Should writers be held accountable for the performance of the web pages they write?
In today’s Excess Voice newsletter I included an article on this topic, and also made it the topic of my survey question.
Some of the responses have been very thorough and interesting. I am including some of them here. Each is anonymous, to protect the guilty, the innocent and everyone in between.
“Professionally speaking, I hold myself accountable for all copy that I write, either online or offline. Whether it's in my full-time job as a direct marketer, or in my freelance writing projects, I try to write the best possible piece I can with the information that I'm given.
However, I'm finding more and more that my number of "editors" is growing and there are times when I'm reading something that I have supposedly written and I don't recognize the piece. But, instead of getting angry (because as long as I get paid for the work I do, it's the company's "property" and they can do what they want with it), I try to figure out if there was something that I didn't do that caused them to change my piece that extensively.
And you know what? Sometimes the answer is that my well-crafted masterpiece gets sliced and diced by a 20-year old graphic artist with purple hair and four nose rings whose job is to make my copy fit her web page design and those darn words just get in the way.”
“Your argument for the lack of accountability in online copywriting is clearly stated and quite accurate, I believe, for the industry at large. In short, there are simply too many variables to hold the copywriter to sole accountability. In my experience, the offline world generally presents the same set of problems: designers who either don't design very well or don't get direct, clients who don't track results accurately, and agencies that don't understand testing. However, even in the ideal situation you describe ("in a mature industry, as part of a sophisticated, knowledgeable direct marketing team") there is a flawed view of "accountability" in the DM industry. Even among the most knowledgeable DM practitioners, there is a belief that results of a promotion are always crystal clear when you evaluate them on "the bottom line." But what's the bottom line?
For instance, a copywriter writes a new test package that whips the client's control by increasing response significantly, but this causes the client's inventory to go into backorder thereby increasing customer complaints that result in longterm brand erosion. Or for a nonprofit fundraiser, a copywriter writes a new acquisition test that increases average donation, which usually results in increased lifetime donor value, but the impatient client sticks with the control because the immediate ROI was better than the test. Just as in scientific inquiry, where the perspective of the observer can influence the results of what is being observed (the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), the results of any DM effort, online or off, depend on the perspective of the observer, not the copywriter.”
“There are degrees of accountability and the point you made about the layout of a website is valid. My argument and I think a lot of us who write content geared for SEO and SEM contend with this - designers want the design to be visually pleasing and SEO teams want more content. We divide over this issue constantly. The marketing message points are another area where a copywriter needs to have a marketing focus if they are writing for a site other than a brochure site. I feel accountable to marry the marketing message with well written copy and make recommendations as to where the call to action points reside on the site. Do I succeed? Sometimes. But it’s what I constantly strive for – the stickiness of the site so the client’s revenue boosts their return on investment.”
