What does a copywriter do?
A copywriter turns a strategy into language people will actually read. Headlines, taglines, scripts, voiceover, social posts, product descriptions, email, web pages, the manifesto in a pitch deck and the three words on a billboard. They work from a brief, usually alongside an art director or a designer, and they are responsible for the idea as much as the sentence: in advertising the copywriter and the art director form the creative team that comes up with the campaign.
The job has a range. At one end is conceptual advertising copy, where a single line is worked on for a week. At the other is volume work, where a writer produces a hundred product descriptions to a style guide. Most copywriters do both across a career, and the best ones are as careful with the hundredth description as with the headline.
Why it matters
Why a copywriter matters
Words are the part of a brand people quote. A visual identity gets recognized; a line gets repeated. Good copy makes a brand sound like one person with a point of view instead of a committee with a legal department, and it makes a film land, because the last line is what the viewer leaves with. Bad copy is expensive in a way that is hard to see: it does not fail loudly, it just gets ignored, and the media budget behind it is spent on nothing.
In practice
How a copywriter works in practice
- 01
It starts with the brief: who the audience is, what the brand needs them to think or do, the tone, the mandatories, the format. The copywriter reads everything, talks to the people who know the product, then writes many more options than anyone will see, because the first ten lines are usually the obvious ones. With the art director they build the concept, and the copy and the visual are developed together rather than one decorating the other.
- 02
Once an idea is chosen the copywriter drafts the full execution: the script with timings, the page with its headings and calls to action, the social set with its captions. Then revisions, legal review, the read-through at the recording session and the last trim in the edit when the line is a word too long. Copy is never finished; it is released.
At RIOT
Copywriters at RIOT
Every film we make has been written before it has been shot, and most of them are rewritten in the edit. The brand spot we made for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, "For the Pursuit", was carried by its words as much as its pictures. This glossary is a copywriting job too, written in our own voice rather than generated to fill a page, because a studio that sells words should be able to write its own.
Watch out
What people get wrong about copywriters
Hiring one at the end. A copywriter brought in to "add the words" to a finished layout is being asked to caption someone else's idea, and the work shows it. The other mistake is confusing writing with typing: a copywriter is paid for the judgment about what to say and what to leave out, which is why the best ones hand back a shorter page than they were briefed for.
