The skinny on Copywriting Club - Manchester

Braving weather so wet even the fish looked fed-up, our hardy copywriting clubbers headed for cover at an evening of copy chatter – and a good dry-off

Torrential downpours aren’t exactly something Manchester gets its knickers in a twist over.

But as the clock ticked around to Club time, a glance outside revealed rising water levels and concerned faces amongst the local ducks. Luckily, Copywriting Club – Manchester features not only a gang of talented writers, but people with innate survival skills.

Particularly if the end-goal is a warm pub and the prospect of getting stuck into a debate about copy, the dreaded “b” word and swapping a few anecdotes about clients that will go unpublished here.

With everyone dried off, we took a look at work our writers loved, hated or fancied having a natter about. On our journey through copyland we applauded these classy OOH, social and print executions from Tesco, with their reminders about those items we need, but so often leave hanging.

There was admiration for the ambition and creative vision behind a series of homelessness posters developed by the charity Depaul. The storytelling won particular acclaim, with clever execution meaning passers-by get to see another side to the story. Mounted on corners, one side of the poster details why the reader shouldn’t help the homeless, the other side reads out the exact opposite and thus put together delivers a compelling narrative to drive people to help out those less fortunate.

Our writers were non-plussed, however, by Stella’s new “Be legacy” brand campaign. Trite, under-considered and something of a non-entity: there was considerable opposition to writing that left us nothing to feel.

We peered further into the campaign, bemoaning slogans that are tweetable rather meaningful. And a look around for other industry reaction to the Stella work shows it’s come in for criticism from some of copywriting’s star names.

We rounded off with a flurry of chatter about the role of the brief for today’s multichannel writer, but we’ll bring you more on that in the near future.

A huge thanks to our writers and creatives for turning out in such awful condition and carrying on the debate in fine style.

Copywriting Club - Manchester returns in September (it will be here sooner than you think. Gulp) so grab a place and come along.