After over half a century from its creation, we’re starting to see the art director/copywriter partnership decline.
With the rise of interactive advertising and copywriting being owned by the everyday person (across social media platforms), there has been a greater rise in designers over copywriters in agencies. As a result, copywriting is rapidly becoming an after thought. It’s a role flip from the 50s.
Personally I think this is a huge hit to the level of creativity that has and continues to come from the ad industry as a whole. The biggest hope is the drive to “cut through the clutter” could create a refreshed avante gard movement to obtain great creative copywriters again.
Yet the question that this arises is: Is the decline of copywriting due to our visual obsessed culture, the inability to sell clients on the ad hinging on copy or the lack of groundbreaking copywriting talent that we were flooded with in the 50s?
2 comments:
The days of copywriting as it was known to the legacy advertising world may be ending, but the importance and impact of the Copywriter can not be denied.
As it is with many other careers in today's digital society, the role of the copywriter has and will continue to evolve. A role that was filled with powerful headlines to get us to buy into a product's benefits has begun to shift towards a field filled with storytellers who can quickly and powerfully set the stage for consumers to act.
I like to compare it to trends in television programming where we see some shows move away from pre-written scripts to a format that is more suggestive. I believe this is where the new copywriter will lend his/her talents.
The ability to create the over-arching message for creatives to build, business people to see value and consumers to engage will become paramount. The copywriter of tomorrow will not be a leader in the creative process but rather a guide for others on the path to turn to when they start to feel lost.
That is a really interesting thought. I've never been one to fight changes in the ad industry; but, I feel that the rise of social media has greatly attributed to more novice writers that engage in it more as a passing fad than a full time career or art form.
It's great to allow for more people to put their hands in copywriting and for more competition in the field; but, on the flip side we may miss out on some truly talented copywriters that have to turn away from the field when it can no longer prove to be profitable for them.
I love what you said at the end about copywriters creating the overarching message for everyone to follow. Yet, it doesn't seem to be happening very often today when we see designers or clients themselves often writing the copy for various applications. Along with on the flip side, if the copywriter is simply handing over copy rather than collaborating with an art director partner to bounce big pictures ideas off of, doesn't the big idea still suffer in the end?
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