June 1976, San Francisco: As I mentioned, the Network Answering Service was created in my studio apartment at 495 Third Avenue, north of Golden Gate Park, and according to the employee manual, the primary purpose of the answering service was to feed Rosie the Cat.
Of course, we had a more noble mission, and- But that’s neither here nor there, because this is about the CopyDragon, copywriter extraordinaire, raconteur, and gentleman at arms. That is, ahem, myself with my writing-copy hat on.
As best I know the first copy written was some advertising for Simple Simon bookkeeping (myself), and then there was a brief audiotext positioning message for my high-tech and newfangled answering machine, but this summer as I prepared to launch the answering service, I began writing a lot of what’s called “commercial writing,” which simply means writing for business purposes.
It includes:
- Advertising copy
- Employee manuals
- User guides
- Sales scripts
- Brochures, business cards, rate cards
And many years later, as the world moved into cyberspace, commercial writers moved right along, and built fancy apartments on the internet, in which they could make virtual smoothies, and take naps on virtual sofas, and watch very large virtual television screens.
And so in the later internet age, commercial writing came to include:
- Webpage copy
- Presentation and demonstration videos
- Website construction
- Salespages
- Ebooks and recordings, to give away or to sell
- Email-capture systems
- Automatic sequences of emails selling everything from soup to nuts
And the CopyDragon just kept adapting to the changes in the world. Someday probably everybody will wear glasses, and these glasses will include a virtual screen and voice-commands, and you can walk down the street and surf the net and run a business and scan through your emails and walk into a tree.
Here’s to the future!
===0===
Information about Arthur Cronos and commercial writing services can be found here:
and an expanded biography, plus details about Arthur Cronos as a media guest can be found here:
Arthur Cronos on AirtimeGuests.com
Leave a Reply