World Copywriting Blog

The Most Powerful Copywriting Technique There Is

As a teacher of copywriting, I drill into my students to eat, breathe, sleep, learn and master:

> headlines
> hooks
> offers
> bullets
> benefits
> subheads
> short words, sentences and paragraphs
> active language
> emotional, visceral, visual expression

... and so many other basics of the trade.

And they're all important.  All of them.

But in terms of raw selling power, nothing, and I do mean nothing, holds a candle to a good story, well told.

You're heard all this before.  But I have come across some interesting new evidence that leads me to believe stories are even more powerful that I previously realized:

1. Goodbye Hollywood, Hello Dairyland.  There's a small revolt going against special-effects 3-D-like animation.  After the movie Sinbad tanked three years ago, the big studios said sayonara to doing old-style cartoons.  Wisconsin homebuilder Tom Hignite decided to keep the art form alive and opened his own 2-D cartoon studios in Richfield, just north of Milwaukee.  13 former Disney and Warner Brothers artists came to join him. This quote in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, from production manager and 28-year industry veteran Tim O'Donnell, who moved from Hollywood, spoke volumes to me: "... we all love the pencil-to-paper kind of thing. We all feel if the story's strong, it doesn't really matter what medium you tell it in."

2. A good story creates automatic choreography.  Great book I discovered last week: Presenting to Win, by Silicon Valley Presentations Guru Jerry Weissman.  He tells about a Microsoft employee the PR dept. turned over to him in the early 90s to get ready for a very important presentation -- and the PR folks were wringing their hands because the employee didn't know what to do with his when he spoke.  Weissman wanted three days to work with the employee but he only got one.  In one day there was no time to fuss about postures, gestures and pacing: "I helped Jeff make some decisions about his story... which elements were most relevant and compelling... and which ones were superfluous."

Jeff was a star; his bosses were impressed.  Weissman observed: "All the vocal pyrotechnics and body language in the world can't improve a confusing story, while a clear and concise story can give a presenter the clarity of mind to present with poise."

3. The most profitable ad ever written.  I should have seen this long ago, but sometimes you just overlook the obvious.  One ad has been tracked to bring in over $2 billion in sales.  If you are a student of copywriting, these words will be immediately familiar:  "On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college.  They were very much alike, these two young men..."  This letter, written by Martin Conroy, has no headline.  No bullet points.  No sharp-angled hook.  No typical direct-response gimmicks at all.  But it sold more than $2 billion in subscriptions for The Wall Street Journal.  It sold more than any other copy ever written, and it begins and ends with... a story.

So next time you take a couple hours to sneak away and see a movie, or turn on the boob tube, pat yourself on the back.  You're refreshing and strengthening the most important skill for writing persuasive copy that you possibly could.

David Garfinkel
Publisher, World Copywriting Newsletter

Long Copy vs. Short Copy - This Experiment In An Unexpected Medium Should Settle The Question, Once And For All

It's the perennial question.  Clients argue about it with copywriters.  Even copywriters argue with other copywriters about it.

Those of us who have done the tests know the answer:

Long copy sells better than short copy.

But still the argument rages on.

I've just come across a live case study that sheds new light on the question, because it's about long copy used in a context that is not typical. 

We're not talking here about magazine space ads, or emails, or landing pages, or direct mail letters.

No.  We're talking about help-wanted ads.

You remember those, right?  Even if you haven't applied for a job in decades, or placed an ad to hire someone in your entire life, you must have at least a vague recollection of what they look like.

Here is a typical one, from this Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle help-wanted section:

BILLING Clerk
F/T oppty to work in the
fiscal dept. of a health-
care org. Job req data
entry exp. proficiency in
Excel, & good communi-
cation skills.  Exclnt
bnfts, $26,000/yr.  Apply
(Company) Attn: CFO, (number)
(Street name) SF (zip) or
fax (phone number) EOE

45 words.

It reminds me of an ad card I used to see on the subway on my way to work, many moons ago, when I lived in New York:

if u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb!

Well, back to the BILLING Clerk:

When you're paying by the line for your ad, and you have a $10 or $20/hr position to fill, you're going to make every word count.  Even if you hv 2 sqeez a few of them.

Right?

Hmmm.  Suppose you didn't have to pay ANYTHING for your ad, and you could test the merits of long copy with no constraints other than the attention span of your potential new employee?

That was the situation Jim Van Wyck found himself in.  Now you may know Jim as Executive Contributor to the World Copywriting Blog, but Jim is also a very fine marketing coach and copywriter in his own right.

Jim is currently working closely with a client in Los Angeles.  The client needs a personal assistant to reach certain business growth goals.

Jim wrote this ad which he placed for FREE on Craigslist, the online community and multi-purpose ad service that has swept the Internet like wildfire.

I won't reprint the whole ad here -- it almost as long as this blog post!

It starts out with a great headline ...

Are you ambitious, hard-working and talented?

... which qualifies the prospect very specifically.

Here's a link to see the live ad...

(After 30 days, the ad expires, so here's a link that will remain live on my Web site for years to come... )

This ad is 461 words long!

When Jim first posted it, Jim emailed me:

"[My client] says he's found some really good people thru Craigslist.

"Do you think the right person will answer this ad....which appears in the domestic section?"

He then gave me the same link I gave you, above, and opined:

"I think it's a long-shot, but I'm interested in what you think..."

Me, I didn't think it was a long shot.  But then, I already had had some experience with Craigslist, and this was Jim's maiden voyage.

I told him I thought he would get a ton of replies, and maybe 2-3 good candidates.

We were both wrong.

"I got 41 resumes in 2 days," he wrote in a later email. "26 of them were from pretty ordinary folks... I'd say 10 really outstanding applications."

How outstanding?

• One from a butler with a culinary arts degree
• One from a former personal assistant to a senior executive at the talent agency of choice in Los Angeles -- the one everyone who's anyone wants to be represented by
• One who had been personal assistant to the president of one of the largest record labels in the world
• And... a little off topic, but totally LA ... two women who offered their sexual services!

Six days after Jim had placed the ad, he had an additional 15 applications, for a grand total of 56.

Now you could say that this is an appealing job and LA is overflowing with under-employed talented people, so this level of response to this kind of job -- personal assistant to a dynamic, dramatic, successful young entrepreneur --would be high in any case.

I would agree with you.  To a point.

But you've got to ask youself this question:

How would those people know about this job if you didn't take the time ... and the words... to describe it to them in the first place?

Thus ends the trial of Long Copy v. Short Copy.  Decision: Long Copy.

Case closed!

... until next time...

========================================

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Selling With Humor: This Ad Is Dark -- Very Dark -- But You've Got to Admit, It's Memorable

Blowfish Sushi ad from San Francisco Bay Guaradian, June 21-27, 2006, page 70

Watch Out For Ideas That Look Good On Paper... Every Piece of Paper, That Is, Except Your Company's Financial Statement

One of my favorite writers in the hard-bitten school of realbusiness is direct marketing virtuoso Denny Hatch, who writes a monthly print column for Target Marketing Magazine.  This month what he wrote about was so important I implored him for permission to reprint his column online, and he graciously agreed.

Denny wrote a funny story about trying to buy some plain, old-fashioned Jockey underwear online because he couldn't find it at a fancy department store in Philadelphia, where he lives.  The story was not made-up for teaching or dramatic purposes; I'm sure it really happened to him.

He was infuriated and insulted by what happened to him on the Web site.  As he well should have been.

I've been more than a little pissed myself at Web sites that don't merely let me buy what I want, but seem to be in a deadly-serious competition with the National Security Agency to get every shard of information they can about me before asking for trivial details like, you know, what I want to purchase; where to send it; and what credit card I'll be using.

Denny's theory is that some earnest but dunderheaded MBAs came up with the sales process that convinced him to abandon the jockey.com shopping cart and get his new briefs elsewhere.  In his column he quotes an Advertising Age report from this March that says, in part:

"A Masters of Business Administration degree is not only worthless, it can actually work against a marketer, according to a survey of marketing executives from 32 consumer-products companies..."

Though the underwear story part of the column is funny, and his attitude toward MBAs and other degreed professionals is totally uncompromising, Denny also makes some key points that you need to absorb, internalize and implement if your online -- or offline -- business isn't churning out the profits you'd like it to be churning out.

If you have an MBA, you won't like Denny's article a whole lot -- unless, that is, you are like my friend, multimillionaire Terry Allen.  He shakes his head when he says his Harvard MBA prepared him only for three jobs: Chairman, President and CEO.

But Harvard Business School labeled Terry, its disappointing graduate, "a chronic entrepreneur."  And he's not too impressed with his alma mater, either, for that matter.  He believes the whole exercise of getting the MBA degree was largely a waste of time.

Although, I'm sure the three letters after his name on his deposit slips really do impress the bank tellers every time he puts checks in the account from his various ventures.

David Garfinkel
Publisher, World Copywriting Newsletter

Plagiarism? Or Creative Adaptation? Or Neither? Oakland Mayor-elect Challenges The Creativity of His Citizens

"You might wake up some mornin'
To the sound of something moving
past your window in the wind..."
Bob Lind, The Elusive Butterfly, 1966

"You're going to awaken one morning,
and brilliant ideas are going to come forward."
Ron Dellums, Mayor-elect of Oakland, California, 2006

Former Congressman Ron Dellums won the post of mayor of Oakland - just across the Bay from San Francisco - by a hair in last week's election, and yesterday he gave an inspiring speech to his supporters at Oakland's downtown Marriott hotel.

Dellums charged his listeners to come up with new ideas to revitalize the perennially troubled other City by the Bay, forever dissed by Gertrude Stein's stinging remark, "There's no there there," (referring to the town where she spent her childhood).

I've been to Oakland and I can assure Ms. Stein that either she's wrong or things have changed.  It's a vibrant, muscular, forward-looking city, although nobody would argue that it has seen more than its share of turmoil.

I'm intrigued by the statement about awakening one morning.  Of course it is not plagiarism in fact of Bob Lind's memorable top-10 hit "The Elusive Butterfly" from the 1960s.  What's curious to me was, did the song drift through Mr. Dellums' mind as he was composing that line (or, perhaps, through the mind of his speechwriter)?

In direct marketing copywriting, we always strive to build our message on structures, concepts and actual words that have worked before.  It's no crime.

Hey, in this business, swiping is admired.

And, if the future Mayor Dellums is successful in spurring his partisans to better the city, he has my admiration, and should have yours, too... even if he swiped a word or two from the popular song.

And now, an only in San Francisco item for you:

Meanwhile, Harry Stoll forwards an overheard remark with a gloriously evocative setting of the scene: "There are two copies," said the overheard gent, "one on the desktop and one in the systems folder."

Stoll says that the man was talking on a "cell phone seated in a stall in the extremely echoic men's room amid a Niagara of flushing commodes and urinals during the Lowell High graduation at Bill Graham auditorium.''

From Leah Garchik's column today in the San Francisco Chronicle.

David Garfinkel
Publisher, World Copywriting Newsletter

New Book Reveals Secret Meanings Swimming Around In The Unconscious

If you are politically correct or you have a very literal understanding of the way the world works, you'll find The Culture Code by Dr. Clotaire Rapaille very disturbing.

To say the least.

Because this is a book about abstractions and symbols, some of which (many of which, in fact), may upset you significantly.

It's derived from a methodology that, while research based, could come across like voodoo and tea-leaf-reading to you.

But... if you want to know what secrets lurk in the hearts of men... and, while we're at it, the hearts of women... then this book is for you.

I got a copy in the mail yesterday from a book promoter friend of mine, and once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down until I finished.

I have never heard of Dr. Rapaille before, but 10 high-level CEOs have, and they retain him as their personal adviser.  He has 50 Fortune 500 companies that buy his marketing advice on a regular basis.

What he does to mine the source material for his advice is: he peers into a whole culture's collective unconscious mind, through a series of unique, structured dialogues with a lot of people, to find out about cultural meanings... of products, emotions, states of mind.  Like what Jeeps mean (it's entirely different in America, by the way, than it is in France or Germany).

And how to market coffee to the Japanese, by developing childhood associations with the flavor, planning a generation ahead.

But, he also gets beyond products to reveal things like: what love means. 

Or, what money means. 

Or, the meaning of being fat.

This is a very sophisticated book, but it's presented simply and clearly enough.  I resonated with some of his more shocking assertions, because I just happened to have had personal experiences with people in the culture along the lines he was talking about.  And his painstaking, procedural research conclusions coincided with my more casual, experiential ones.

This book is currently undergoing an Amazon bestseller promotion and you can get gobs of free stuff along with the $25 book at http://www.discoverthecode.com

Or, if you'd rather skip the hoopla and just get the book -- which, trust me, is worth way more than $25 -- here's a quick link to Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/oow6b

David Garfinkel
Publisher, World Copywriting Newsletter

Worldwide Convocation of Seven-Figure Seekers - Tactic 7 Seminar Was 'No-Fluff,' Insanely Practical

It was one of those rare events that stays with you long after it is over.

I'm talking about the Tactic7 workshop I gave this weekend with John Carlton, Harlan Kilstein and Mark Widawer.  We revealed little-known secrets we have used over and over again to help our clients build robust seven-figure businesses... and it was quite a sight, from the front of the room, to watch jaws drop over and over again as light bulbs kept going on and brains kicked into a higher financial gear.

Students had flown in from around the world.  One of them, head of an eight-figure Canadian-based company, had to rearrange his schedule to leave a Hollywood sound stage and take a late-night flight up to San Francisco, because he is technical advisor to a weekly hit TV series on Showtime. Another student flew in from Mexico City.

But our "farthest distance traveled" award goes to the student who trekked in all the way from the U.K.

What made the event so special?

Everyone came in with varying degrees of expertise, financial success and focus.  But everyone, to a person, left with a clear focus, an action plan, LOTS of insider information, and a level of confidence that was simply amazing to observe.

One student emailed me:

"Wonderful and powerful. Thanks again for the opportunity. I got a kick out of it and got some very clear direction for my work".

Another wrote:

"I thought it was funny on your blog when you said that you mentor by intimidation. I don’t mind that kind of intimidation, knowing your intention is to blast away all the fluff and get really down to the core of things."

And the head of the eight-figure company?  He and one of his top marketing guys are mentoring clients of mine.  The marketing guy complained to me on a mentoring call yesterday that the whole company simply GROUND TO A HALT because of Tactic7.

After intimidating him, I explained why.  It was because his boss was actually ATTENDING the program and PAYING ATTENTION!  His cell phone was turned off, and the company had to run without someone calling him every five minutes about this issue or that.

Fortunately, his company kept on going even with the boss working on the business rather than in it for a few days. And he is confident that with what he learned, planned and realized, he will reach his goal of more than doubling his market share in the next few years.

What did we cover?

It started with bulls-eye strategies to select a rich niche to sell to. Mark "Wizard of AdWords" Widawer shared powerful strategies to quickly gather a group of eager, responsive customers using Google AdWords ads.

In what was a seminar "first," Mark and I teamed up to give people step-by-step shortcuts to writing AdWords ads designed to have high click-through rates.  Students wrote ads right on the spot and we edited and molded them into high-powered winners.

I've been to a lot of seminars and worked extensively with Mark before, but I've never seen anything like this.

The real hero of Tactic7 was Dr. Harlan Kilstein, who, in addition to having written the most successful Web site on the Internet ($1.3 million sales in 3 hours), also has a doctorate in education.

True to form, Harlan loaded our students with homework that will put truckloads of money in their bank accounts in weeks to come.  After the first day, everyone was instructed to come up with a list of additional things they could sell their customers.

From a business point of view, this is about the most enlightening exercise you could imagine.  Think of your business doubling overnight simply by making a handful of carefully targeted offers to your customers.  That was the power of Harlan's exercise.

Harlan also spilled his guts about newspaper advertising secrets that simply blew my mind.  Now remember, I'm a former newspaper reporter and, until I heard Harlan, fancied myself quite an advertising expert.

But he revealed "straight from the streets" techniques that kept his phone ringing off the hook and also kept the newspaper from wringing out his bank account.

But the most mind-bending part of the seminar came when John Carlton took each student through his legendary Brain Cleanse.

You haven't seen instant business transformation until you've seen John at work.  All his years working in Jay Abraham's office and partnering with Gary Halbert -- not to mention writing home-run after home-run sales letter -- came home to roost in the concentrated business smarts he applied to our students.

Those intense and valuable sessions alone were worth the price of admission to Tactic7.

We were very selective in who we allowed to attend, and our strict admissions policy paid off in droves -- because the group had outstanding chemistry and got extraordinary results.

But by all the emails we received from people who wanted to attend but couldn't make it, we realized we owed it to our subscribers to record the event.

If you want to build a seven-figure business and enjoy the privileges of freedom from financial struggle, sign up for the Tactic7 announcement list. The site will only be up for a few more days, so get on the list now.

We will probably have a pre-publication special offer on the DVDs, but the only way to find out about them is to be on the list.

Go to:

http://www.tactic7.com

In the U.K., Internet Advertising Predicted To Overtake Newspaper Advertising

Time marches on.  This year, for the first time, according to a published report in Britain's Guardian newspaper, advertisers in the U.K. will spend more money advertising on the Web than they will in newspapers.

The article quotes a report by GroupM - a huge worldwide advertising conglomerate - estimating that in 2006, 13.3% of UK's £12.2 billion advertising expenditures will go to Internet advertising - a hair greater than 13.2% going to newspaper advertising.

And that doesn't even account for another estimated  £1 billion being spent on affiliate advertising online in the UK.

In dollar figures, that's a $23 billion ad market in the UK.  $2.5 billion going to online ads this year, plus another $1.9 billion going to affiliate marketing online.

This matters because there are no signs of this Internet advertising growth slowing down.  If anything, it will pick up the pace and widen the gap over newspaper advertising in the U.K., and, eventually, in the U.S. as well.

And what this means to you is:  If you don't know how to write copy for the Interent... learn!  It's more important than ever... and... it will be more important tomorrow than it is today.

Thanks to World Copywriting Blog Executive Contributor Jim Van Wyck for alerting me to this important story.

David Garfinkel
Publisher, World Copywriting Newsletter