A Subtle Difference Between Content Creation and Copywriting

A clear purpose makes for good writing in much the same way that good fences make for good neighbors.

Amidst rows of suburban residences, clear boundaries and respect for those clear boundaries help maintain good relations and provide a marker for mutual understanding.

While you and your neighbor might have nearly identical lawns, it is understood that those yards belong to different owners and, in a sense, serve different purposes. If you doubt this point, imagine your next-door neighbor's 90-pound rottweiler doing his business in your yard. Now, the boundaries have meaning.

Engagement Economy

There are subtle but significant differences in writing, too. These writing boundaries, if you will, separate what it is to be a content creator, a journalist, and a copywriter. Certainly, there can be overlap, but the ideas and writing roles should not be confounded.

Recently, I read a newsletter from a well-known creator coach who earns a six-figure income encouraging content creators, but this self-proclaimed guru was utterly wrong about what it is to be a content creator. Instead, he was describing a copywriter.

In the newsletter, he argued that writers should "know their audience" and address the audience's "pain points." It would have been hard to be more cliché. And his advice would have, frankly, worked better for a copywriter composing a brochure than a creator writing a newsletter.

This "creator coach" was focused on the consumer economy when, in fact, content creators are part of the engagement economy.

Technology forecaster and futurist Paul Saffo describes "economies" as ways or approaches to addressing scarcity. Thus, the industrial economy sought to address a scarcity of manufactured goods. The consumer or credit economy sought to address a scarcity in consumer demand, and the engagement economy seeks to address the lack of attention.

When a "creator coach" tells you to solve problems or address pain points, he employs a consumer economy mindset wherein the consumer demand is the problem being solved. He is making the creator a copywriter, thereby putting the creator in competition with every brand in the market. He is contributing to the information overload rather than cutting through it.

Folks bombarded with news, entertainment, and noise from everywhere have generally stopped paying attention. Or as Herbert Simon put it in 1971, "What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently."

In an attempt to hammer this point home, think of Mr. Beast or author James Clear. These creators don't focus on solving audience pain points, rather than produce entertainment or insights that garner attention.

Subtle Differences

Copywriting is an important and valuable skill. Economies —like the consumer economy and the engagement economy— overlap and co-exist. So don't hear what is not being said.

This article does not argue that content creation is good and copywriting is bad. Nor is the point that one discipline should be abandoned over the other. Rather, copywriting and written content creation are not identical or perfectly synonymous. There are different tools in the writer's kit.

One primary example of the difference is in the audience. In the purest sense, a content creator writes for himself, not his audience. He also writes about a personal topic of interest or passion. He does not necessarily write for the audience.

Below is a table that contrasts the three associated but different writing disciplines. Journalism, copywriting, and content creation serve different purposes and audiences, with the core distinction lying in the role of the audience:

• Copywriting positions the audience as buyers, focusing on immediate action.
• Content Creation treats the audience as a community, aiming to build long-term trust and engagement. Often, the creator writes what he cares about.
• Traditional journalism views the audience as informed citizens, seeking to empower them with facts and insights to participate meaningfully in society.