Entertainment Is Both the Blessing and the Curse of a Copywriter - Essay Example

The paper "Entertainment Is Both the Blessing and the Curse of a Copywriter" is an excellent example of an essay on marketing. In advertising, it is considered most important to build brand identity and name recognition for a product, even when this is done by associating popular ideas, people, and events with a product that they generally have no relation to functionally. A good example of this is the use of sports stars in commercials for breakfast cereals such as Wheaties. While sports and a good breakfast are surely related on one level, the advertising campaign takes the dominant ideas from the symbol of the athlete and transfers it over to the product, in this case, the breakfast cereal, but it could be anything, a car, a cell phone, or a commodity. The advertising campaign is designed to merge ideas and associations in people’s minds, for example, building on the image of strength, success, and popularity as represented by the athlete that then becomes part of the brand identity of the product. In many ways, this is easier to do with imagery than pure copywriting in advertising, and this explains why so many companies place large budgets in generated media ads for their products. Through the increased name recognition, the sales of the product also increase, even if there is no real logic to the way that the name association was built through the celebrity promotion of the advert.

Ads that merely entertain the viewer can be highly successful in building this type of brand identity and name awareness in a consumer market. Yet, the campaign can also backfire if not written correctly. For example, Microsoft recently hired the famous comedian Jerry Seinfeld to do a series of ads for them. Seinfeld is a comedian and entertainer and the ad campaign was designed around the idea of entertaining the viewer of the TV commercial in the same manner that a sitcom entertains the audience. However, in this ad campaign, the copywriters evidently missed their mark in entertaining the audience and instead, bored and confused them. As Computerworld blogger Preston Gralla wrote in a review, “I just saw Microsofts much-ballyhooed Jerry Seinfeld ad, and can say without equivocation it's one of the worst, most pointless ads in history... The entire spot plays off a lame joke about Bill Gates buying cheap shoes at a cut-rate discount store. The ad isn't funny, has absolutely no point, and is about as boring a minute and a half as you'll ever spend.” (Gralla, 2008) The Microsoft Seinfeld-Bill Gates ad went viral after it was released on the internet, being reviewed and discussed by bloggers across the web who commented how unusual, unorthodox, and even boring that the ad was, giving Microsoft millions of dollars in free publicity that it would not have ordinarily received with a typical ad campaign. Thus, advertisements that entertain can build a brand and name recognition for a product or company, as well as leading to discussion in other contexts that builds marketing buzz. In the modern media environment, this is a good strategy for targeting the complex consumer. Read More