Posted on August 29, 2008
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I still remember the regret I felt when I first read David Ogilvy’s Confessions Of An Advertising Man. My hopes to one day write the definitive book on advertising copywriting were dashed. Ogilvy had said it all, and said it perfectly. There was nothing more to add.
Soon after, DOS turned into Windows, and writing and advertising and a lot else turned topsy turvy. Now there was email and web content and SEO copywriting, new territory Ogilvy had never trod. It looked like there were new things to say after all.
But to this day, no copywriter said them with more grace and wit of David Ogilvy — a Scottish door-to-door salesman, a chef in Paris ducking the eggs of his culinary overseer, a social worker in Edinburgh slums, an assistant to Sir William Stephenson in British Security, and the man who (after failing at farming among the Pennsylvania Amish) went sadly on to found Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, one of the largest, most notable advertising agencies in the world.
You would not have expected a man with a background as a Gallup research associate to write like an angel. But he did. And his two classics, Confessions Of An Advertising Man and Ogilvy On Advertising positively glitter with wise counsel for the aspiring copywriter. Consider:
Ogilvy has been called the greatest advertising genius of all time, and that’s an exaggeration. Few of his ideas were entirely original. Claude Hopkins and John Caples beat him to the punch in many a classic insight.
But while Ogilvy may not have pioneered his views, he gave them classical expression, and, even better, embodied them in a set of model ads that remain unsurpassed, including what may be the greatest print ad of them all, “At 60 Miles An Hour The Loudest Noise In This New Rolls-Royce Comes From The Electric Clock”.
And for all his commitment to research and ‘reason-why’ copy, Ogilvy also subtly midwifed the birth of Branding with such classic campaigns as “The Man In The Hathaway shirt”, and Schweppes, featuring the bearded icon of Commander Schweppes himself and the unique benefit of ’schweppervessence’.
There’s more to say about David Ogilvy. But as always, he said it best himself. And we’re fortunate enough to hear it from the man directly now, thanks to an hour of Ogilvy in the Sixties graciously posted to YouTube.
Click, reader, and learn and enjoy:
Posted on August 22, 2008
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Marketing In A Demographic Revolution
Hispanic-Americans make up over 15% of the American population.
In 2002 Hispanic-American purchasing power exceeded $580 billion dollars.
In 2005 Hispanic-Americans filled one out of every three new jobs.
In 2007 Hispanic-American purchasing power was projected to rise to $926.1 billion.
This year it should exceed one trillion dollars. And keep rising at a rate roughly twice that of non-hispanics.
Hispanic-Americans aren’t becoming a major market. They are a major market.
Yet in a great deal of American marketing, hispanics and hispanic culture are minimal to the point of invisibility. And some of that marketing, even when it is visible, seems almost calculated to misfire.
What’s the best way to create marketing and advertising that reaches the Hispanic market?
Customize Thoughtfully
Some companies think the way to market to hispanics is simply to point existing marketing material at them. Why bother to customize? If a Coke ad works on one market segment, it should work on another. Right?
Wrong. In fact it’s so plainly wrong one hardly knows what to say. If you address English-language advertisements to a population a part of which doesn’t read English, isn’t it obvious that a serious chunk of your marketing dollar will simply not get through?
The whole broad edifice of market segmentation is built on the knowledge that markets are built of subsidiary markets with unique needs and characteristics. Know them and address them and you will do better. Ignore them, and at best you will communicate inefficiently. At worst you may more than fail, you may alienate.
Companies who understand this and customize to a target market can nonetheless make the mistake of addressing that market superficially. This is what I think of as ‘touch-up’ marketing: you take marketing collaterals aimed at traditionally non-hispanic markets and simply tack on a latino phrase or face or, often, cliche. The hamburger remains the same, only a dash of salsa is added.
This can misfire too. The surface may send out one message, but is the subtext sending another?
Take commercials that target the generic ‘American’ family. As a rule you’ll tend to see the traditional nuclear family, suburban and secular, of husbands and wives of roughly the same age and occasionally one or two children. But you’re not likely to see six children. Nor are you likely to see a family with live-in cousins and grandparents, or a wife of twenty and a husband with grey hair.
But sociologists note that in latino society, families are often extended families. A family picture without a grandparent is the exception. Old people and young people interact regularly, and older ones have a visible measure of authority and respect. Religious pictures and symbols are a common part of most household decor. Colors are alive. Food is spicy. Music is vivid rather than ambient.
Is there a standard latino style? Not really. But there are styles that are definitely not latino, pale minimalism and unisex understatement among them. One can tape a latino element to these, but it only produces the sort of faux-latino advertising that poses as being culturally sensitive but leaves a subtle or a sharp flavor of dissonance — the sort that can do more harm than good.
Showing marketing sensitivity to hispanic culture has another tall challenge — the fact that there is no hispanic culture as such. Or at least, no single such culture. It’s a multitude of cultures, rather - Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Salvadoran, Argentinian. We all understand why a campaign that might succeed brilliantly with New Yorkers might fail miserably with Southern Baptists or with Scots. The same applies to marketing to latinos: one size does not fit all.
The median age of a Cuban-American is 39. The median age of a Mexican-American is 24. Will that make a difference to a company selling life insurance as opposed to one making college loans? You bet. The numbers tell us that hispanics in the urban North are largely Puerto Rican, but those in the rural North are largely Mexican, whereas the hispanic population of Miami is overwhelmingly Cuban. Does it make a difference? It makes a difference.
What can help alert you to those distinctions? Direct market research is probably your best source. But just studying advertising in specifically hispanic locales helps too. Puerto Rico and Mexico and Brazil have their ad agencies, marketing awards, and print ads and commercials too. A quick review can be an illuminating one. Provided you review it thoughtfully.
Why? Because hispanic culture in America is far from being a patchwork of cultures from elsewhere. A hispanic culture native to America began emerging long ago. It’s here, it’s alive, it’s growing, it’s changing. One day it promises to be the mainstream.
So it isn’t just a matter of being of hispanic culture. You need to be aware of hispanic cultures. And, in the long term, of the fact that American culture is becoming a new hispanic culture all by itself.
Talk To People In The Language That They Use
Right now roughly one out of every four hispanic consumers in the United States understands Spanish well, but may have a degree of difficulty with English.
Companies can ignore that. They can save time and translation fees by continuing to produce marketing materials in English alone. And so, addressing a trillion dollar market, they will send partially or utterly incomprehensible messages to people that control a quarter of a trillion of those dollars.
Of course it would be an equally great mistake to treat hispanic Americans as being Spanish-speaking only. A part of the hispanic market in America doesn’t speak Spanish at all. And the emergence of ‘Spanglish’ is yet another twist for marketing writers to take into account. You don’t have to translate ‘baby’ for ‘Hasta La Vista, baby’ to get across in either language.
But stats are stats: a significant minority are still more at home with Spanish than English. And so marketing communications directed at the hispanic market needs to be, to some extent, bilingual. Any other decision wastes too large a part of your marketing and advertising dollar.
Admittedly this poses some challenges. How do you create successful marketing materials in two languages?
There are several ways. Parallel texts in English and Spanish may be used in marketing material. Headlines, read by over 90% of readers, can be in both languages, whereas body copy, read by less than 10%, might be in one. In video, visual text in one language might be accompanied by voiceovers in the other, or vice versa. Subtitling can be used with real wit. In a bilingual website I created for a client, one can click on a page and go from English to Spanish and back.
Here again American marketing can learn by looking across the border. Media awareness work in bilingual Quebec showcases a wealth of insights into multicultural marketing.
But however it’s done, some elements of a company’s marketing material will need to be in Spanish. It doesn’t have to be completely or exclusively in Spanish. It doesn’t even have to be a large or very conspicuous part of what you have to say.
But the critical part of your message needs to be made available in both languages. Otherwise you will lose business. And possibly a lot of it.
Think Globally And Locally
If all the latinos in the United States were counted as one nation, it would be the third-largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world. Only Mexico and Spain itself are larger.
But the global Spanish-speaking market is larger than all the people in the United States put together. As of 2005, the Gross National Product of Latin America alone exceeds four trillion four hundred and twenty-one billion dollars. Spanish is considered to be either the second or third most-spoken language on the globe.
If your business is purely local, this may not be a major consideration. But there are fewer and fewer such businesses in the age of the internet.
The phrase, ‘a world of opportunity,’ isn’t just words when it comes to marketing to latinos and latino cultures. If your business product can be shipped, flown, or downloaded, opening your business to Hispanic-American consumers can be one step in opening it up as well to a global Spanish-speaking market of dozens of nations and hundreds of millions of individuals.
Think locally and globally.
Remember That The Rules Remain The Rules
There are differences between Hispanic consumers and non-Hispanic consumers. Noticing and addressing those differences can get you more business. But basic marketing principles are basic marketing principles. And those don’t change.
If you want to get a good consumer response, you need to have a good product. You need to promote that product — to let the people who might want that product know that it’s available. You need to tell them why it’s smart to get it. You have to show why you’re better than the competition in some important respect. You need to show them where they can go to buy it. It has to be look good and work right and be affordable.
Hispanic people will not go to a restaurant if the food isn’t good. Even if the menu is bilingual, even if the waiters know Spanish, even if the menu mentions classic hispanic cuisine, even if the background music stretches from Segovia to Santana, the food still has to taste good, not bad, the price has to be appropriate not outrageous, the restaurant has to be minutes away, not hours or days away.
The product must satisfy the customer. Advertisements and survey questions have to clear. Product packaging has to let people know what the product is. Business decisions need to be based on studying the market and addressing the people that make it up.
Markets change. But marketing basics like these stay the same. The best way to reach hispanic consumers is by sticking to those basics: good business practices and good marketing approaches.
And the best time to start? Pronto.
Posted on August 13, 2008
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Designers and copywriters don’t always get on well.
Partly it’s a turf thing. Rare is the agency whose art department isn’t straining to splash dazzling visuals across multi-page spreads and browser screens. The copy department has a similar obsessive urge, a primal ache to cover every inch of white space with Times New Roman.
Whichever side wins, the marketing materials that emerge, like their creators, are heavily lopsided towards either the verbal or the visual.
And that’s too bad, since neither approach appeals to all of the market, only parts.
How do you avoid that? How you get visuals and copy to work effectively together?
Here are some tips:
What Do You Want The Target Market To Do?
I write and I also design. But when I create marketing materials for a client, the main thing that concerns me is not visual, not verbal, but behavioral. Marketing isn’t there to create art for art’s sake. It’s there to advance business goals.
Marketing materials are there to get a measurable active response from a target public. You want to get someone to do something – to make a purchase, send a donation, vote for a candidate.
Advertising ‘concepts’ touch on this with the notion of expressing one central idea in both words and design. Yes, but what is the point of that concept? What is its goal?
Good marketing and advertising is not about making pretty pictures or memorable remarks. The concept — and the copy and the design that express that concept — have to move the audience to action. If people see your promotion and just drift away, why bother?
So always ask yourself first: what are the words and images intended to get people to do?
Different Ways Of Expressing The Same Idea
Once you’ve got that target action clearly in mind, ask yourself this: what sort of visual imagery alone would incline a person to do that thing?
Say, for example, that you want someone to buy a car. What visual impressions would incline someone to want to own that car?
Images of stylish exteriors, surely. Roomy interior space, rich accessories, gleaming dashboard paraphernalia. Images of happy campers happily camping, if the vehicle is geared to that market. Or of James Bond at the wheel, if geared to another.
Then do the same thing with the copy. Ask yourself, what words or statements would have the same effect?
Often the time-hallowed ones will do it. Great mileage. Easy payment plan. Quick and helpful service.
But if you’re truly aiming for the same effect, you’re likely to come up with individualized words and phrases that say in words what the pictures are saying in terms of imagery.
Put it this way. Imagine that you’re thinking of hiring a salesperson. You interview two candidates at Starbucks. One is articulate, eloquent, and suave. Unfortunately the mark of Satan is tattooed on his forehead. The second candidate is grey-haired and square-jawed, wearing a silver Rolex, a Brooks Brother pinstripe, and an alumni pin from Harvard. Sadly, his language skills are limited to Latin.
Now if you could combine that affable eloquence with that good business suit, you’d get a positive response. If you combined the satanic tattoos and the Latin, that might work too, if you’re marketing Death Metal albums.
And that’s the point. People going to interviews try to talk in ways likely to get them a positive response, and they dress in a way that secures a good response too. Intergration follows naturally.
Ads are like that. They make a verbal impression on us through what they say, and a non-verbal impression on us with how they look.
It isn’t that difficult to figure out what makes a good and similar impression in each area. Or to see how similarities harmonize.
The Strip Test
Here’s a test. Look at any given ad. Ask yourself this. Suppose there were no visuals at all. Strip them out.
If all you saw was the plain text by itself, would you remember it?
Would you still be interested, and be more inclined to buy the product or take the action than if you hadn’t seen it?
If so, the copy works.
Now put back the images and strip out the words. What if you saw just the images alone? Would you still get roughly the same idea? Would you still be inclined to get the product?
If so, the imagery works.
And when they both work, the marketing piece will generally work too.
Overkill Kills
Do imagery and copy need to work together really tightly? The inclination is to say yes. If your ad proclaims Leo Associates to be The Lion Of Theatrical Agencies, you generally want to couple it with an image of the Lion King and not a dead dog.
But in my experience, the only thing you must avoid when integrating copy and imagery is blatant incongruence. Overkill kills: it’s enough for them to be quietly complementary, so long as the core idea gets through.
Images of pleasant skies have nothing to do with pharmaceuticals, for example, but they can provide effective backdrops for pharmaceutical ad copy, and yield effective ads. You don’t need literal one-to-one equivalence between words and pictures to create a fine piece.
It’s also true that text and imagery can comment on one another ironically, of course. The face of Frankenstein might make an effective visual for an advertisement for cosmetic surgery, for instance.
But irony and dissonance are paths to take with reluctance. Marketing materials fly by consumers at the speed of light, and impressions they make are instant. To assume the public will stop and take the time to savor your ad’s urbane ambiguities can be fatal.
Which Matters Most – Copy Or Design?
Both matter, obviously. But which element deserves the highest attention? It really depends on the particular situation. Pictures of fashion models sell fashion better than words, and paperbacks flash the author’s name across the cover, not their photo. Wise marketers let the market determine the medium.
But if I absolutely had to pick? I’d pick copy.
The fact is, there are perfectly effective ads that have no visual element at all. From personals to classifieds to full-page ads in the New York Times, words alone will move people.
And – the critical distinction – they will move them with precision. A picture of a tire cut in half won’t tell you that Crazy Al is selling his tires half-off this Sunday only. Text will tell you. And it will sell those tires too.
Images are wonderful at conveying emotion and mood, but mood isn’t language, and more sales are closed when buyers can articulate the reasons for the purchase than when they can’t. Design makes a wonderful sauce. But text is the meat.
Though of course a good cook will give as much attention to the one as to the other. You have to prepare both expertly to bring the client to the table.
David Pascal has nearly twenty years of freelance and in-house experience in marketing, advertising, and corporate communications. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of the State of New York, and a second bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, David began his career in marketing and advertising as an illustrator, became a marketing agency copywriter, and subsequently added web design skills to the mix. He has taught copywriting at the nationally celebrated writing center Writers & Books, published numerous articles, and spoken on marketing and other subjects at the Rochester Institute of Technology and other colleges and institutions. Contact information and samples of his writing and design work for clients is available at his web site at www.davidpascal.com.
Posted on August 3, 2008
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Web Copy Has To Stand Alone
Back in the old days when print was the rule, things were static. What you saw was what you got. Every element of an advertisement worked together to create a single fixed effect. The finished ad or brochure or billboard looked the same to every reader every time.
Those days are dead. Print still counts, but not the way it did. The way we write now is for the web. And it’s no secret why. Magazine copy, direct mail, annual reports reach only so many people. Digitized versions can reach the whole world. So even when you do print, one eye is always on the web, since that’s where print materials are likely to turn up. And stay turned up for a long long time.
But the web is a very different medium. Web browsers don’t show a fixed creation the way the designers envisioned it. Browsers take raw code and separate files and reconstruct them as best they can. So what you see can look different in each different browser.
And different can mean very different. Images can be turned off to save download time. Type can be halved or doubled or in size, depending on the viewer’s default setting. The viewer may be blind and use a program that speaks the text aloud. Copy can appear on a massive monitor running multiple screens simultaneously. Or on a 50-inch WebTV. Or on a mobile phone screen the size of a postage-stamp.
You can be fairly certain that in most cases browsers will be looking at an end product sort of close to what the web designer wanted. Maybe. But you have no assurance.
The online copywriter has to work on the assumption that none of the visual elements that normally support the copy – not even typography — will do so.
The copy you write has to be able to stand alone.
Entrance From Anywhere
It isn’t just that the look can’t be taken for granted. The logical flow can’t either.
When reading print, people normally start at the beginning, move through the middle, and go on through the end. The logical stages of an argument, a presentation, a process, unfold in clear sequential order.
On the web, readers enter your site from any page, not necessarily the home page. And they progress through it any way they please.
They leap away to other sites via hyperlinks. They scan, bouncing from sub-head to pull quote to pop-up window. They may follow a link into your site at a page devoted to your staff’s bios. They may jump next to the links page, see one they like, and click away never to return, or bounce back and hop over to the FAQ, or bookmark it to del.icio.us where they (and thousands more) may access it later. They may click an mp3 file to listen to your pitch with their ears while replying to email with their hands and browsing a competitor’s site with their eyes.
How much of your site do such visitors seen? A tenth? A twentieth? What order have they seen it in? Even they may not remember. How much do they come away with?
Again: web copy has to stand alone. It’s isn’t just that it has to work independently of the visuals or the surrounding imagery. It has to work independently of the surrounding pages. Sometimes even of the surrounding paragraphs. Writing for the web means creating content that makes instant sense or gets instant interest regardless of overall context.
Can Effective Web Copy Be Written At All?
Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Well, yes. Your site’s readers can drop in at any point, move in any order, and see get your message in ways totally different from the way you wanted them to get it.
But is it fatal? No. The fact is, web readers follow the news, not only visit sites but comment on them, read blogs and wikis and fanfiction, and make online purchases in the billions. Clearly people read online, and take actions and make buying decisions on based on what they read.
And that’s the key to writing effective web content. Because when you find things that work, you can study the process. And re-create it.
Web studies abound tracking the way people read and react to writing on the web. (The archives at Jacob Neilsen’s www.useit.com contain a Niagara of material on the subject.)
In my case it’s led me to four principles that I continually keep in mind when writing for the web:
Who Are The Readers And What Do They Want To Know?
That’s the first question to ask. And it should be asked in that order. Start with who, not what.
Say you’re writing a travel blog so your family can follow your foreign tour. They want to hear about your feelings, your experiences, your surprises. Because they want to hear about you.
Say you’re writing copy for a travel agency web site. You write about the place, the sights, the prices, the cuisine. Why? Because what potential tourists care about is not you. They care about the tour.
Both categories of reader really want the same thing: information. But they want different kinds of information. Your first task as an online copywriter is to find out what that target readership wants to know.
Think of web readers as information hunters. They want to know something, and they want to find it out as quickly as they can. They don’t want to have to dig for it and they don’t want to have to puzzle over it. They want it straight and the want it now. Bang.
What sells is relevance. And relevance is only relevant in relation to a person.
Find out about that person. If you’re lucky, review the market research. And if you don’t have any, talk to a few actual target prospects or check out where they chat on the web.
The more you learn about the prospects, the better the eventual copy.
Long Copy Still Sells
What? Long copy sells? “But I thought web readers barely read at all?”
Readers don’t. Buyers do. Long copy sells – to serious buyers. And those are the only kinds you really need to consider.
The fact is, not everyone who visits your site or reads your online piece is a likely prospect. Some are. Some aren’t. Most aren’t. Most visitors flicker in, have a glance, and click away.
But people seriously interested in a subject, people who are seriously thinking about making a purchase, will want more information not less. And they will go through it. Don’t think of it as long copy. Think of it as rich comprehensive content.
Example. Imagine that you want to buy a Volkswagen. You see two classified ads.
Ad One: “Car For Sale. Contact POB XXXX.”
Ad Two: “2004 VW. 20,000 Miles, Perfect Condition, Inspected, Automatic, A/C, CD Stereo. Price Negotiable. Must Sell By Tomorrow! Call XXX-XXXX.”
Ad One is short. Which in principle is fine. But are you really going to send a letter to a P.O. Box and wait to see if that car even is a VW, when the second ad looks like a good VW deal and could go any second? Ad Two sells because Ad Two tells.
Don’t misunderstand. Prospects don’t read your writing for the joy of savoring your elegant prose style. Short sentences, short paragraphs, and straight-to-the-point copy remain the rule. But that doesn’t mean you cut down on content. Far from it.
Take a potential client who needs marketing. He sees one business card with the word MARKETING on it, followed by the company name address. Then he sees a second business card that says Print, Direct Mail and Internet Marketing, Branding and Strategy, In-House Design and Production, 20 Years Experience, Free Consultation, followed by name, address, phone number and URL. Which card is more likely to lead to a call?
A consumer making a low-cost purchase may buy casually. But when business people in business-to-business situations make a decision, they want as much relevant information as they can get. Give it to them.
Content is king for a reason: it rules. And while it’s smart to serve it up online in short sentences, serve up more content rather than less. Substance still sells, and a rich amount of strong selling content is always stronger than copy that’s information-starved.
Write Long Cut Short
Short sentences, short paragraphs, and straight-to-the-point copy definitely works well on the web. No question. Unfortunately that may lead you to think that not only is it good to write short, it’s good to think short too.
This is the ‘Just Do It’ school of copywriting: an approach that focuses on creating striking one-liners instead of persuasive appeals. And brilliant and memorable one-liners really do move people sometimes. But copywriters who think of themselves as Jay Leno rather than salespersons are playing a risky game.
The focus of commercial writing is never the writing. It’s the product. And while finished copy needs to be concise, I never advise being concise when writing the draft. There you should sprawl. Throw in all you can. Making a good loose case for the product during the draft helps you hone a sharp concise case in print. And a crystal-concise one on the web.
Think of it in terms of process. To write 500 words of good print copy, you may well have to write a thousand or two thousand words of bad draft copy. The draft is where you sketch, try different approaches, brainstorm. When final draft time comes around, you trim and compress that amorphous blob till it reaches 500 tightly focused words fit for print.
To write good web copy, you keep trimming. You sharpen it to 200 words or even 100.
But remember: you can’t sharpen something that just ain’t there in the first place.
Good print copy is like the proverbial iceberg. The tip is visible, but 90 percent lies underwater.
Good web copy? 95 to 98 percent may lie underwater.
But it’s what you don’t see that supports and makes possible what you do see.
Make the linear case first. Study the product in depth. Look at the research, understand the target market. Be thorough. When writing the first draft, sprawl.
And then?
Think Chunks
Once you get the long copy drafted, chop. Cut it down. Break it up. And – if it’s headed for the web – make sure each stand-alone section is comprehensible on its own, is compelling on its own, and is interesting enough to make the reader want more.
The test for print copy is generally to read all the copy. That’s a luxury you can’t afford online. You have to judge each piece of copy on a page-by-page, sometimes a screen-by-screen, basis. Does each screenful of text affect the reader in a way consistent with the marketing goal? If that one screen is all the reader sees – because it may well be – does it work?
The criteria is not the total impact of the whole site. Because the studies are blunt: people just don’t read whole sites. They pop in and scan chunks. So our criteria has to be: do the chunks work? If all the pieces work together, great. But they have to work effectively separately. Because separately is all that most viewers will ever see.
The Way We Write Now
There are times when I think that there is no such thing as body copy anymore. Only headlines. The art of writing copy for the web is in many ways the art of crafting subheads, labelling buttons, and unobstrusively inserting keywords. (Which brings up the whole question of writing for search engine optimization — a future article in itself.)
All in all it can be a very fragmentary perspective. Not every print copywriter has made the transition gracefully, and not all the web copy you see is graceful.
But the huge change in mediums hasn’t meant a huge change in fundamentals. On the contrary.
Copywriting isn’t a kind of writing. It’s a kind of thinking. It’s asking the question: what can you say that will persuade a person do something? What combination of words will grab attention, change a mind, open a wallet, move a heart?
Answering that question is still the goal.
David Pascal has nearly twenty years of freelance and in-house experience in marketing, advertising, and corporate communications. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of the State of New York, and a second bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, David began his career in marketing and advertising as an illustrator, became a marketing agency copywriter, and subsequently added web design skills to the mix. He has taught copywriting at the nationally celebrated writing center Writers & Books, published numerous articles, and spoken on marketing and other subjects at the Rochester Institute of Technology and other colleges and institutions. Contact information and samples of his writing and design work for clients is available at his web site at www.davidpascal.com.