Sample Copywriting Work
Scroll down to find examples of my copywriting work. None of these are professional work as of yet, but I hope they can build the foundation for future jobs.
Economist - Copywriting Assessment
This is the very first piece of copywriting I ever made, and was created for a university assessment, where we were tasked with creating for The Economist in their classic ‘red background’ style.
Researching this newspaper and their adverts was really interesting, as it’s not a publication I would usually go out of my way to read. I think this was what first drew me to copywriting in a way: being able to research a company and product you would never usually interact with, and learning enough about them to be able to create an appropriate advert is a strangely satisfying journey.
The tagline ‘No More Smiling and Nodding’ is based on the idea that reading The Economist will make someone more knowledgeable on business matters, and therefore not need to smile and nod and pretend they know what other people are talking about. When my tutor published this on LinkedIn, a surprising amount of professionals really liked it! It was so much fun to see such a positive response and I think this really started my copywriting journey off on a good foot.
The Guardian - Copywriting Assessment
The second adverts I created were also born from university assessments. In this one, we were given the freedom to choose who we wanted to create poster adverts for, so I chose The Guardian because their advertising — centred around the idea that they are a truthful newspaper who don’t withhold facts and aren’t beholden to some corporate bosses (unlike many other newspapers) — really spoke to me.
It was this message that formed the basis for these two poster ideas. In the first, I really wanted to play on that ‘we aren’t being controlled by some corporate outside force’ angle, this in turn created the ‘we don’t have guns to our heads’ tagline. The text lining up against the head and looking like a gun was somewhat of an accident, but I liked it so much that I decided to keep it.
In the second advert, I focused more on the ‘we don’t withhold facts’ message by breaking the fourth wall and outright telling the reader that they are looking at an advert to convince them to do read the newspaper. It’s somewhat light-hearted and cheeky, which I think fits with the tone of The Guardian, as well as sending a clear message that The Guardian doesn’t work like other newspapers , as they are interested in sharing the truth and being clear about their own intentions.
Dropout.tv - Personal Copywriting Task
This was the first copywriting task that I set for myself, outside of any academic or professional influence or requirement. Knowing that I needed to expand my portfolio, I decided to set myself a challenge to create some adverts for a company of my own choosing, drawing on the knowledge I gained during my bachelor’s. After some consideration, I chose the streaming service ‘Dropout.tv’ as the focus of this project, as it was a service I had been using a lot at the time of creation. It was a company that I felt I knew well, that I admired, and that I thought I could create adverts for effectively.
When first considering taglines, I realised that I wanted to incorporate the names of the different shows featured on Dropout (Game Changer, Um, Actually, Dirty Laundry, etc) into the adverts, and this soon expanded into incorporating the title fonts of each show into the adverts as well.
As for the colour scheme and central style, I took direct inspiration from Dropout’s logo and branding, with the bright yellow background and blocky black text, changing the words that referenced the different shows to the appropriate fonts in order to add some variety with minimal colours.
The idea to add an Asterix and an extra comment under each tagline began with the first advert I made (‘we’ve been here the whole time!’) when I realised that this extra information would be vital to completing the joke I had set up. I enjoyed how this worked so much that I added this aspect to all of the adverts I made, in turn creating a more cohesive series of adverts with the same structure despite their stylistic differences.
