Is Copywriting A 'Thankless Job'?


Some people would be impressed that you work for a top advertising agency as a copywriter because your work will always be plastered on the TV screens or spread in the best-selling magazines. Little do they know that copywriters are placed in a pressure cooker that will slowly but surely churn out all the creative juices that you have. It's even worse than the Spanish Inquisition, although you won't be tortured to death and quartered to pieces.

The truth of the matter is that you are always in a constant battle to meet the clients' needs, your boss' expectations, and the competition out there - equally-talented people willing to replace you and eventually render you obsolete. Getting started in this business is cutthroat and oftentimes equal to indentured servitude. Seriously, new and junior copywriters are notoriously underpaid by some agencies because they think that it is easy to write articles out of nothing because you have the Internet and all the online resources out there. No wonder, we are under-estimated.


We don't use Facebook all day to pass time, we have to keep on educating ourselves on how the world works, learn new things we don't know, and research new ideas. Copywriting can be a "thankless job." We work hard, often a lot than what we can handle. Expectations are too high to deliver the goods. Often times, few people understand that our ideas form the core of a great new advertising or marketing campaign.

Whether you're in a top advertising agency or just a small company, you will almost never receive credit for all your hard work. At the end of the day, it's the creative director that receives all the credit from all your endless hours of brainstorming and research. The genius behind the success is invisible while failure can be your death sentence.

Is it a 'thankless job'? Or a high risk, big reward kind of a career? What are your thoughts?

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