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Ads and PSAs
⑴Copywriting for Visual Media
Before television, there was radio advertising and film advertising in
movie houses.You still see local ads in some movie theatres before the
program starts. So the principle of selling time between programming for
commercial messages grew up with the visual media. A format that is
probably unique to television was developed to deliver short visual
commercial messages very efficiently and effectively in breaks between
programs. The air time was sold to advertisers to generate the operating
revenue and profit for the television companies.
Television provides access to the majority of homes and, therefore,
to the largest audience. Before television, few people had dealt with the
pressure to communicate product or commercial information in a rapid,
attention-getting way that television needs. It was, and still is, very
expensive to buy air time. Because television is the most expensive
advertising medium, it has driven the writers and producers of
commercials to refine their techniques so as to deliver a complete
message in a small amount of time. The cost of this time far exceeds the
production cost of making the message itself.
The short ad has become a kind of twentieth-century art form with a
constantly evolving style. It has attracted much writing and directing
talent from around the world, drawn partly by the money they can make
and partly by the opportunity to graduate to longer forms. Ads are special
because they are so short—usually under a minute. Everyone has seen
them, which is not so true for some other formats.
Almost all television viewers have seen public service
announcements (PSAs),which are messages that are broadcast for the
public good. PSAs are sometimes paid for by sponsoring organizations,
but they are usually furnished to broadcasters to fill any empty spots in
the commercial break. This is one way in which television stations help
the community to which they broadcast and fulfill an obligation of their
FCC license to broadcast over public air waves. Of course, PSAs usually
run late at night or in other less commercially desirable time slots. Not
everyone can write a feature film script, but anyone can write a 30- or
60-second PSA, so it is a good place to start.
⑵Copywriting Versus Scriptwriting
Let us distinguish between copywriting and scriptwriting.
Copywriting includes print and media writing. National advertising
campaigns on television are devised and produced by advertising
agencies retained by the client company. Learning about this kind of
writing and the business of advertising and public relations usually takes
place in a specific track and specialized courses in communications
studies.Although visual writing is involved in some kinds of copywriting,
there are so many other issues involved in copywriting that it is better to
leave those dedicated issues aside and deal with visual writing that
happens to be part of copywriting.
However, small markets in the broadcasting world serve local clients
who cannot afford an advertising agency. Somebody has to write these
ads for the station’s clients. It could be a staff member, part of a unit that
sells the station’s time, or it could be a freelance writer paid by the station
to do this writing work when needed, or a local ad agency. We need to
keep in mind that these kinds of local ads are made on small budgets,
sometimes at cost, by the station selling the air time because their profit
comes from selling that air time. They often have spare production
capacity—a studio, cameras, a camera crew, and an editing facility. This
means that the ad must be written for that budget range without slick
effects or expensive graphics, without travel to expensive locations, and
without expensive talent. It brings us back to the perennial challenge that
every scriptwriter faces:to write creatively and invent original visuals
within a tight budget framework. The same holds true for local PSAs,
sponsored by organizations with no budget to spend on production.
PSAs are an excellent training ground for student scriptwriters. They
are short and complete TV playlets. They require all the disciplines of
scriptwriting. You can easily settle on a public service issue such as
smoking, domestic violence, education,drugs, or racism. You know the
issues. You can test your creative imagination. If you have a related
production course going on, you might be able to produce your PSA. You
can also take a familiar product and try to devise a TV spot for
it.However, a lot of ads rely on specialized production companies to get
pack shots or create computer-generated effects that might be difficult to
duplicate in a college production setup.
⑶Client Needs and Priorities
The PSA and the TV ad are works commissioned by a client. The
client needs a solution to a communication problem that the writer must
provide. We alluded to this discipline of the professional writer in
Chapters 3 and 4. You write for someone or rather someone who
represents the interests of an organization or a corporation. Later we will
look more closely at another kind of writing for a producer of
entertainment films or programs. The entertainment script is different
from commissioned works because neither the producer nor the writer
