9.1: Copywriting core concepts

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Coca-Cola Ad. (Unsplash free-to-use license; Thomas Charters)

Writing for Advertising 

The core concepts of media writing apply to composing advertising copy and contributing in other ways to ad campaigns. Clear, concise writing is essential. Knowledge and application of AP Style is a must. Advertising messages should influence the target audience’s perceptions and/or behaviors. Word choice, tone management, and message delivery are some of the techniques you will need to master to be a strong communicator. These core features apply to all kinds of advertising writing.

Word choice refers to the careful selection of each word in a sentence. Professional writers think carefully about the subtle differences between similar words. It means one thing to eat a slice of pizza, another to enjoy a slice and something else to devour a personal pan pizza the way an avid reader devours books.

Tone management refers to the need to select words, phrases and narrative structures that are most likely to evoke a particular emotion in audiences. Every piece of writing has a tone. Some textbooks are dry. They may be written in consistently long paragraphs with a large amount of jargon. The goal is to impart information clearly and accurately, though sometimes at the expense of the reader's attention. Political speeches tend to try to project a confident tone. They indicate the speaker's strengths. Paragraphs may vary quite a bit in length, which allows the speaker to speed up or slow down the pace to keep the audience on their toes. The underlying message is that the speaker is comfortable being in control and that they can be trusted to accomplish what they say they will. A sermon might be written to be reassuring or inspirational. Sermons are often written as a series of anecdotes with explanations. The anecdotes are easy to understand and relatable, and the explanations often offer solutions to common problems or reassurance about concerns. In all of these cases, tone serves to persuade and tone is imbued through word choice and structural choices.

Message delivery refers to the ways messages are presented. You could write the best advertising copy known to humanity, but if audiences do not notice it, it doesn't matter. Delivery is a matter of designing the visuals of an ad to be eye-catching, making audiovisual presentations as professionally produced as possible, and placing the ads on the right platforms to reach the target audience at a time and place where they are open to receive persuasive messages.

To illustrate how a copywriter might contribute to an ad campaign, this text presents a pro-social campaign model and a sample creative brief.

Definition: Copywriter

A copywriter is an advertising industry professional whose primary job is to write the text used in ads. They may write print ads, scripts for audio or video ads, social media posts, blog posts, website copy, marketing emails, news releases, and more.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): A-I-D-A Funnel. (CC-BY license; Mark Poepsel)

AIDA

For an overall framework for crafting ad copy, consider using the Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action (AIDA) framework.

• Attention - Good advertising copy should effectively grab the audience’s attention through words, images and design. This can be challenging. Since consumers see hundreds or even thousands of advertisements each day, capturing their attention needs to be informed by strategy.
• Interest - After gaining the audience’s attention, copy should maintain their focus by generating interest. This involves crafting relevant messages.
• Desire - The next step is to provoke a desire for the advertised product or service. Dozens of approaches for provoking desire can be used. Copywriters must choose what is best for the brand and the campaign. One of the most common methods of establishing desire is to describe a problem many people have and show how the product being advertised solves the problem.
• Action - If and when desire is instilled, the copy should then motivate the audience to act. Copywriters craft a call to action in most ads. The call to action tells the audience what it is that you want them to do. This could be buying the product, visiting the organization’s social media page, volunteering, or attending an event. The call to action should be memorable. Experienced copywriters often craft messages that use this structure without having to think about the AIDA framework.  

When AIDA is employed well, consumers may get the sense that trying or buying the product or service was their idea because cognitively this is how most humans approach new information. They first decide whether or not to pay attention at all. They then quickly decide if they are interested. Both processes may happen in a split second. If an audience member’s attention and interest can be held, they may be led farther down the path to make a decision to try, buy or believe what the copywriter is selling. Ultimately, a call to action is often used to carry the consumer beyond deciding they will do something to encourage them until they actually follow through.

In the age of "big data," it is possible to target repeated ads to audience members at a particular point in the funnel. For example, if an audience member has recently bought a home and has purchased a dishwasher and refrigerator in the past several weeks, they are much more likely to be in the market for a washer and dryer than other consumers. These individuals may be targeted based on their online shopping behavior, credit card purchase information and web search data. 

This level of targeted marketing might take some consumers by surprise, but for advertising copywriters, being assured by data analytics that the messages they are crafting are very likely to reach the (nearly) perfect audience at the (nearly) perfect time can be reassuring. The words that are chosen and the style with which they are presented can truly make the difference in hundreds or thousands of people's purchase decisions.

The goal for many copywriters working on organized ad campaigns comes after a consumer has made this AIDA journey. The additional step is to become a brand advocate.

Definition: Brand advocate

A brand advocate is an individual who is so impressed by a product or service they have purchased that they encourage others to buy or try the same product or service.

Encouraging brand advocacy may or may not be addressed in a specific advertisement, but a key goal of many campaigns is not only to convert people to become their consumers but to talk them up, so to speak, with other consumers in ways that are organic, that do not rely on paid influencers or other forms of paid promotion, but which are honest testaments to the value of a product or service shared between friends or acquaintances.

Some online advertisers attempt to mimic this form of organic interaction in social media, but it is risky to attempt to fake this kind of organic interaction. Consumers who are made aware that they have been fooled into thinking a campaign was organic when in fact it was manufactured may harm a brand’s image online and in person. The best products advertise well and are of such good quality that their customers become advocates out of actual appreciation for the quality of a brand and, in the case of social campaigns, for the good that they do.