Writing and advertising

(c) Kim Rempel

OK, I want an honest answer.  How do you feel when you see these two words in the title?  They are very simple to interpret, but I have come to find out after earning a bachelor’s degree in marketing and advertising, and now running my own blogs, that a person perceives it in one or two ways: Yeah and nah.

First the yah (yes for proper English enthusiasts, such as myself).  Writing and advertising go hand and hand, like peas and carrots, Fred and Barney, shoes and socks, and Mickey and Minnie.  You cannot have one without the other.  (Well you can, but that is not the point I am trying to make).  In order to succeed in marketing, you have to know how to write well. Advertisers do not like misspelled words, unless it is a play on words, and then you have to know when and how to use them. 

People live for advertising.  After all, what influenced you to buy the kind of car you have, the clothes you are wearing, and phone you are talking on? There are more than one type of advertising.  There is print, internet (online), television, radio, and word or mouth advertising for starters.  When a friend tells you that they like a certain brand of food for the economic value of that food (AKA price) that is advertising.  When you go to the library, and you see that the branch you are in have Dell computers with the Windows operating system in them that is advertising.  Want Coke and the venue you are at carries Pepsi products?  You guess it, advertising.  Think of advertising as a major influence factor in your decision making.

On the other hand, there are the naysayers. (Or no for again proper English).  They loath adverting because it either promotes greed, lust, and want.  I have not seen protests against advertisers or writing for advertisers in my lifetime, but I know they are there.  Perhaps against polluting the air, the environment.  Again it is mostly word of mouth.  They do not like the commercials online, on the airwaves.  I wonder if these naysayers say anything, do they know that’s advertising too.  I do not have a problem with advertising, I just have a problem with what is being advertised to our young.

Today, I saw a video on Facebook.  It was tagged by a friend of mine, and he had a problem with this boy dancing like a girl.  You know, very female-like.  The child had to been about 7 or 8.  He was doing a dance battle with a girl.  I watched the video, and I had a problem with both of them.  The girl was around the same age, and she did a little acro, (what they call gymnastics these days), a little twerking, the same as the boy, and again I had a problem with both of them.  You know where I am going with this, and you know where they learned it from.  It was part sass, part dance studio taught, but look what is on tube.  Sex and sass is all the rage, and these kids do not want to learn the cutesy dances.  OH no, that is too babyish, but even the babies do not want to learn it.  I am going to leave it at that, because we will be having a whole new conversation here.

The point I am making is love it or leave today’s advertising, it requires writing, even if you are writing out a plan of attack.  I even pointed it out in one of my posts last year that you need to have good writing skills.

So how do you feel about writing and advertising?