What No One Tells You About Being a Copywriter at a Marketing Agency

Mindblow Agency
3 min readJan 23, 2025

Copywriter Facts

  • Natural Habitat: Coffee shops and dark corners where no one can ask, “Is this done yet?”
  • Superpower: Turning a three-word brief into a 2,000-word campaign.
  • Enemies: Deadlines, one-sentence briefs, clients who “expect this by noon”
  • Also Known As: Word wizard, human thesaurus.
  • Salary: Somewhere between “I can pay rent” and “I might need a side hustle.”

Ah, the glamorous life of a copywriter at a marketing agency. If you’ve ever dreamed of crafting brilliant campaigns and enduring endless rounds of client feedback while slowly losing your grip on reality, welcome aboard!

Copywriting in an agency isn’t for the faint of heart. You’ll spend half your day coming up with clever taglines and the other half convincing clients that squeezing in a full five-page brief and their grandmother’s life story into a single tagline is something that simply can’t happen.

The Office
A copywriter’s workspace looks like a war zone of half-empty coffee mugs, Post-it notes covered in cryptic doodles, and a laptop that’s holding on for dear life. Everyone wears headphones, not because they’re working, but because they’re pretending not to hear the Account Manager approaching with “just one more thing.”

The Clients
Clients are the lifeblood of the agency and thus the reason for a copywriter’s existence. They like to throw contradicting phrases like “We want it to feel disruptive, but also traditional,” and “Can you make it sexy, but in a family-friendly way?” A copywriter soon masters the art of smiling politely while internally screaming. His favorite client is “the one who approves things quickly,” a mythical creature rumored to exist but never actually seen.

The Creative Process
Brainstorming sessions are a sacred ritual where a copywriter and his team gather to throw ideas at the wall while consuming enough caffeine to give an entire city a high, but never enough to meet client demands. Some ideas stick, while most fall into the abyss of “We can’t afford that.” and some are even rejected in favor of something “safe and simple.” (Translation: boring.)

The Glory
Most of the time, a copywriter’s hard work will be boiled down to a 10-second Instagram story that gets skipped faster than a Terms and Conditions agreement. Still, there’s a strange pride in seeing your tagline on a billboard, even if it’s next to an ad for adult diapers.

Did You Know?

  • Most copywriters consume more coffee than water, which explains why “free coffee” is so often included as a perk in job listings.
  • The average copywriter rewrites the same sentence 43 times before realizing the first version was the best. The average client takes about as many rounds of feedback before coming to the same realization.
  • Copywriters are responsible for the rise of buzzwords like “synergy,” “disruptive,” and “circle back,” for which humanity may never forgive them.

Top 10 Things to Do as a Copywriter at a Marketing Agency

  1. Come up with 3 top-notch headlines and 97 fillers, only to see the client pick the worst of the fillers.
  2. Spend 30 minutes debating whether to use a semicolon or a dash.
  3. Write a tagline that gets rejected for being “too bold.”
  4. Pretend “ASAP” doesn’t mean “right now.”
  5. Brainstorm a campaign that gets shot down because “we don’t have the budget.”
  6. Pretend you understand the brief while Googling half the terms.
  7. Lose hours tweaking a sentence no one will read anyway.
  8. Use the phrase “brand voice” 17 times in one meeting.
  9. Send a draft titled “Final_FINAL_ActualFinal_v7.docx.
  10. Daydream about freelancing, then remember freelancing involves clients too.

At the end of the day, while the job of a copywriter comes with its share of frustrations, there’s nothing quite like seeing your words come to life — even if they’re in Comic Sans.

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Mindblow Agency
Mindblow Agency

Written by Mindblow Agency

We won’t bore you to death with small talk. We’ll just let the work do the talking and let’s hope you have an eye for design and creative direction.

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