It’s time I was honest with you. I’ve got a confession to make.
I’m not just here to sell stuff.
When I scroll through my LinkedIn feed, I hear two kinds of voices. The first kind sounds fun, welcoming, entertaining at times. These are the voices of marketers, talking about six figures, pain points, customer journeys.
Then there are the other voices. The hard-to-listen-to voices. The voices of people who can’t look away. They talk about the IPCC, the trees. They talk about the things that are getting broken. Things that no one knows how to fix.
The first group of voices talks because they need to eat. They need to feed their children. The second group talks because they can’t stay silent.
I write for lots of reasons. I write to get to know myself better. I write to say things I’d struggle to say out loud. I write to entertain my kids. And for these last two years, I write to pay the bills and grow my business.
I don’t identify as an ‘ethical copywriter’, for two reasons. Firstly, I’m not quite at the stage where I can only work with clients with proven sustainability commitments.
Secondly – and I don’t think everyone’s going to like this – I think that if you’re going to spend every day honing your power to persuade, there’s more effective ways to use it than selling more stuff, even if that stuff is in cardboard rather than plastic, or made with old shoes rather than fresh cotton.
Don’t get me wrong – we need all those solutions, and more. And those solutions need marketing persuasively. But we also need to move the conversation. We can’t just shop differently, we need to live differently. And no one’s going to pay me to say that.
I’m still figuring a lot of this stuff out, obviously. But I think the dark, cynical part of everyone’s brain that we use to block out the inconvenient truth sees the words ‘ethical’ and ‘sustainable’ as just another selling tactic. So if you earn a living from selling eco-solutions, your message is unavoidably tainted by self-interest.
In my lifetime, there’s only ever been one voice that’s cut through the noise. A voice so innocent, so unencumbered by allegiance to any tribe or creed, that her first name alone is now synonymous with the approaching mass extinction that threatens our species. I don’t even have to say her name here, you know who I mean.
“Go try journalism, instead, then”, you might suggest. But I’m not sure that’s the answer. ‘The medium is the message’, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, all those years ago. Would ‘Don’t Look Up’ have reached any kind of audience, without the trappings, distribution, and promotional clout of Netflix? Would Attenborough’s ‘Planet Earth’ work, stripped of the incredible visual content?
I’m not looking to preach, I’m looking for a conversation. I think what I’m asking is, ‘Does selling stuff impair your integrity as a persuader? And if so, how can we get around that?’ Maybe it’s the wrong question, but it’s a place to start.
This blog won’t travel far. But the next one might. I’ve decided that if I need to build a platform of influence on social media to feed my family anyway, I also need to talk regularly about the things that matter. It’ll probably be cringey, self-righteous, and gauche. But I intend to use my marketing and writing skills to push these messages as hard, and as persuasively, as I can.
I’m not an ethical copywriter. But I won’t be silent, either.