Creative space

How to write advertising

A very famous writer, Aldous Huxley, once said, “The advertisement is one of the most interesting and one of the most difficult of modern literary forms”. He considered it more difficult than the novels that he wrote, for example, because of the restrictions of time and space. You might have thirty seconds in a television ad or only a half page in a newspaper, instead of 300 pages in a novel.

Also, unlike authors who often have a ready-made audience keen to read their books, most advertisements do not have a voluntary or ready-made audience. Advertisements have to capture the audience in the headline or the opening five seconds, persuade them with meaningful and well written copy and then convince them to act, as advertisements must get results. The other point about being a copywriter (which is what advertising writers are called) is that you have to be able to write for all kinds of media from press ads to interactive engagements.

This means that writing ads is not easy, but it is a lot of fun. In fact, a well-known advertising writer from the 1960s, Jerry del Famina described advertising as “the most fun you can have with your clothes on”. Most copywriters follow a process in creating an advertising campaign.