Brands radiate emotion (at least the good ones do); they make you feel something, some emotion which is the catalyst to start a relationship and make a purchase. Some brands, like PRADA, Bentley, and Godiva make you feel decadent. Others strive to make you feel practical, like Volkswagen, Tom’s Toothpaste, and Southwest Airlines. I could go on-and-on about how this brand stands for this, and that brand stands for that. The big question for any marketer is how to go about building or redefining a brand’s emotion in today’s fragmented multi channel, multi device world.

In the old days, before the advent of our little ‘ole Internet, the formula was simple: create a compelling brand message and broadcast the hell out of it so that the public was assimilated into your brand. As you know I tend to bash Madison Ave. on this blog because I feel most of their tactics are dated and no longer effective. But that’s not to say there aren’t some aspects of traditional advertising that deserve our respect. Let’s take the fundamentals, writing and art direction, which in my opinion is where the bulk of emotion is created.

Advertising is supposed to be the epitome of marketing communication. It is where words and pictures (whether moving or still, interactive or static) blend to create some kind of brand experience to affect consumer behavior.

A copywriter once wrote, “don’t leave home without it,” which creates an emotion that drives a behavior (for those of you who weren’t born when that copy was, it’s from a very famous television commercial for American Express). Sadly though, Copywriting seems to have taken a backseat to design. It’s become a bit of a lost art, if you ask me. The “writer” as creative director has become an endangered species.