One Down, Three To Go

Today is going to be a busy one. Like I’ve mentioned so many times before, I think I would benefit a lot from a project manager. For reasons quite obvious (time and client management) I always seem to find myself having a ridiculous amount of projects due on the same day. Well, that day is today. Luckily I stayed up late last night and polished off one job leaving me three to work on for today. The aforementioned job? I just finished up some content for a cell phone distribution company. For NDA reasons I won’t mention the name of the company or the project, but I can say that the gig involved writing two sets of everything for multiple groups of clients.

I’ve done this before, where I’ll write something that would be internal like a brief, then write something that would be customer facing, so it wasn’t new. What it does do is double my time for the entire project. Basically what happens is that I have to write something for the company to sell to other companies, then write something for those companies to sell to the public. Seems simple enough, but its not. I’ve spent countless hours of my life trying to master specific tones for language and I have to say that writing for a business oriented audience is tough. Not impossible, but tough.

Businesses have a specific way of speaking to each other. Sometimes its dry, sometimes its specifically number oriented and sometimes its something completely different. The bottom line is always the same though, get someone’s attention and keep them on the page. For me, I take the standard principles of fiction writing and translate them into the world of ad writing. It’s actually not all that different (the main one being length) so when I’m tasked to write for an audience of number crunchers and analysts I make sure to try and draw them in with something interesting first. Throughout the narrative I’ll drop in specific facts that will keep their attention, then put in a clever kicker that speaks only to them. This involves quite a bit of research because as standard writing practices go, you have to know your audience.

One of the jobs I’ve done in the past was for lumber enthusiasts; people that buy, treat and distribute the world’s lumber. In order to do something like this I had to embody my inner lumber jack, businessman and factory worker. In the end I pulled it off, but it’s always a journey.

Anyways, back to the title. So I’ve done 1 and I’ve got about 3 more to get finished by 5PM today. Better get off this blog and back into it.