Commercial Creativity: Writing Authentic Brand Fiction
After working as a writer in China for a couple of years, I was tempted into a career in advertising for two reasons: MONEY and business experience.
Writing for a living is sadly not really profitable and I wanted to learn skills from the advertising and marketing business that I could apply to other things later in life.
Let’s be honest, the writer who wrote The New York Times feature article got paid less than the writer who wrote the banner copy for ad next to the feature. This reality makes my idealistic heart bleed a little inside.
Now, I had never considered advertising as a career path, until a friend of mine who was Head of Strategy for a digital ad agency in Shanghai talked to me about it.
She had attended a fundraiser I had organised to raise surgery money for my cleaning lady’s husband who had been in a motorbike accident. The fundraiser contributed 27,000 RMB to his surgery and she thought the way I had pulled off the fundraiser showed a talent for strategy.
“Bek, you are a REALLY good storyteller. You are intuitive and understand people and what motivates them.
Advertising is basically crafting stories about brands that people want to hear. Imagine a brand is a person, you are writing the life story of that person.”
How she sold it to me was that through advertising, I could write brand fiction or “conceptual art” (waxing poetic, here) and in exchange I could make real money.
I thought about it for six months, but had that slight sinking feeling that I was selling out, throwing in the towel — walking away from my dreams of being a writer because of the realities of life, or perhaps, that I simply wasn’t good enough to make a living off it.
My writer friends also treated me a bit differently when they heard I had “gone to the dark side” and become a mercenary creative, which is not untrue.
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