John Malcolm of wordwork and JDM Marketing has spent over 30 years in business-to-business marketing and copywriting. Here are some of his personal career highlights:

Early publications

My editorial instincts first emerged at school, where I was volunteered to lick the annual magazine into shape. The content was exceedingly raw schoolboy humour but I relished the challenge. My predecessor as magazine editor was an idealistic young Bob Dylan fan called Jim Naughtie - where is he now, I wonder?

After graduating with an MA Hons in English at the University of Aberdeen, I went into industrial marketing and found myself producing a monthly newsletter for customers in the construction industry.

This was a modest publication (pre-internet), but included product information, company news, special offers and profiles of company personalities. An early example of what is today called “content marketing”!

Promotional newspapers

Having taken the plunge into self-employment in 1987 as JDM Marketing, I continued producing regular newsletters but also expanded into larger publications with greater in-depth features.

Two full-colour A3 newspapers stand out in the memory. I researched, wrote and laid out The Point, a lively promotional newspaper produced for Grampian Initiative.  This was a successful private/public sector partnership with four industry-specific task forces set up to balance the regional economy in the wake of the 1986 oil and gas slump. Perhaps now ripe for resuscitation, thirty years on?

Another promotional newspaper which I wrote and edited was Focus on Farquhar, a review of UK and European construction projects which used prefabricated components manufactured by the RB Farquhar Group. Also produced in the pre-internet era, Focus on Farquhar had a massive print run and distribution – larger than “The Scotsman” newspaper at the time.

Working on these high-quality publications honed my sub-editing skills in particular, and I greatly enjoyed producing in-depth articles with a strong narrative and sense of personality.

Digital productions

For a number of years, I wrote and edited a monthly Exportlink newsletter for Scottish Enterprise, Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce and the local North-east councils.

This was a rapid-response publication, flagging up trade missions and export opportunities, and it enjoyed strong support and appreciation from the local export community.

But eventually print deadlines could no longer match the immediacy of the web, so Exportlink went on-line and I was charged with writing web content, editing the website and issuing regular e-newsletters.

In the early noughties, this proved an excellent opportunity to master early web Content Management Systems (CMS) and apply Search Engine Optimisation writing techniques. There weren’t many e-newsletters ten years ago!