Advertising

Advertising:

Advertising is a form of communication used to influence individuals to purchase products or services or support political candidates or ideas. Frequently it communicates a message that includes the name of the product or service and how that product or service could potentially benefit the consumer. Advertising often attempts to persuade potential customers to purchase or to consume a particular brand of product or service. Modern advertising developed with the rise of mass production in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Commercial advertisers often seek to generate increased consumption of their products or services through branding, which involves the repetition of an image or product name in an effort to associate related qualities with the brand in the minds of consumers. Different types of media can be used to deliver these messages, including traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, television, radio, billboards or direct mail. Advertising may be placed by an advertising agency on behalf of a company or other organization.

Organizations that spend money on advertising promoting items other than a consumer product or service include political parties, interest groups, religious organizations and governmental agencies. Non-profit organizations may rely on free modes of persuasion, such as a public service announcement.

Money spent on advertising has increased in recent years. In 2007, spending on advertising was estimated at more than $150 billion in the United States and $385 billion worldwide, and the latter to exceed $450 billion by 2010.
Advertising is communication used to influence individuals to purchase products or services or support political candidates or ideas. Advertising can be displaced on billboards, newspapers, T.V., websites, movies and more.

Copywriting

Copywriting is the use of words to promote a person, business, opinion or idea. Although the word copy may be applied to any content intended for printing (as in the body of a newspaper article or book), the term copywriter is generally limited to such promotional situations, regardless of media (as advertisements for print, television, radio or other media). The author of newspaper or magazine copy, for example, is generally called a reporter or writer or a copywriter.
Thus, the purpose of marketing copy, or promotional text, is to persuade the reader, listener or viewer to act — for example, to buy a product or subscribe to a certain viewpoint. Alternatively, copy might also be intended to dissuade a reader.

Copywriting can appear in direct mail pieces, taglines, jingle lyrics, web page content (although if the purpose is not ultimately promotional, its author might prefer to be called a content writer), online ads, e-mail and other Internet content, television or radio commercial scripts, press releases, white papers, catalogs, billboards, brochures, postcards, sales letters, and other marketing communications media.

Content writing on websites is also referred to as copywriting, and may include among its objectives the achievement of higher rankings in search engines. Known as “organic” search engine optimization (SEO), this practice involves the strategic placement and repetition of keywords and keyword phrases on web pages, writing in a manner that human readers would consider normal.

Copywriters

Most copywriters are employees within organizations such as advertising agencies, public relations firms, web developers, company advertising departments, large stores, marketing firms, broadcasters and cable providers, newspapers, book publishers and magazines. Copywriters can also be independent contractors freelancing for a variety of clients, at the clients’ offices or working from their own, or partners or employees in specialized copywriting agencies.

A copywriter usually works as part of a creative team. Agencies and advertising departments partner copywriters with art directors. The copywriter has ultimate responsibility for the advertisement’s verbal or textual content, which often includes receiving the copy information from the client. (Where this formally extends into the role of account executive, the job may be described as “copy/contact.”) The art director has ultimate responsibility for visual communication and, particularly in the case of print work, may oversee production. Either person may come up with the overall idea for the advertisement or commercial (typically referred to as the concept or “big idea”), and the process of collaboration often improves the work.

Copywriters are similar to technical writers and the careers may overlap. Broadly speaking, however, technical writing is dedicated to informing readers rather than persuading them. For example, a copywriter writes an ad to sell a car, while a technical writer writes the operator’s manual explaining how to use it.

Because the words sound alike, copywriters are sometimes confused with people who work in copyright law. The careers are unrelated.

Famous copywriters include David Ogilvy, William Bernbach and Leo Burnett. Many creative artists spent some of their career as copywriters before becoming famous for other things, including Dorothy L. Sayers, Viktor Pelevin, Eric Ambler, Joseph Heller, Terry Gilliam, William S. Burroughs, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Lawrence Kasdan, Fay Weldon, Philip Kerr and Shigesato Itoi. (Herschell Gordon Lewis, on the other hand, became famous for directing violent exploitation films, then became a very successful copywriter.)

The Internet has expanded the range of copywriting opportunities to include web content, ads, commercial emails and other online media. It has also brought new opportunities for copywriters to learn their craft, conduct research and view others’ work. And the Internet has made it easier for employers, copywriters and art directors to find each other.

As a result of these factors, along with increased use of independent contractors and virtual commuting generally, freelancing has become a more viable job option, particularly in certain copywriting specialties and markets. A generation ago, professional freelance copywriters (except those between full-time jobs) were rare.

While schooling may be a good start or supplement in a budding copywriter’s professional education, working as part of an advertising team arguably remains the best way for novices to gain the experience and business sense required by many employers, and expands the range of career opportunities.

Search engine optimization (SEO) copywriting:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Copywriting is textual composition for web page marketing that emphasizes skillful manipulation of the page’s wording to place it among the first results of a user’s search list, while still producing readable and persuasive content.

The text appearing at specific locations, such as in the title tag and the Meta Tag of the page’s code, gets special attention during SEO, because search engines compare information found there with other pages to determine relevance. However, SEO copywriters also strive for unique written content on the page, distinguishing it from similar pages competing for placement in the search results. Other factors that determine relevance during a search are the page’s Keyword Density, the placement of the keywords.

SEO copywriting is most often one of the various jobs of a copywriter. However, there are freelance copywriters who hire out their services solely for SEO, agencies and firms that specialize in SEO (including SEO copywriting), and copywriting agencies that offer SEO copywriting as part of comprehensive writing and editing services.

While an obvious goal of SEO copywriting is to cause the business’s or product’s web page to rank highly in a search, most experts in the field would argue that it is of secondary priority. The foremost goal of SEO copywriting is to produce succint, effectively persuasive text for a well-written web page. Writing that “optimizes” a search, but which offers little useful information or only weak persuasion, is frowned upon in the profession as at best ineffective. At its worst, it becomes a costly resource inducing potential buyers to turn away from the site rather than generating sales.

Ghostwriteres

A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, reports, or other texts that are officially credited to another person. Celebrities, executives, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, magazine articles, or other written material. In music, ghostwriters are used in film score composition, as well as in pop music such as Top 40, country, and hip-hop. The ghostwriter is sometimes acknowledged by the author or publisher for his or her writing services.

The division of work between the ghostwriter and the credited author varies a great deal. In some cases, the ghostwriter is hired to publish and edit a rough draft or a mostly completed manuscript. In this case, the outline, ideas and much of the language in the finished book or article are those of the credited author. In other cases, a ghostwriter does most of the writing, using concepts and stories provided by the credited author. In this case, a ghostwriter will do extensive research on the credited author or their subject area of expertise. It is rare for a ghostwriter to prepare a book or article with no input from the credited author; at a minimum, the credited author usually jots down a basic framework of ideas at the outset or provides comments on the ghostwriter’s final draft.

Remuneration and credit:

Ghostwriters will often spend from several months to a full year researching, writing, and editing nonfiction works for a client, and they are paid either per page, with a flat fee, or a percentage of the royalties of the sales, or some combination thereof. Having an article ghostwritten can cost “$4 per word and more depending on the complexity” of the article.[1] Literary agent Madeleine Morel states that the average ghostwriter’s advance for work for major publishers is “between $30,000 and $100,000″[2] In 2001, the New York Times stated that the fee that the ghostwriter for Hillary Clinton’s memoirs will receive is probably about $500,000″ of her book’s $8 million advance, which “is near the top of flat fees paid to collaborators.

According to Ghostwriters Ink, a professional ghostwriting service, this flat fee is usually closer to an average of $12,000 to $28,000 per book. By hiring the ghostwriter for this negotiated price, the clients ultimately keep all advances and post-publishing royalties and profits for themselves.

In Canada, The Writers’ Union has established a minimum fee schedule for ghostwriting. The total minimum fee for a 200-300 page book is $25,000, paid at various stages of the drafting of the book. Research fees are an extra charge on top of this minimum fee.

In Germany the average fee for a confidential ghostwriting service is about $100.00 per page.

There is a recent[when?] trend of outsourcing ghostwriting jobs to offshore locations like India, to save up to 80%. Outsourced ghostwriters whose qualities are at par with US, UK or Canadian ghostwriters, based in countries like India, complete 200-page books for fees ranging between $3000 and $5000, or $12–$18 per page. This sharp price cut in ghostwriters’ fees is encouraging more outsourcing.

Fiction:

Ghostwriters are employed by fiction publishers for several reasons. In some cases, publishers use ghostwriters to increase the number of books that can be published each year by a well-known, highly marketable author. Ghostwriters are mostly used to pen fiction works for well-known, “name” authors in genres such as detective fiction, mysteries, and teen fiction.

Additionally, publishers use ghostwriters to write new books for established series where the ‘author’ is a pseudonym. For example, the purported author of the Nancy Drew mystery series, “Carolyn Keene”, is actually a pseudonym for a series of ghostwriters who write books in the same style using a template of basic information about the book’s characters and their fictional universe (names, dates, speech patterns), and about the tone and style that are expected in the book. (For more information, see the articles on pseudonyms or pen names.) In addition, ghostwriters are often given copies of several of the previous books in the series to help them match the style.

The estate of romance novelist V. C. Andrews hired a ghostwriter to continue writing novels after her death, under her name and in a similar style to her original works. Many of action writer Tom Clancy’s books from the 2000s bear the names of two people on their covers, with Clancy’s name in larger print and the other author’s name in smaller print. Various books bearing Clancy’s name were written by different authors under the same pseudonym. The first two books in the Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell franchise were written by Raymond Benson under the pseudonym David Michaels.

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