Nick Watmough sits within our Creative Agency as Senior Copywriter where he creates concepts, establishes tone of voice and crafts content for clients across a wide range of platforms. Before joining APS, Nick worked in journalism, an experience that helped shape his keen eye for detail and passion for great writing.
From bringing creativity to content for our government clients to developing a simple idea into a fully-fledged campaign, Nick enjoys finding the right words to connect with audiences and bring ideas to life. We’ve taken some time to get to know Nick a little better below.
How did you fall in love with your creative job?
I think the moment where my role finally ‘clicked’ for me was learning to love the small jobs. As a copywriter, I have a chance to inject tonnes of personality into even a single social post. Finding those small ways to introduce more interesting tone of voice or creative expressions are what keep my job fun.
What was the best piece of advice you got early on?
Keep it simple, stupid! Writing is really a reductive form of creativity – you can keep drafting and editing and rewriting something until the cows come home, but after a certain point you aren’t really making the work any better. Of course, it’s great to present our clients with lots of ideas, but I find the most obvious solution is usually the most appropriate. The simpler, the better.
What sort of briefs or projects do you find more fun to work on personally?
I personally enjoy the more conceptual projects. Not just because they’re a chance to flex the creative muscles and invent exciting concepts out of thin air. But mostly because they’re a great chance to collaborate, bringing together the whole team, all bouncing ideas off one another.
What are the biggest challenges for the creative industry?
I can’t speak for the whole industry, but I think the biggest challenge facing copywriting is of course AI – but more specifically, understanding its limits. It can feel like there’s suddenly limitless creative potential available at the click of a button, but once you look a little closer, a lot of the copywriting being done by machines is kind of rubbish! The future is definitely going to be humans and AI working side by side, rather than a total takeover.
Who is your creative hero and what is it about their work that inspires you?
My creative hero is David Foster Wallace – author of Infinite Jest. It’s a very long and very difficult book, sort of infamous for being so challenging to read – he’d probably have made a terrible copywriter! But he manages to make even the most mundane human interactions feel electric. Highly recommend, if you’re up for it.
What example of their work particularly stands out?
I guess I already answered that above – Infinite Jest. DFW also wrote a book of essays about lobsters and cruise ships, called Consider the Lobster. Pretty weird stuff.
What do you think the misconceptions about your industry are?
That AI can replace human creativity. I mentioned this earlier – it absolutely helps in lots of amazing ways, but it will never be a substitute for simple, honest, human thinking.
What are your thoughts on AI? How are you using it in your work?
Wow I should really read these questions ahead of time rather than answering them by accident already! I find AI really useful to generate variations on a theme – for example, I might come up with a catchy headline, but then want to try 20 different variations with slightly different sentence structures. Usually about 18 of them aren’t very helpful, but every now and then it will spark a more interesting turn of phrase!
Any advice for those aspiring to enter your industry?
For aspiring writers, read The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and then also read Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy. And then read literally anything else you can get your hands on! You can’t write if you don’t read.
What’s one thing outside of work that always inspires your creativity?
Painting Warhammer miniatures. I am a huge nerd and can lose hours and hours carefully highlighting the eyebrows on a green skinned Ork. Cool, right…right?
