focused content, for example, that together create a more powerful, workable whole. More like pit ponies than racehorses. There are surely other solutions with suitable equine metaphors that you could come up with.

Still, this isn’t hugely satisfying, especially when you’ve spent time and creative energy breeding your thoroughbred – and you know that there is a more effective piece of work desperate to escape from underneath all the lumps and bumps.

The first thing is to think about prevention rather than cure.

The people who are going to be contributing to or feeding back on any piece of copy should be involved from the very beginning. The ideal time to get their input is at the proposal or briefing stage. If they understand what the content is intended to do (and, importantly, what it is not intended to do) before a word is written, it is going to be easier to push back against unhelpful suggestions and demands.

What’s more, if the brief itself has camel-like tendencies, it is much quicker (and cheaper) to get those sorted out before any creative work has been done. It comes with the added advantage of identifying where any internal disagreements and discrepancies are lurking, giving the business a chance to fix them before they bubble up somewhere else.

The second thing we can do, as copywriters, is to make sure that we can justify our copy and explain why we have written what we have.

It’s tempting to dash off a piece of brilliance and expect everyone to love it just because. But if we can also explain why a piece of content is constructed just so, why we have used the techniques we have, and what the consequences of changing it will be, it becomes easier to defend and where necessary push back. If it gets to that point, we need the weapons to kill off the camels as humanely as possible.

I think there is a common belief that skills like graphic design, photography, SEO, UX and others that regularly come into contact with copywriting are best left to the professionals, but that anyone can knock out a couple of a paragraph or two when it’s needed, or just add a word here or sentence there. In my experience, copy is often the afterthought once the ‘creative’ is done. When you think like this then having a team of people tinker with copy doesn’t sound bad at all.

It will not surprise you to learn that I don’t agree.

First of all, copy can’t deliver results if there’s no agreement and consistency on what those results should be.

Second, producing winning content is a skill that can be learned and continuously improved. Like graphic design, there are certain rules that work, and techniques that help deliver real results. Copywriters know what those rules are – although we probably need to get better at explaining them.

And, frankly, copywriters know how to break rules to create impact rather than an unproductive hot mess!

So, if you want content that earns you a strut around the winner’s enclosure, then maybe, just maybe, take a step back and trust the experts. The never-ending feedback loop is good for no one.