The host, Mark Dolan, has made a career out of being a bit annoying which is unfortunately not the best qualification for a panel game host. His teams consist of the usual rent-a-standup comedians with the addition of a couple of almost entirely superfluous ad people in Kate Stanners of Saatchi and Saatchi and Simon Chamberlain, a planning director. They sat uncomfortably close to each other on a sofa trying to look amused at the witty ‘ad’ libs being made on either side of them. They had clearly been told to leave the funnies to the experts, although on the evidence of this show they shouldn’t have worried.

It was nice to see some great old ads and to hear a name check for Bob Brooks who directed the first commercial I ever wrote – even if the ads chosen have rather been done to death on the ‘best of’ countdown shows that litter the schedules almost as freely as panel shows. The ‘complete the slogan’ round had some legs, not so the interminably lame spoof commercials made by the two team captains.

Whilst the equivalent task in The Apprentice usually serves up some accidental classic of crassness, these were supposed to be funny. I assume Sacha Baron Cohen is currently suing Micky Flanagan for nicking his Borat character for the first offering and, as for the second, it could at least claim to have had a rather fetching soundtrack from the reclusive French chanteuse SoKo. Before the commercials were shown, we were treated to a toe-curling creative briefing in which the unnamed agency participants looked in embarrassment at their pencils or pretended to take furious notes.

Our adland gurus were eventually asked to judge the resulting commercials, both giving the kind of clenched teethed praise that a creative director gives to the latest ideas from the client’s son to whom he is reluctantly giving a month’s work experience. No-one mentioned the obvious fact that neither ad would have a snowflake’s chance of getting past the ASA nor that each ad went on for about half an hour (or maybe it just seemed like it).

A shame really that at a time when the advertising industry has so fully embraced the need for products to engage with their audiences, that this programme so singularly failed to do so.

On some days I receive over 100 e-shots, so the question is how do you make your company’s effort stand out. The advent of off-the-shelf designs and the very cheap cost of entry for sending e-campaigns have encouraged more and more companies to use this medium. But the downside of this DIY approach is that sometimes the content is lacking in interest. Employing a creative team to give your e-shots an edge may seem an unnecessary extravagance but if no one is looking at your emails, you may as well not bother.

An experienced copywriter will ruthlessly question what you are offering and distil your message into something compelling and eye-catching. With a dispassionate perspective they may well spot angles you have overlooked or become too familiar with. An art director will not only add something visually exciting to your e-shot but will also ensure that the design conforms with your company’s overall style guide, adding the consistency that reflects a company’s professionalism. There are also various words, phrases and styles of presentation to avoid if you want more of your emails to avoid the spam box. If you are looking to provide more of an e-newsletter, make sure the articles are of genuine interest to your readers, not just thinly disguised attempts at a hard sell. In short it’s worth spending the money you’ve saved on postage and print on the creative input that will make sure every e-shot hits the mark.

Creativity wins out – when it’s relevant

Last year’s IPA report confirmed what we creative agencies have always maintained – that creativity has a direct effect on ROI. Creative ads do generate more sales. A word of caution though: even with all the analysis tools at the disposal of today’s marketer there is still room for misleading stats to suggest average work is stunningly effective. Getting enormous number of hits on a viral ad is not conclusive proof of a successful campaign. Apart from the fact that skilful web operatives will have indulged in viral seeding to boost the number of hits, there is not necessarily a link between an entertaining piece of film and a sale.

This is particularly the case where the viral film has no intrinsic link to the product. Take the recent spate of ads featuring animated animals, cuddly toys, household objects. Where the product is intrinsically linked to the idea this works well – look at the success of those ubiquitous Meerkats. This fulfils an old criterion of good advertising – that the campaign could not be used for any other product. But whilst this rule is too much of straitjacket today (pardon the impending pun), it’s hard to see the connection between dancing second hand clothes and Cadbury chocolate. Emperor’s new clothes more like.

Waterstone’s watershed

There has been much debate about the vanishing apostrophe on Waterstones. As a copywriter, I am usually pretty hot on poor grammar and spelling in marketing communications, but I have to say this issue doesn’t particularly concern me. We are, after all, talking about a logo here, so the word’s physical shape is important as well as the sound. Spelling and grammar are secondary in a brand name – Toys R Us, Phones4u, Flickr and Xperia all deliberately flout normal conventions. And of course when it comes to the web, urls are no respecters of punctuation. So if your name’s O’Flaherty-Smythe it’s probably best to call your bookshops something else.

Why then are there so many examples of sloppily written ads and websites? It’s a commonplace that the explosion of texting has impoverished people’s ability to spell and use grammar meaningfully. The texts of the juror who recently contacted the defendant is a good example of that. Her main crime may have been contempt for the English language.

But it’s not just jurors who are guilty. An advertisement in a national paper for a well-known digital TV channel recently carried a glaring spelling mistake in the headline. Does this matter? The old saw goes that a sign saying Tomato’s 80p a kilo will be more effective than a correctly spelt sign offering the same produce for £1.50 a kilo. Of course, the spelling skills of a market trader do not have a bearing on the quality of his goods and, let’s face it, copywriters take plenty of liberties with grammar. Like having sentences with no verbs. However there are occasions when bad copy will seriously damage your business. I recently received an e-shot from an education company with a spelling mistake in it. Bad enough that it obviously went out to their entire prospective client database. Even worse that, on visiting their website, I found loads more errors and spelling mistakes. Do I want to learn with a company that can’t even check its own output? Or worse still doesn’t even realize there are errors? I suppose since certain exam setters can’t be bothered to check whether questions are actually answerable perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.

A part of the problem is the belief that everyone can do anything, no doubt inspired by reality TV shows such as The Apprentice and Britain’s Got Talent in which people without talent or noticeable business acumen are encouraged to think otherwise. So similarly loads of people think anyone can write copy or design marketing material when the truth is you risk seriously spoiling your ship for a ha’porth of tar. And it really is a ha’porth compared to some of the expenses, from legal advice to office refurbishment, which many businesses pay without batting an eyelid.

Of course investing in copywriting expertise doesn’t just mean avoiding howlers. That surely is the very least you should demand from your marketing material. The real bonus of copywriters is their ability to make sure your message is got across in the most interesting, eye-catching and immediate way. Today copywriters can also bring new skills to the party such as writing SEO friendly copy, which will appeal to the search engines without sounding like it’s been written by a machine and helping you with blogs, e-shots and virals.

So next time your marketing needs words, don’t settle for a misspelt youth, treat your business to a real caffeine boost with some proper copy.

We must all beware of the way these goliaths of the internet age big themselves up, because ultimately there is danger in any organisation becoming too powerful. Competition is stifled and the playing field becomes uneven. We must not so readily believe their own publicity. And we must always remember that what sprang up so quickly can just as easily disappear. Remember Friends Reunited and Bebo? Already there is a vague feeling that Facebook is less cool than it was now that everyone’s parents are on it too. Who wants to attend a disco where Dad’s dancing?

Talking of po-faced monoliths bigging themselves up, I took my daughter’s 18month old ipod back to the new Covent Garden Apple store before Christmas. It was all rather like visiting the Wizard of Oz, and naturally I couldn’t see one of the oh-so-busy ipad carrying gurus immediately, I had to book an appointment for the next day at something they modestly call the Genius desk. When I presented the ipod I was told that the battery had expired and that a replacement would be £60 odd. £60 for a new battery in a product less than 2 years old? Now that’s what I call genius.

So is there a future in paywalls for newspapers? When the news is available freely from other papers and the BBC it seems unlikely that enough people will pay. The content has to be specialist and unobtainable elsewhere for it to be worth paying for. Having said that, cricket site cricinfo.com is free and provides a huge number of informative articles without a paywall. Currently cricinfo are advertising for writers on their site. As a cricket-loving copywriter I thought this might be worth investigating until I discovered that there was no actual fee for accepted articles – just the glory of appearing on the site. The Times would argue that if journalism is given away free then journalists can’t expect to get paid. Other publications hope online ad revenue will foot the bill.

It’s interesting to note that whenever the Times paywall goes down, certain Times journalists tweet this fact in a desperate attempt to get more people reading their articles. And of course if journalists see they are not being read, they may well feel more inclined to move to rival papers where their online presence is greater.

At the same time as this debate rages, back in the physical world the Independent has just launched a new 20p version and the Standard continues to be a completely free newspaper. This strategy represents the polar opposite to that of Murdoch and it will be fascinating to see which model wins. Whatever the outcome, advertisers should benefit from the increased competition and the newspapers’ greater reliance on paid for advertising.

Does all this matter? It does, because as in all things, becoming proficient at something takes time and effort (hence the Peperami brief was won by creative professionals). If no-one is to be paid for this time and effort, the standard will undoubtedly fall. There’s an interesting corollary to this scenario in the other ‘arts’ fields. In music, new bands can now become famous without a label, which is in many ways good. But it will probably be hard for a musician or group to sustain a long-term career because of the sheer volume of new and accessible competition. On the radio recently I heard a Hollywood film director complaining of the same problem after someone who had directed a youtube film had been offered a directing job on a big movie. Already comedians’ shelf lives are very short – at least if you’ve made it big enough in the first instance you can go off and do travel documentaries and endless lookalike comedy panel shows.

In the new world order, many more people will of course get their 15 minutes of creative fame, but what we will miss out on is the development of an artist over a long period. The good news however is that, at least in advertising, creatives are fighting back – on linkedin copywriters and designers have been queueing up to slag off the latest crowdsourcing site, crowdspring.com And whilst we’re at it, let’s all revile those advertising agencies who have recently had the great idea of running competitions on behalf of their clients to find the next ad in a campaign. Have they got no ideas of their own? Or would they really prefer to drive their clients into the open arms of opensourcing?