What it's like to be a copywriter

I knew I wanted to be a copywriter before I knew the job had a name. In the third year of my business degree, somewhere among the accounting subjects, a marketing course introduced me to ads for Apple, Volkswagen and Nike. Those witty headlines had me hooked. You could do this for a living?

I finished my degree and joined Price Waterhouse, mostly to give accounting a fair chance. After almost two years of dragging my feet to work, I felt I had given it one. I was young and wanted to be excited about what lay ahead.

Getting into advertising without experience took some doing. Eventually, someone took a chance on me. In the agencies that followed, I learned from copywriters and art directors. Somewhere along the way, I began to imagine a little writing agency of my own.

Thirty years on, I still look forward to my workday. Though these days, I leave the jumping out of bed to the younger ones.

What a copywriter actually does

A copywriter writes words with a job to do. Sell a product, explain something, persuade someone to sign up or help them feel they can trust a brand.

Before the words come the questions. What are we trying to say? Who are we talking to? Why would they care? There are briefs to understand, interviews to conduct and things to look up. You spend quite a lot of time finding out what you don’t know.

Then you have to make something of it.

Sometimes that means a headline, a social post or a few words on a button. Often, you are interrupting someone who was perfectly happy doing something else. You have to earn your place.

Long-form work asks something different. Annual reports, company histories and commemorative books give you room to tell a fuller story. They also give you more material to check, more people to consult and rather more pages on which to lose your reader. A project can stay with you for months.

If you had told my younger self that I would enjoy writing 100-page corporate reports, I would have said, ‘Get out of here!’ I was there for the clever headlines.

But I grew to love finding the story in all that material. Behind the numbers are people making decisions, trying things and sometimes getting them wrong. Helping a reader understand what happened, and why it matters, is deeply satisfying to me.

It took me years to find my feet in long-form work. Neither kind is the beginner version of the other. I know excellent advertising writers who would rather not go near an annual report. The feeling is mutual among some corporate writers.

Actors with words

I’ve always thought of copywriters as actors with the written word. We take on someone else’s voice and try to make it sound natural. A bank does not sound like a beer brand. A chairman does not sound like a product manager. And before we start, we need to know who is in the audience.

I like to make brands sound like people. Clients who come to my studio tend to want the same thing. Especially in an annual report, I want you to feel there is someone on the other side of the page.

The lovely thing is how many worlds you get to wander into. Airport retail, insurance, palm oil, data centres, beauty creams…. Subjects you might never have thought to read about become things you genuinely want to understand. Dig far enough and there is usually something fascinating waiting.

That curiosity has taken me a long way from the ads in my marketing textbook. I still love a witty headline. I also love the moment I make a complicated idea clear.

What AI has changed

I started just before computers became a fixture on our desks. Then came the internet, social media and all those little screens. There were suddenly many more places for our words to go.

AI has changed how those words get drafted. To me, it is the biggest shift of the lot. I understand why AI might have given writers a fright.

I think it can help a good copywriter do better work. A new writer has help with a first draft that I could never have imagined at the same stage. But you still need to recognise the difference between a draft that sounds right and one that is right for the job.

That takes practice. You write, get things wrong, try again and, if you’re lucky, work beside someone who can explain why one word gets to stay while another has to go.

So keep writing, even with AI at your elbow. There is something to learn from wrestling with a sentence yourself, working out why it feels wrong, listening to feedback and finding a way to make it say what you mean. With practice, you’ll also get better at noticing when the words aren’t quite there yet. I know I’m still learning.

Finding your way

There are plenty of directions to explore in the field of copywriting. You might love agency life, working with an art director on a campaign. You might prefer getting to know one business from the inside as an in-house copywriter, or going deep into a subject such as sustainability or finance.

Some writers find their place in speeches, video scripts or the tiny messages or microcopy that help us use an app.

You can freelance or, as I did, try it all and then start a studio. Just remember that a studio comes with cash flow, talents and clients to manage. That’s another article perhaps.

Try work you haven’t done before. See what interests you enough to keep going when it gets difficult. You may surprise yourself as I have many times.

To aspiring copywriters

Someone once wrote that when you are a good copywriter, you can be a better anything. Someone once wrote that when you are a good copywriter, you can be a better anything.

Learning and practicing the craft teaches you to ask better questions, look a little closer, and think about how your words might make someone else feel. Useful things to take with you, whatever your goal in life.

If you are looking to pursue copywriting as a career, write more, observe more. Rethink a directional sign that leaves you puzzled, an ad for a product you imagined. Keep the work you are proud of. That is the beginning of your portfolio.

If you are still curious to know more about copywriting, I’d be happy to help. Drop me a line