Mia Shumway didn’t always want to be a copywriter. She took a public health class in college, thinking her career path would move in that direction. Then, her public health teacher showed her public-health related advertising campaigns and that’s when Shumway realised she’d found her calling.

She attended the BYU Adlab at Brigham Young University in Utah, USA. Universities have often been sold as a coming-of-age experience: you move away from home, study and live independently. In a student bubble, the experience of being a young working adult is kept at bay; time away from the employment market is, instead, meant to be spent studying.

BYU AdLab, however, provided Shumway with a different experience. “Our undergraduate advertising programme was run like an agency, with real clients and everything,” she says. “This is thanks to some awesome professors who worked hard to simulate a real-world experience. We were given so much creative freedom and really encouraged to find our own voices.”

This kind of training has allowed Shumway to grow into the copywriter she is today, one who is able to play and speak with wording in ways that address important topics. Her WNBA project is one such example, featuring a tagline that emphasises the ‘W’ in the word. “The WNBA commercial doubled as a passion project and a strongly-worded email to the way we talk about female sports leagues,” she explains to Creative Review. “The idea spawned from my own experience playing sports growing up. My high school mascot was a tiger. When the boys played sports, they were called the tigers. When I played sports, I was called a ‘lady tiger’.

“I thought a lot about the presence of that extra word and what it insinuated. I made this project to express something I believed but hadn’t heard clearly articulated yet. To hear others say my commercial changed their whole perspective on the subject was amazing.”

Aside from addressing universal issues that exist across societies around the world, Shumway does also have a penchant for humorous language, gravitating towards comedic writing while finding fulfilment in addressing more serious topics. “I don’t know if I have a signature style,” she muses. “Just whatever feels right.”

Graduates are facing a much changed job landscape today, one filled with the doom or convenience of AI, depending on how you look at it. For Shumway, AI is integrated into her practice and she says it’s made her a “better creative”.

She explains, “When I’m creatively concepting, I like to use [ChatGPT] as a filter for first thoughts. Since AI effectively just regurgitates a conglomeration of everything already stored in the collective human mind, feeding Chat my creative prompt helps me to weed out the lowest hanging fruit. It spits out everyone’s first idea – the things that have already been discovered or made. It presents the zigs, so I can find the zag.

Only when you stop taking everything so seriously and just try to have fun will inspiration strike. My creative partner and I are always trying to think dumber

“I also treat Chat’s answers as important ingredients that I can experiment combining in new ways to see if anything interesting comes of it. Chat serves as the best word, phrase or rhyming thesaurus any writer could ever ask for.”

With AI by her side, there are still other difficulties Shumway faces in her practice. Mostly, she struggles with imposter syndrome. “Doesn’t really matter how much I’ve accomplished, I can get really insecure and second guess everything,” she says. “I need to learn how to navigate that.”

She’s also aware of how anxiety can be an obstacle in the creative process. “You can’t get an idea when you’re being chased by a tiger. In other words, if you’re really anxious, forcing yourself to try and find the creative answer, you just won’t,” she advises. “Only when you stop taking everything so seriously and just try to have fun will inspiration strike. My creative partner and I are always trying to think dumber.”

What does the future look like for Shumway? The graduate wants to work on a book of poetry, she says. “Want to perform some stand-up when I finally write a set. Want to keep trying new sandwich combinations.”

miashumway.com