This week we had the privilege of receiving a visit from Ronnie Lee, a creative director at Hook Studios in Los Angeles, CA. Following our successful campaign pitches at the TOMS headquarters, our groups all have invested money to work with, and need to use this money to take the best possible next steps in our campaigns. This visit from Ronnie Lee was centered around copywriting, which I found extremely helpful, and very interesting. We learned about ads, tactics, and the best ways to figure out what we want to say, who we want to say it to, and the most effective way to say it. One highlight that really stuck out to me and surprised me about his presentation was his structure for creativity. Ronnie had very carefully laid out steps and tactics which he aligned in a process, which we used to come up with our own ideas for our specific campaigns.
At the beginning of his presentation, Ronnie said, "Good writing is good writing, no matter where it is." This had me immediately thinking of copywriting as a much broader career, rather than just a tagline or an image on a billboard or in the page of a magazine. Copywriting can be used anywhere and in any fashion, and it is in our hands to decide what to say, how to say it, and where we should put all of it to reach our target audiences. He told us to find out what we wanted to say, before we figure out how we want to say it, and this helped me drastically before I dove into the creative process of writing for my own group's campaign: Artivate.
Ronnie Lee soon began to split up the products and brands that we promote into attributes, functional benefits, and emotional benefits. We begin with the attributes of a product, for example. Then we identify the key functional benefits that these attributes offer, and lastly pull emotional benefits from these functions, because when it comes to an advertisement, the emotional benefits are what best reach whoever is sees it. Simply, we learned to take attributes, functions, and emotions, and find something interesting to say. Once we identify useful functional and emotional benefits from our own campaigns, we began using different functions of writing to develop more thought and emotion. We picked from tactics like metaphors, personification, hyperboles, irony, rhetorical questions, parallelism, and more to bring our thoughts and emotions to life. This time spent with Ronnie Lee helped me develop the skills I needed to turn a product or a brand's image into something that will reach out and grab attention rather than just be seen, and I was amazed by how useful a solid plan for creativity was used to generate such powerful results.
Commentaires