Is Zomato a copywriter's new copy chief?

Before ChatGPT and its ilk gain sentience and reengineer the world of copywriting, this fine art is seeing its existence moulded by another beast — Zomato.

The food delivery brand has, in the last eight to nine years, carved a name for its communication which loves puns, spouts witty wordplay, and sprinkles a generous amount of pop culture references in every second post or billboard.

Such is the potency of this particular copywriting bug that it has infected every third brand and many a copywriter and agency while at it. The ‘Kheer mangoge…’ billboards are enough evidence.

One can argue Amul Butter did and does the same with its billboards but Zomato’s dominance on social media and its mass appeal gives it the zeitgeist edge over the milk cooperative’s butter brand.

There are other players too. Swiggy follows a similar communication path, there is Durex and its many strokes; the one where it wishes its rivals’ users a Happy Father’s Day is genius.

Nandita Chalam, a lecturer at the Xavier’s Institute of Communications (XIC), reveals her students “smile, say hmm…, or nice” when she shows them a classic ad copy like David Ogilvy’s ‘At 60 miles an hour…’ for Rolls-Royce.

But, show them a work from Durex and “it will get them talking and they start discussing it for a long time and I have to stop them.”

Chalam, before moving to teach, worked in advertising for 33 years with stints at Ogilvy and JWT (now Wunderman Thompson). She was there when Hinglish first reared its head in ad copy and horrified many, and feels today’s Zomatofication of copywriting is another change in terminology and not something one should condemn.

“I do not think it is such a bad thing because copywriting language always reflects society and the way people talk,” says the XIC lecturer.

To write as one speaks is a kind of copywriting that is a different skill and has pushed traditional copywriting — where you sit and chew ideas and thoughts before writing a copy — to the backseat.

“As an industry, we wondered who writes for print, where do you ever read the classic headline anymore, the destination of the headline is changing. Maybe 15-20 years later this (Zomatofication) will be the classic headline,” feels Pallavi Chakravarti, former creative head, DDB Mudra Group.

Copywriting, at the end of the day, is a commercial art form and it has to bend, on most occasions, to the market force twins supply and demand.

The rise in consumption of content over the last three years has festered the fear of missing out among brands and so everyone is posting something or the other online in the form of social media posts or sending push notifications, WhatsApp texts, and whatnot.

This Zomatofied style of copywriting has found its utility in these times because, as Chakravarti puts it, “it is easy to understand.”

It, says Schbang’s executive creative director Manish Kinger, “has to tap into pop culture, has to seem like a relevant message, and should evoke a certain emotion, to the audience it wants to speak to.”

He, taking a lateral route, talks of the wave of spec ads on LinkedIn. These speculative copy pieces do not take forward a product feature or work on a business problem, they “are a new form of content and create reception.”

Young copywriters showcase spec ads (think hypothetical print ads or social media posts or scripts for brands) on their portfolios because they do not have much experience.

Kinger feels today even non-writers, even engineers, even account managers or chartered accounts have started experimenting, they feel "I can write an ad."

Zomato’s ads seem like spec ads to him. “If you look at the Zomato ad(s), it was so easy to recreate it which is also the case with spec ads. They have the right amount of intelligence and tadka of advertising that it tells you anybody can do it,” says Kinger.

This ease especially the ability to recreate an ad (a nod to the Kheer mangoge campaign), he feels, is “what makes brands tap into this form and generate conversation but what it does, in the long run, is it sort of lowers the bar.”

What he has an issue with, remarks the Schbang ECD, is brands being blinded and stretching a moment marketing opportunity beyond its life span. “… To chase that viral currency, you become a me-too product.”

As brands will most likely go forward on this path, long-form copywriting is facing a point of no return.

When XIC’s Chalam presents long-form copy like a Luxor highlighters ad featuring Charlie Chaplin by Leo Burnett where end to end of the copy makes sense and so do the highlighted bits, “not one of my students wants to read the whole thing.” She blames the all-pervading decline of attention spans.

Maybe two or three in a class of 100 are keen to do long copy she reveals and says most students lack the skill “because you can do a pun or a Zomato ad, it just comes to your head but to write long copy, you have to sit and craft.”

“The days of the long copy are truly dead,” she bemoans but adds there is a bit of hope of its return seeing how cinema halls have survived despite the advent of OTTs.

Until then and later, the Zomatofication of copywriting is here to stay. It has, in a way, become the copy chief laying the guide to the present and future set of copywriters.