As I had once said, I would start talking a little more about the work I am now doing, which is my day job and one that pays the bills, once my dissertation is done with.
I will now. I recently got myself a job in the advertising and brand design industry. This is my third month into the work. I must say that it has been an exhilarating and frustrating experience.
The good thing about this job is that it is training me to be a better writer, to be better at conceptualising ideas and putting them across in the most succint manner. Which is not easy. Any art form, done well, whether for commercial, experimental or epistemological purpose, is never easy. This is especially true when it comes to commercial art. Your audience is no longer a bunch of connoisuers and fans who already have a bit of notion as to what you are doing, even if it was merely a superficial notion. In commercial art, you are reaching out to a new audience that might be blind to the subtleties of your art work or the poetry of your writing. Yet, catching their attention in this crazy age of information saturation is a feat in itself, and if you have done that, perhaps by a catchy or pyschologically engineered headline, enticing them enough to read the copy, you know that you have hit the jackpot. After all, advertising is just another way of dressing marketing in a more seductive manner. Advertising people and marketing people have different creative profiles. Not all marketing people are of the creative type, especially since some forms of marketing merely involve following pre-defined rules that has been set out (maybe memorising instructions from the company's brand manual). Yet, it doesn't mean that good marketing has no need for creative sparks, and such are the sparks that keep the business from stalemating or stagnancy.
For advertising people (and I mean those in the creative department), their creative economy is the main reason why they are hired. As I work in brand design, everyday, I am learning about how visuals can do well to complement writing. I work across different mediums, doing mostly smaller projects, from conceptualising pitches (with the other team members) to regular copywriting.
I realise I have a long road ahead as a copywriter, and I have yet to claim the voice that would allow me, in the long run, to be an excellent copywriter. But I hope to one day claim it. My journey in life has been such that I never thought I would now end up a copywriter, professionally. It has been a long, winding, path, with many heartaches and headaches. And I am still finding my way. I wonder where will I be a year from now.
