Online Marketing Mavens Blog

We are thrilled to welcome Erin Matson as a guest blogger for Online Marketing Mavens blog. She is a writer and activist. She is currently a Senior Interactive Copywriter at an advertising agency and on the Board of Directors at National Organization for Women. You may also enjoy her blog, radtothemax.com in which she challenges us to feel things, think about issues, and ideally help her advance women’s rights. We are smarter for knowing her.

My friend thinks my job sucks. I think he sucks and you should, too (at least if you want your business to succeed).

Thing is, my friend and I have the same job - if you ask him. Recently I did over instant messenger. “Erin, I’m not trying to offend you,” he said as we chatted from our respective advertising agencies. Then he told me interactive copywriting is traditional copywriting with lower standards.

I’m not offended. I know most Big Deal Creative Directors of Today, many of them Big Deal Copywriters of Yesterday, reward that attitude. Those guys hire my friend and give him raises when he says that.

Not for long.

If you’re strong enough not to get seduced by the open bar at insider award shows (or are an unusually clairvoyant drunk), you know that the biggest deal in advertising remains what it always has been: the customer. Sadly, that customer rarely gives a millisecond for even the award-winning headlines, TV and radio spots.

Enter neat-o! Customers, prospects and lonely people with insomnia actually pay attention to interactive. That means copywriters, creative teams and businesses contracting advertising agencies can use their work to influence the market side of marketing. Add that up: Interactive is on the cusp of becoming a bigger deal.

I’ll agree with my friend that most interactive copywriting sucks right now, but I think the entire polarized nation could agree that most advertising copywriting sucks harder than an aardvark on top of the ant community’s Kilimanjaro. If we do have the same job it’s to write as hard as we can. People don’t care about any form of writing unless it’s spot-on. That’s hard to do.

So I’m not offended. I know my friend will figure out that he needs to care about interactive copywriting within the next few years, and he’ll give me a call for tips then. There are a few things that are different. I’ll deal with them in a future post here.