If I were the Bad Copy Police, I’d have to write a ticket to the local BMW dealer whose radio commercial I heard today.<\/p>\n
The spot, announcing a sale on preowned BMWs, said the dealership was “making an offer even a Dickensian miser couldn’t resist.”<\/p>\n
Huh? A “Dickensian miser”?<\/p>\n
You and I know the copywriter is referring to Ebeneazor Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens.<\/p>\n
But many listeners will hear the phrase “Dickensian miser” and think: “What does THAT mean?”<\/p>\n
And the point will be lost.<\/p>\n
My rewrite: “making an offer even Ebeneazor Scrooge couldn’t resist.”<\/p>\n
Even better: have a character identify himself as Scrooge and say he is rushing down to the dealer because even he can’t resist the offer.<\/p>\n
Why on Earth would the copywriter use such a bloated, pretentious, intellectual phrase in a car commercial?<\/p>\n
Would you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If I were the Bad Copy Police, I’d have to write a ticket to the local BMW dealer whose radio commercial I heard today. The spot, announcing a sale on preowned BMWs, said the dealership was “making an offer even a Dickensian miser couldn’t resist.” Huh? A “Dickensian miser”? You and I know the copywriter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}