The terms advertising agencies, copywriters, and content creators were changed to content agencies. The art of advertising copywriting became content for content marketing, as if by a formal order of the American Advertising Federation and the Association of National Advertisers.
This meant that copywriters would need to update their resumes. Just search copywriter, writing, and other words. Replace with content strategist, content creator, etc. It was a minor nomenclature change. It was more for the industry than that, however. This shift was a natural one. The industry has changed. You can understand why if you are old enough to recall the original definitions of copywriting.
This doesn’t sound like the current advertising and marketing environment. Today we have a multi-stage buyer journey landscape that allows content creators to drive demand generation and lead nurturing. It’s not the same as copywriting in its traditional sense. Writing? Writing?
The current emphasis on content creation and all that goes with it has potential pitfalls, principally in quantity over quality.
What happens next? Sturgeon’s Law is applied, as a writing colleague likes to say. This means that 90 percent of the content is schlock. We resort to shortcuts, rules, and tricks to reduce the effort required if we need more time. These same steps can lead to a decrease in quality.
Messaging guides
There are good and bad guides, but they can be abused by lazy content creators or those with limited time. Corporate marketing groups and agencies publish these guides with the noble intention of ensuring consistency. Too often, content creators need to pay attention to the audience or media to copy/paste good work. With its beautiful, consistent use in the third person, passive voice, and excessive use of the word solutions, the guide’s “corporate voice” bleeds into all content, rendering it uninteresting and not readable.