Have you ever seen Mad Men? Yup, your job will involve visiting clients’ offices and pitching your ideas to them. It will also involve celebrity shoots and off days to visit the shoot location.

It will also involve you coming up with a brilliant line that eventually becomes the main line that your agency goes ahead with in the pitch deck that eventually becomes the tag line of the product that eventually inspires the TVC spot that eventually airs on prime-time.

And who can forget about the awards! Yes, you will win an award for the afore-mentioned “brilliant line”, your agency will be crowned the “Best agency” and you will be kohinoor of that mukut.

All that is true.

All that is also 10% of your job. For some, even 1% of their job.

Because what you will actually do as a copywriter isn’t glamorous enough to be made into a 9-season TV show.

Hey, It’s Maha-Shivratri next month. Can you write a social media post for that? Also please don’t forget to plug in the new range of bright LED indicator lamps that the client has recently launched.

It will mean staying up till 2AM, coming up with ideas. Sorry, trying to come up with ideas. Because ideas don’t care you have a discussion tomorrow “first-thing”.

It will also involve you muttering “why didn’t I think of this” under your breath everytime you see a brilliant campaign. And your CS person saying “Why didn’t we think of this” on your internal Whatsapp group.

It might also mean that you will have to stay awake even after sending out the copy and technically “finishing your job” just to make sure the designer doesn’t make any copy errors.

It will involve frustrating nights. It will involve terrified afternoons before you go for that ideas discussion without actually having any ideas.  It will involve panic attacks. 

It will mean seeing 90% of your ideas never even making it through your supervisors. And sometimes the client won’t even revert or give feedback on the rest of the 10%.

Look, even I dread 90% of the stuff that I’ve written. I don’t want to think of ideas on how to launch a new watch for teenagers when I am doing my workout. But that’s the job. It’s not coming up with the tagline that will be printed on tomorrow’s front page. It’s writing a blog post that maybe no one apart from you will ever see. A 1000-word article is buried on page 11 of Google.

This is somewhat like the reverse Pareto principle. You do 90% of the work so you get to do the juicy 10% of it.

But as Beyonce said, “If you don’t like the worst of your job, you don’t deserve the best of it”.