AI is making corporate writing human again

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”

This line, which advertising legend David Ogilvy made famous, was one of many that inspired me in my early years as an advertising copywriter. You can almost imagine yourself inside the car.

British copywriter David Abbott, whose work included some of The Economist’s best-known ads, wrote something equally lovely in a Father’s Day ad for Chivas Regal. Among a son’s reasons for thanking his father was this line:

“Because you never expected too much of me or let me get away with too little.”

An ad for whisky makes you think about your own dad.

In ad copywriting, making someone feel something or see something differently is the holy grail. Those lines stayed with me because of the few words that took me somewhere. The first, inside a Rolls-Royce, and the second, to thoughts of my dear late dad.

I don’t think we have to leave that behind when we write for a company.

Bringing it to work

In the early days of running my own copywriting business, around 2000, I worked with local publishing company Epigram on numerous corporate publications. We would pitch ideas for telling an organisation’s story through words and design.

One of the first projects we worked on together was a commemorative publication for the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF). We called it In Safe Hands, with a close-up of a firefighter’s hands holding a young civilian’s on the cover.

At a time when book titles such as “xx years of excellence” or “celebrating xx years” were rife, we pushed to look beyond the expected to what those years of service meant to people. The title and image brought that down to a simple gesture, one person looking after another.

For an Asia Pacific Breweries annual report, we used “The Rise and Rise”, accompanied by a close-up of bubbles rising through APB’s iconic Tiger Beer. A good year for the company, expressed through the very thing it made. It also said something about APB: a company comfortable enough with itself to let a little wit into its annual report.

Neither approach reached for “greater heights” or “empowering resilience”. Not because those words are forbidden, but because we had been given something better to say and did not need them. We gave readers something they could feel instead.

Write so readers see themselves in it

There are opportunities to make that connection inside a publication too. Even in a thank-you not at the back.

Take a company thanking its staff after opening a new distribution centre: “We thank our employees for their dedication and commitment,” is something almost any company can say.

We can improve it by finding out what the move actually involved.

“Our customers received their orders as usual while we moved to the new centre. Behind that were months of planning and many of you working shifts at both sites. You made a difficult move look uneventful, and we know how much work that took. Thank you.

If you were one of those colleagues, you might see your own long days in that paragraph and know that someone noticed.

Be straightforward, even with bad news

An annual report is a formal account of performance. A company needs to explain its results while maintaining confidence in its direction, even in a difficult year. How the uncomfortable parts are handled matters.

“Revenue from our logistics business fell 8% this year. A weaker freight market played a part, as did the opening of our new hub six months behind schedule. The hub is now operating.”

There is no attempt to make this moving. It gives readers a straightforward explanation, including a fact the company might rather not dwell on. The delay contributed to weaker results. The hub is now open, which signals that things are back on track. There may be more to explain elsewhere in the report, but this passage makes those points clear.

It is also the paragraph most likely to be handed to a machine and a machine will always smooth it. Smoothing is what the average of every such paragraph looks like.

That, too, is part of writing for people. Readers can form their own opinion. Giving them a clear account respects that and gives them a basis for trust.

Finding what matters

We start by thinking about the person reading. What do they need to understand? What would make this matter to them?

A draft can have all the expected words and still leave those questions unanswered. We learn that a company is committed, its people are dedicated and its future is promising. We come away knowing very little about any of them.

The trouble is rarely the words themselves. Take every tired phrase out of a paragraph like that and you are usually left with a shorter paragraph that still tells the reader nothing. What is missing is not vocabulary. It’s the nuanced details.

There is thinking to be done before choosing the words. Sometimes, perhaps in the rush to the deadline, we haven’t found enough to say yet. And asking AI to “add warmth” won’t supply the missing understanding. We need to speak to the people involved, ask questions and listen until we can say, “Ah, now I get it.”

Then comes the writing. Choose what to bring forward, what to leave out and how to bring the point home. Give readers a reason to trust what you say. If there is still work to do, be clear about what has been done and what remains.

What AI is giving back to us

We can’t be annoyed with AI for having the default corporate voice. We wrote it. It learned from decades of material we signed off and sent to print.

Now that it can produce so much of it so easily, some phrases are harder to read without wincing.

t would be convenient if that were the whole problem, because a list of banned words is an easy thing to circulate. The real problem is that AI is not in the room.

It does not know that the hub opened six months late, or that people worked shifts at both sites to keep the orders moving. It cannot tell which parts the reader will care about. It will not be able to decide what matters and what to leave out.

Finding out what actually happened. Deciding what is worth the reader’s few minutes. Being willing to put the company’s name to it.

The thinking behind Ogilvy’s and Abbott’s lines still work today. Both came from someone who had gone and found out what was true about the thing in front of them and then had the nerve to say it simply.

That was always available to us in corporate writing. We mostly did not bother, because the approved version was safe and nobody ever got into trouble for it.

Which puts the job back to us. Go and find out what is true about this company this year, then say it plainly enough that even the person with no reason to care notices. That’s the most important part of communication, and it’s still ours.