Copywriting Has a Problem (And it's not AI)

This is going to make you think I'm stupid, but it's the truth.

All throughout my childhood and adolescence, I discovered many things I had an aptitude for. Writing, critical thinking, basketball, vocabulary, singing, art, design, running, impersonations, computers, humor, debate...

Some of those things I'm still great at. Others have atrophied in the attic of my mind as I've ignored them for decades.

But, when translating most of those skills to future careers, my high school left me woefully unprepared.

• I knew I could teach English because I had an English teacher.

• Perhaps a basketball player. Those were on TV.

• Politicians debated occasionally, so maybe that's what you do with that?

• My fine art could sell for millions, but only if I'd been dead for 300 years.

I knew what I saw, and very little else. Careers like engineering? Creative directors, key grips, or HR? Didn't see it; didn't know what any of it was.

Same with copywriting.

Copywriting has a strangely subdued public facade, and I run into people all the time who have no idea what it means when I tell them "I'm a copywriter". No judgment here. I was 36 when I started copywriting. I was 35 when I figured out what it was.

So, send this to your resident 16 year old. I'm going to explain copywriting, why no one knows what it is, and how to tell if you'd be any good at it.

The Deck is Stacked

Why is copywriting dwelling in the dark? For one thing, it's got a name problem perfectly summarized by 30 Rock's defunct gameshow Homonym!

"Copy" is a term referring to words written for publication. Unfortunately, it also means...

1. Copy: n. a single specimen of a book

2. Copy: n. a duplicate

3. Copy: v. to duplicate

4. Copy: v. to mimic behavior

5. Copy: v. to comprehend, on a radio

It's always the other one!

As if the confusion inferno required more fuel:

1. Copywrite: To compose words for publication.

2. Copyright: The exclusive legal right to reproduce.

Wow.

Can we all and pause for just a minute and acknowledge how hilarious this is?

At some point in history, long before the internet, the OG troll was out there somewhere inventing and defining words. This individual said to themselves "I'm going to take a profession that leans completely on grammatical clarity and assign it a label that is a homophone and a homonym. Just because I want to watch the world burn."

And THAT is why people live their lives not knowing what copy is despite the fact that they see printed words everywhere, every day.

Becoming the Next Great Copywriter

Copywriting is salesmanship in print. You see it all around you in ads, marketing emails, and newsletters. Printed on billboards and mailers. Some of it drives you nuts because it's no more than mailbox fodder and spam in your inbox. Other samples of it leave you entertained or fascinated.

No one likes being sold to, but I guarantee that there's some great copy that has caused you to buy a product without even realizing there was a sale happening.

You might even say that copywriting is the art of making people love to read the mail they hate to get!

Now that you know what copywriters do, you can ask yourself if you want to be one! Copywriting is an incredibly valuable form of work that is in demand by almost every business at some level of their organization.

Plus, you get to be a professional writer!

Right?

Write??

If you came to copywriting because of a love for writing, think long and hard about that.

I still see many people gravitating to copywriting because they think that it is the best-paying path for "a professional writer". They've discovered that Mark Twain was once a copywriter and would love their copywriting to someday give way to authorship with novels or at least a blog with a massive following. They have a good vocabulary, adore alliteration, and have a way with words.

Those things will not make them great copywriters.

Don't get me wrong, it's incredibly validating to see your writing published by anyone else, and writing is surely the second or third most important skill in copywriting.

But it's not first.

Intuition is everything.

Because it's all about the customer.

Marketing Minds

My love for writing is one of the reasons I became a copywriter. I'm also innately fascinated by marketing. I can't tell you how many times in 2023 I've turned to my wife and said "'Come to Turbotax and don't do your taxes' may be the most brilliant campaign I've ever seen."

And she says "no one cares".

Probably because she's busy doing our taxes. But still...

Tell me, the copywriter/marketer who wrote "And you can do...not taxes", what grade do you think they got in their high school English class, just based on that?

What kind of writing degree could train you to do something like that?

It's not writing that made this brilliant ad campaign.

It's thinking.

Copythinking.

This ad does best what copy must do always. It speaks to the desire beneath the desire. As a taxpayer, I want to have completed taxes. But as a taxpaying dad, what I really want is to do anything (or nothing) with my kids. Instead of taxes.

This ad got me, because it gets me.

If you're a business looking for a great copywriter, you will never benefit as much from bountiful prose as you will from a marketer who takes time to research and understand your audience. Someone who asks you great questions and sees how to position your unique angle in the market using strategic, compelling copy that converts.

If you're a copywriter so new to the craft that you're unclear if you're allowed to be called a copywriter, know that your self-education and your deliverables for clients need to be powerful desires, not just powerful words. And if you haven't invested your time in understanding your client and their audience, you need to start over. For their sake, and for yours.

Need a copywriter or a coach? Catch me here.

Where Does AI Fit in All This?

The big question every copywriter is asking in April 2023: will AI destroy my career?

Kind of.

But also, not really.

I've been tracking AI pretty closely these last two months, and I have a lot to say about where it is going. It will affect copywriters. It will reshape our world.

That'll be my next post.

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