Introduction
The first time I taught my copywriting course for the DMA, I called it “Direct Response Copywriting”. After the initial semester I realized I should be practicing what I preach and I retitled it “Copywriting That Gets Results”—a description that, like all good direct response copywriting, contains a benefit for the reader.
RESULTS can be measured in orders, sales dollars, leads generated etc. But they can also be measured in success in landing a job or convincing an audience of your political views, among many other potential examples. And one of the best reasons to develop the skill of “copywriting that gets results” is that it helps you become more successful anytime you want to use words to convince someone.
Robert Collier put it this way in his 1930’s classic Letter Book: “Little Willy wants an extra slice of bread and jam; sister wants 15 cents for the movies; Dad is scheming how to get out of the house for lodge that night, and Mother is planning to have Dad sweep out the cellar—while around the corner the Preacher is planning a visit on the household to make it more church conscious and one and all, have their own pet ‘TESTED SELLING SENTENCES’ they plan to use on one another!”
How I became a copywriter
I would guess that relatively few people spring from the womb and say, “I’m going to be an ad copywriter when I grow up”. More likely you have an aptitude for writing and you discover copywriting as a way to make a living, or else you are asked to write copy as part of another job and discover you’re good at it.
I came from the first group. I went to film school to become a rich and famous screenwriter, but I turned to freelance copywriting as a way to support myself until I got my big break. I actually did apply for the proverbial “job in the mailroom at J. Walter Thompson” but I didn’t get it; my first assignments were writing sale catalogs for department stores. I liked the challenge of finding a way to say something meaningful about a product in a paragraph or two, but it never occurred to me that I was actually selling something.
After a few years of this, I went into one of my department store clients, The Broadway, to see if there were any copywriting assignments coming up. There weren’t but the direct mail advertising manager had just quit and so I was offered that job. For the first time I became accountable for my results—defined not as whether the designs were pleasing and the writing clever, but how much we sold on a per inch basis. It was a revelation, brought home to me when Jan Wetzel, the VP of marketing at our company, took me around to various stores in the chain on the first day of the sale and we watched customers waiting in line to pay for the very same products we had featured in our catalog.
I had a couple of other “suit” jobs, including one where I was the ad director of a company that sold tools by mail. The orders came in by phone so I could see when we had a hit because the switchboard would overflow to the receptionist and she’d be too busy to say hello. I found myself excited about coming into the office on the first day after a new mailing hit, to see if this would happen. Again, a link between copywriting and results. Amazing.
I could only take the suit for so long and eventually I went back to freelancing and buried it in my back yard. (I assume it’s still there, at the intersection of Occidental and Westerly Terrace in Los Angeles’ Silverlake district.) But I had learned the life lesson that successful copywriting is not about gratifying yourself and maybe winning an award or two with a clever concept or turn of a phrase. It’s all about making something happen—and the more significant your impact, the more a knowledgeable client is likely to pay you for your work. It’s copywriting that gets results.
The role of predictability in advertising
The picture at left shows the inside of the men’s room door in the building where I used to rent a studio, in San Francisco. The knob is the way you get out of the room; the much more prominent grab bar is a useless appendage. During the 18 months I rented this space I used the bathroom certainly 100+ times… and at least 50 of those times I grabbed the bar because my sense memories “knew” that was the right thing to do.
People expect things to work a certain way. And this can have important implications when you’re marketing to them. Ads that play against expectations, especially in web video and TV, can surprise and delight and get through to a dulled viewer. But direct marketing pitches that veer in an unexpected direction—introducing a surprise element in the middle of a sales letter, for example—can turn off a reader and cause them to pitch your message in the recycling bin.
The difference with these scenarios: in the first, the prospect is on the outside, tacitly agreeing to let you try to entice them into your world. In the second, you’ve already created agreement and now you’re violating the contract. That’s why so many paragraphs in classic direct mail letters begin “that’s why”—to let the reader know you’ve established your point and are transitioning to another. And why many direct marketing pitches (including web pages and email, as well as print) will include what my clients at Rodale used to call “head nodders”—statements you know your audience will agree with, used to establish that you are on the same page and your message is reasonable and relevant.
It’s OK to be unpredictable… just as long as you know when to use and not use this strategy. If you’re doing intrusive advertising—which would include most examples of direct marketing—then it’s best to stay within expectations and avoid surprising your prospect except with the wonderful news of your offer and its benefits.
How to make people read what you write
An insurance company asked me to teach an in-house version of my copywriting course. The audience was mostly lawyers who write white papers on various legal topics. Since the scope was much broader than advertising, I retitled the course “how to make people read what you write”. I added two points which I think are worth repeating here:
1. Virtually everybody you are writing to has grown up with television, or at least movies, which means they have been trained to make mental edits when the communicator jumps from connection to another. What’s more, they EXPECT these jumps in the material they absorb and if you take pains to write with a smooth transition, they’ll just pass over the transitional paragraphs and move on to the next topic.
This means you need to write for scanning, not word-for-word reading. It also means you need to be aware of how the mind handles mental edits, and make transitions much as a film editor would. Cut from the big picture to a closeup, instead of showing two slightly different views of the same thing. When something is important, showcase it (=a closeup shot) and then establish context (=a person reacting).
I read a lot of “Magic Schoolbus” books to my kids when they were little, and I noticed a wide range of skill levels in the cartoon factory workers who draw these. When the same character appears, in a similar context, on two facing pages, then Eli says “why are there two Carloses?” When the narrative talks about a giant squid that doesn’t show up in the picture, he says “where’s the giant squid?” He already has a well-formed system to tell him how stories should be told with words and visuals—and your older reader does too.
2. Dr. Johnson said that “knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” White papers fall into the second category of knowledge, as do a marketer’s informational premiums. It isn’t necessary for the audience to read all the way through; the author has done his or her job if the reader glances at the first page, accepts that the paper is making an authoritative analysis of a topic, then files it for future reference.
On the other hand, you may fail even when communicating valuable information if the paper is poorly organized and hard to get at. This isn’t to say that presentation is more important than information. But if presentation falls short, the reader will never gain access to the information and the writer is judged a sorry failure.
Why copywriting