Career as an Advertising Copywriter

By Institute For Career Research

You can write the words: TV, radio, magazine ads. Do you love to write? Are you interested in the world around you? Are you intrigued by the challenges of problem solving? A career as an advertising copywriter may be for you. Being a copywriter is challenging and rewarding. This is a job where you work in jeans, work with interesting people, have a great deal of fun - and can make great money.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Institute For Career Research
• Release date: Dec 10, 2009
• ISBN: 9781458184955

Book preview

Introduction

Do you love to write? Are you interested in the world around you? Are you intrigued by the challenges of problem solving?

If so, a career as an advertising copywriter may be for you.

Every time you page through a magazine or newspaper, watch television or listen to the radio, or see a billboard on the highway, you are exposed to the work of advertising copywriters. These are the people who create the language of advertising. Copywriters write the headlines and the body copy, or text, for print advertising (magazines, newspapers, billboards). Copywriters also create the scripts for broadcast advertising (TV and radio commercials).

The companies, stores, and other organizations that advertise their products, services, and statement of ideology may create their own advertising in house, or they may use an outside advertising agency to create the advertising for them. Accordingly, an advertising copywriter may work for an advertising agency or for the advertiser itself.

At an agency, the copywriter works with a number of different people and departments to create a print ad or commercial. For example, the research department determines who the target audience is - that is, the group of people who are most likely to buy the advertiser's product or service. It is this group the copywriter must appeal to. The media department decides where to place the ad - in what magazine or during which television program - in order to reach the target audience. These decisions, too, will affect the kind of advertising the copywriter creates. And the clients, the ones offering the product or service to be advertised, are certain to want to have some input on the project.

Most copywriters work closely with graphic artists and photographers, the people who develop the visual images, to create advertising with the greatest possible impact. (Radio ads, of course, do not include visual images. But they are often part of a larger advertising effort, or campaign, that does.) Even a TV commercial composed almost entirely of visual images and music is usually accompanied by a tag line, a written message or slogan that the advertiser wants you to remember. That tag line was created by a copywriter. And, in fact, a copywriter may have come up with the ideas for the images that are finally realized by the graphic artist or photographer.

Broadly speaking, everything that sells is advertising, from a multi-million-dollar potato chip commercial during the Super Bowl to a tiny notice about a garage sale appearing in the classified section of the newspaper. Ultimately, the purpose of advertising is to persuade people to behave or believe as the advertiser would like them to. Advertising that does not get people to act is a failure. Therefore, even though copywriters may use catchy jingles, slogans, or humor to create effective advertising,