Copywriting and writing

The other day, a long lost school chum asked me what a copywriter was. It sorta came out like this:

Her: are you still writing?

Me: yes, I'm a copywriter

Her: and that is?

Leading me to ponder what is a copywriter. The simple answer is that I write ads. Product A wants people B to buy their product. We ask them nicely to buy. It's really that simple. But it felt woefully inadequate. Where I work, we have a tagline called Talk Human. It means to speak clearly, like humans do. Because advertising people have the ability to speak marketingese, a language that is more confusing, I'll bet, than French (a language I am currently attempting to relearn so I can teach Autumn).

Anyway, Talk human means talk like you're not writing it down, sort of. Obviously, a copywriter must write it down, I mean it's right there in the title. But it's what 'it' is.

Then it sort of occurred to me. A writer is one who writes sentences and complete thoughts. Writers write articles, novels, movies, TV shows, essays, newspaper articles, even blogs.

Copywriters don't. Our job isn't to write the article, but compact the article into a short pithy description. With products, we don't tell the story of the product, we tell you why you want to get to know the story. We're the preview of the movie, the jacket cover of the book. We're the ad in the magazine offering a reason to try or another reason to buy.

Sometimes our job is to figure out what the medium is -- I once convinced a bank to do podcasts. I'm lucky that i love my job. It makes life less grumpified.