The End of the Creative Partnership?

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?

Death of Copywriting

Will there be a day when the copywriter is obsolete?

With the rise of digital advertising and social media it seems that copywriting should become increasingly important; however, it appears that the exact opposite is occurring. Due to the everyday person taking on the self ascribed job of spreading their thoughts on blogs, twitter and more, novice writing is becoming the norm.

On top of that, the level of copywriting that was incredibly strong during the 50s and 60s seems to have taken a gradual decline throughout the years as our culture has become dramatically more visually driven.

Yet with the rule of thumb in advertising being to “cut through the clutter” (by doing things differently) will the next big movement be the revival of great copywriting in advertising and design? Or will we become so used to trivial writing that we won’t even recognize it when it returns?