'Behind the scenes' writer a man of many words

That compelling brochure from the W. P. Carey School of Business? Written by Colin Boyd.

The concisely crafted text on W. P. Carey’s Web page? Written by Colin Boyd.

That voice on the Carey radio spots? You guessed it. Colin Boyd.

Boyd, the multi-talented writer who is a marketing and communications writer for the W. P. Carey School of Business, recently received the second annual "Behind the Scenes" Writer of the Year Award as part of the National Day on Writing.

The award is sponsored by the Department of English to honor a writer who puts words together all day but never sees his or her name in print.

Julie Krell, director of marketing and communication for W. P. Carey, nominated Boyd for the award. She wrote, “Colin not only writes all day, turning out prose in praise and support of ASU and its mission, he writes weekends, mornings, and sometimes late into the evenings!

“He does whatever it takes to write and produce high-quality, creative marketing materials to promote the school to prospective undergrad and graduate students, donors, alumni and other key stakeholders. Because he is so capable, creative and flexible, Colin’s job has grown from marketing writer to content producer extraordinaire.

“He writes all W. P. Carey School materials from advertising to program brochures, to a new interactive online undergrad viewbook, to producing a variety of videos, landing pages, mailers, web content, emails and much more.

She continued, “He is also the voice of the W. P. Carey radio campaign (the talent fees met our budget – no additional fees, since he’s staff!!) and he produces them at night in his home studio. And he is now working to re-launch the W. P. Carey MBA blog for prospective students. All with a positive attitude, creative, professional and team-oriented.

“Colin furthers ASU’s mission of excellence and quality, helping to promote the vision through his words and content each and every day.”

Boyd said he was very surprised to learn that he had won the award.

The writing he does for the W. P. Carey School is challenging, he said, because he has to use many different writing styles for his various assignments.

“They all require slightly different voices, and since I do all the writing for MBA marketing, undergrad marketing, and a lot of web content for each department within the school, there are quite a few different writing styles I have to use every day.”

Boyd grew up in Oklahoma, primarily, and studied broadcasting at East Central University. He came to Arizona in 1995 to earn his master’s degree from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, also in broadcasting. After working in radio for nearly 20 years, he changed his career direction to marketing.

“During that time, I was a copywriter and creative services director, and then on the side, I became a freelance movie critic, which I’ve been doing for about a decade now,” Boyd said.
 
“I never really thought about writing, actually, or even worked at improving very much; I think I only took a couple composition classes in college. But sometime around 2000, between the copywriting and film criticism, I had some epiphany that I was actually getting paid to write more than anything else.”