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I saw the movie Up in the Air recently and thought it made a few interesting points about writing good copy

Plot Summary: The main storyline is about Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a “career transition counselor” (aka hired hatchet man) who’s always jetting off to fire employees for companies who don’t want to do the dirty work themselves. While most of us would probably lose our minds in a job like that, he doesn’t seem to mind it.

But just when he’s about to finally reach his treasured goal of earning 10 million frequent flyer miles, a young whippersnapper named Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) threatens his job and road warrior lifestyle.

She convinces his boss (Jason Bateman) that it would be much more efficient for the company to replace him and his colleagues with minions who fire via script and webcam. After Ryan protests, his boss assigns Natalie to accompany him on the road to learn the ropes.

(Writer-director Jason Reitman obviously overlooked the fact that getting a company to make such a drastic change–much less one proposed by a chick right out of college–is less likely than Elvis coming back from the dead. But anyway…)

Now On with the Show…

Soon we see Ryan in action, delivering the bad news with an air of practiced empathy and self-help panaceas about looking to the future. While it’s certainly not going to give anyone a warm-and-fuzzy feeling, it’s a stark contrast to Natalie’s “just the facts” approach when given her turn to lead the firings.

Even when the situation demands some kind of empathetic response, she’s totally at a loss for what to say. The result–without empathy, her words lose the little credibility they may have had and the employees’ responses go from bad to worse.

Granted, marketing messages are usually much less dire (thankfully!) than that. But inexperienced copywriters tend to make the same mistake Natalie did of relying completely on logic to persuade the audience.

People want to know you understand what they’re going through. They’re thinking if you don’t “get” where they’re at right now, how can you possibly know what the right solution is for them?

Copy Lesson #1: A little empathy goes a long way in getting the response you desire.

Next, Reitman originally scripted the firing scenes as satirical. But by the time he finished filming, the country was knee deep in recession and he was smart enough to realize that wouldn’t play well in Peoria (or anywhere else in the U.S.)

But instead of rewriting the scenes based on tales from the newly unemployed, he went out to capture real, unscripted reactions from ordinary Americans who had just lost their job in the faltering economy. The result–gut-wrenching scenes that hit home because they didn’t just feel real, they WERE real… to these people and to us.

Obviously, screenwriters are used to writing for a bunch of different voices. But even the most talented ones would have had trouble coming up with such a wide range of unique phrasings and verbal stumblings that oozed authenticity and underscored the gravity of the message.

Copy Lesson #2: Imagining what your prospects might say will never be as convincing as letting them speak for themselves–either in testimonials THEY write, not you, or when you incorporate their actual words and phrases into your copy.

My two-second, two-bit movie review…

Up in the Air is definitely a good movie with some darkly funny points about air travel and the corporate world. But the hopelessly bleak ending was enough to make me ready to jump off a bridge (figuratively speaking). If I’d known that ahead of time, I would have skipped it. After all, I can stay home and watch the news for that!

Related articles to read:

Infuse Emotion into Your Copy

Get Out of Your Head

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