“You live and die by your ads. Ads are the primary way [businesses] generate traffic,” says Ryan Lenderman, co-founder of BoostCTR, a company that helps online marketers crowdsource, optimize and test the effectiveness of their online ad copy.
We’ve all seen or read ads we’ve loved and ads that have made us groan. We’re surrounded by ads as we drive in our cars, wait in lines, listen to the radio, watch TV, read a magazine or search the Internet. According to a 2007 article published in the New York Times, Americans are exposed to approximately 5,000 advertisements every day.
This can be a sobering statistic for someone interested in writing ad copy. As the number of ads we see increases year after year, it seems that there will be no shortage of ads to write. But how in the world are you supposed to make the ad you write stand out from the other 4,999 ads a person will see that day?
Unfortunately there is no simple answer to this question. Very few ads become icons themselves (VW’s “Lemon” ad, Apple’s “1984” ad, and more recently, Old Spice’s series of “Smell Like a Man, Man” ads are examples of some exceptions). But thankfully, an ad doesn’t have to be an icon to be effective.
What does make an ad effective? There are obviously many factors, and it’s unlikely that anybody could cover them all in one post. So we’re going to focus on how to make your ad copy as effective as possible. We’ll look at 10 tips you can use to write your best copy. Then we’ll look at an interview with a senior copywriter at a major ad agency to get a feel for some of the challenges copywriters face in the real world. He’ll also give us some insight into how to overcome those challenges (whew!).
Let's start with the tips.
1. Know How to Write
Seems pretty obvious, right? I don’t think there could be a more fundamental tip than this one. But according to Brooks Briggs, senior copywriter at McCann Erickson Salt Lake City, it’s a problem even copywriters struggle with.
I got stuff from an English undergrad recently who…wants to get into advertising. He sent me over some concepts and some work. He wants to be a copywriter. The concepts were like, ‘meh.’ But the part that I expected to see [was his] copy.
Well, where’re the periods on this body copy? Why don’t you have a comma here? You’re coming in as a writer. You’d better know how to write. For heaven’s sake you’d better know how to write because that’s what people are paying you for. It’s one thing to have a bad concept that [a client doesn’t] love. It’s another thing to have them look at [you’re writing] and say, ‘I don’t even understand what you’re saying here.'
“I gained the skill and learned the technique for probably 70% of the writing I do now in my freshman English class,” Brooks said. So dust off those writing books from bygone English classes, polish up your grammar and punctuation knowledge. It’s the first fundamental to writing your best ad copy.
2. Know your Audience
The tone of your copy will vary based on who your audience is. You need to know your audience so you can write to them in a language they are used to.
The Utah company Orabrush knows the importance of targeting their audience better than most. Dr. Bob Wagstaff knew he had invented a product people needed. His tongue brush was unique in the market and would help eliminate people’s bad breath issues. He bought an infomercial for $40,000, which resulted in the sale of only 100 brushes. Bob approached retailers like Wal-Mart and Walgreens, but after being turned down each time, he was looking for help.
He went to BYU’s Marriot School of Management where students conducted market research and found that 92 percent of Bob’s audience or target market would not buy the Orabrush from the Internet. One forward-thinking student, Jeffrey Harmon, however, realized that that meant that 8 percent of Bob’s market would buy the Orabrush from the Internet. The company focused on targeting only those 8 percent with their innovative YouTube advertisements and found huge success. Not only has Orabrush been successful at selling online, but they are now in over 3,000 retail stores nationwide.
So what does the story of Orabrush have to do with copywriting and knowing your audience? By focusing on only 8 percent of their target market, Orabrush was able to define their audience in very specific terms. They could know the ins and outs of their audience—what made them tick—and they could base their copy off of that. Rather than having to try to write to a broad sector of the population (really, who hasn’t suffered from bad breath?), Orabrush could write very targeted copy to a very targeted audience. And the result was some of the most innovative and successful advertising the industry has seen.
3. Define your Big Idea
Anyone who has worked in advertising is familiar with the concept of the Big Idea, an advertising principle stating that the purpose of an ad campaign needs to be able to be defined in as few words as possible—no more than one sentence.
A few years ago, I was in a group of students who had to come up with an ad campaign for a local skate shop called The Decline. Our group had periodic meetings with our teacher so he could coach us and help us refine our campaign. We arrived at each meeting thinking that we had defined our Big Idea, but after each meeting, we realized we still had work to do. What we thought was a very specific Big Idea turned out to be too broad to be effective.
We struggled with our concepts and creating our copy until we had come up with a Big Idea that would work. Once we had it defined, designing our ads and creating our copy seemed to fall into place.
Our Big Idea was this: Skateboarders see the world differently than other people. That’s it—only eight words. But those eight words formed the basis for our ads, which showed images of tabletops and rails and defined them the way a skateboarder might. We used the language of skateboarders in our definitions to try to reach our audience.
After we presented our campaign to our class, our teacher had this to say in his evaluation: “You get the prize for the team that had me pretty worried, but pleasantly surprised when it all mattered.”
The concepts and copy we had come up with before having a solid Big Idea were worthless. Once we defined our Big Idea, we created some good ads.
4. Have Someone Else Edit your Copy
We’ve all read and re-read our own writing to the point of almost having it memorized. So why is it that it’s not until it’s out of our hands that we discover that missing the on the fifth page third line down? "How did I miss that?!”
No matter how short or long your copy is, you need to have a fresh set of eyes look it over before you turn it in. “Writing can always be improved, but the writer, by virtue of having created the copy, suffers from Inside-the-Bottle syndrome, and has a hard time reading the label. It’s hard to be objective when you’ve poured yourself into the words.” (Eisenberg, Eisenberg, & Davis, p. 80)
A good editor will not only help you decide if you’re whole concept is off. He will also be able to point out the typos, missing words and other mistakes that will have almost certainly crept into your copy.
5. Lose the Fluff
In some cases, you might not have the luxury of unlimited space. Layout constraints on ad copy can often affect the amount of text you can use. Avoid unnecessary words. Keep your content tight.
See how tight that was? I got my point across with very little fluff. Your ad copy should do the same. Now on to the next point.
6. Make your Copy Easy to Scan and Skim
This tip applies more directly to longer copy than the short stuff you’d see on a billboard, but it’s still critical. The second your eyes hit a webpage, a magazine ad, or some kind of promotional marketing material—before you read the first word—you are making judgments about whether or not it will be worth your time to continue reading. A lot of this has to do with layout and design of the ad, something most copywriters don’t handle themselves (though if you do have to lay your own copy out every once in a while, it would be worth your time picking up a book like Robin Williams’ "The Non Designers Design and Type Book", or Ellen Lupton’s “Thinking with Type”), but in many ways, your copy can make a difference.
Break your copy up into sections that can be easily digested. Try not to go on and on making the same point over and over. Use section headers or other delineation points like bullet lists in your copy so your reader can immediately know what to expect.
There is a difference between scanning and skimming. Scanning is done first and serves primarily to help the reader determine if the copy is going to be worth reading. Scanning is dictated by the layout and design of the copy more than by the copy itself. Skimming is a little more involved and has to do with the reader looking through the copy. “This is where bolding key words, bulleting, keeping paragraphs short, making sure the first and last sentence in each paragraph are strong, choosing a legible font and even the effective use of hyperlinks all make a difference” (Eisenberg, Eisenberg, & Davis, p. 92)
7. Lighten Up
Write how you would talk. Use a more conversational approach in your copy. You’re not writing to impress someone with a PhD (though lots of times even people with PhDs don’t expect technical writing in copy). You don’t need to pull out the thesaurus to replace all the keywords in your copy with more haughty alternatives. In fact, that could really hurt your copy. Just write your copy as you would say it.
Of course, there are some exceptions. Depending on whom you are writing for, you may find that you have to use some terminology that you may not have otherwise. You may be writing under restrictions imposed by the client that won’t allow you to say certain things. That’s OK. You want to do what the client wants first and foremost, but don’t be afraid to add a little bit of your own flair to it. That’s what you were hired for.
8. Focus on the Right Words
When writing copy—especially online copy—word choice is king. You need to know how your word choice is affecting the success of your copy and making sure it can get to your audience. You need to know your keywords, and you need to use them so your copy will appear in your audience’s online searches.
We hear a lot about keywords when considering online ad copy, but even small changes to the copy itself can make a big difference. Ryan Healy, co-founder of BoostCTR, tells the story of how much of a difference changing one word in an ad had on the ad’s effectiveness:
I was writing in the homeschooling market, and I didn’t have a good idea at the time of what to test. There was this phrase on the third line of the ad that said “no sweat.” And so I said, well I’ll test problem. I had room for the word problem, so I said I’ll test the phrase no sweat versus no problem. This wasn’t even a part of the headline of the ad or even the first line of the ad, it was the third line of the ad right before the URL. Well, the version that said no problem—I don’t remember the specific percentage between the two ads, but it was significant. It was a significant difference of double digits—it might have even been triple digits, I don’t remember. I thought, ‘Why was there such a difference between no sweat and no problem?’ Well the home schooling market is primarily women doing the searching. So we concluded that word sweat was just a really big turn off to them (Ad Copywriting and Crowdsourcing, Podcast, 2011).
9. Skip the Milk—Make your Copy Meat
Cut straight to the chase. Don’t beat around the bush. If you’ve defined your audience well enough, you already have an idea of their backgrounds, what they want, and what they can understand. You don’t need to spend the precious words your audience will actually read giving background information or elaborating on a side point. Have you ever read something and thought, “What is the point of this?” (I hope you’re not thinking that as you read these tips!) “Even mediocre writing that captures the essence of what matters to the [reader] will out-perform stellar copy that completely misses the mark” (Eisenberg, Eisenberg, & Davis p 21).
So get to it!
10. Double Check It—Make Sure There are No Mistakes
Typos can seriously deteriorate the effectiveness of any ad copy. In reading just a few instructional online columns, I found at least three that had glaring mistakes in them:
The ads most like to be noticed are the ones that promote a product
There is nothing wrong with a long sales page, so long as its interesting… (slide 38)
When the advertising legend, David Ogilvy, was told that copy should be short and terse, because nobody reads more than a few words of an ad, he wrote the classic, "At 60 miles and hour the only sound you hear is the clock.
What's even worse is that many columns paid special attention to the fact that mistakes in ad copy can have seriously disastrous consequences on results.
Even the very best of us make mistakes. Linguist and textual critic Royal Skousen once pointed out that there is no such thing as a perfect book. Every book will have some kind of mistake in it—from a simple typo to a misplaced comma to an extra space stuck at the end of a sentence. Mistakes in book form are inevitable, but the same doesn't have to be so with ad copy. Ad copy is much shorter than book-length writing (if it's not, the typos may be the least of your worries). It's often shorter than columns, articles and even online editorials. Ad copy may very well be the type of writing that needs to pack the biggest punch in the fewest words. The demands we place on ad copy are huge, so it HAS to be perfect. There isn't enough text in it to water it down. A reader can read it in a glance, and if there is a mistake in it, it's likely to be the only thing the reader will take away from the ad. Nothing will cause a reader to scoff at an ad more than the mistakes that the professional writer, editor and proofreader didn't even see. "Why in the world would I purchase this product from these people if they should be the ones hiring me to do their editing?!"
When we're talking about mistakes, we're not just talking about typos. Errors in punctuation can be especially troublesome too. After Lynn Truss wrote her bestseller Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, it seems like everyone is on a crusade to look for misplaced apostrophes in ads, street signs and other copy. The ultimate example of this typographic zeal is Jeff Deck. Jeff’s book, “The Great Typo Hunt” chronicles his trip across the entire United Sates and even parts of Canada correcting typos in signs and other copy—sometimes at the expense of his dignity and even his freedom. To people like Ms. Truss, Mr. Deck and many many others, the lack of punctuation is especially irksome since the explosion of written communication in emails, text messaging, blogs, etc., has allowed anyone and everyone to become a writer. As a result, these kinds of errors we see every day have risen exponentially.
The popular “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks has become an Internet hub for embarrassing mistakes copywriters of all kinds have published. Errors in spelling and punctuation are so common that an entire blog has been devoted to the mistakes that occur just on birthday cakes. You probably wouldn't call the person who decorates a birthday cake a copywriter, but that doesn't excuse him or her from the ridicule of others when the bakery delivers a cake with the words "congrautions Allison."
So there you have it. Ten tips for writing your best ad copy and avoid sounding like everyone else. Now let’s take a look at how these tips can work in the real world.
Brooks Briggs, senior copywriter at McCann Erickson Salt Lake City was kind enough to sit down and share some his thoughts what makes a good copywriter. After getting an undergraduate degree in Humanities from BYU, Brooks was hired at a design firm in Utah County for his ability to write and design. Later, he wanted to move into the advertising industry and was hired on at FJC&M, now Richter7. Six years ago, Brooks landed at McCann, “the glass ceiling of ad agencies in Utah,” as he calls it. Brooks’ 14 years of copywriting experience have shown him a lot in the field. You could say he’s a bit of an expert.
We sat down for a few minutes and discussed some of the challenges ad copywriters face and how to overcome them.
Challenge 1: Staying Creative
Our first point of discussion was about the struggle of staying creative. At McCann Erickson, Brooks does a lot of B2B advertising for a lot of tech companies. He’s done everything from white papers and tech brochures to TV and radio spots. The tech focus of Brooks’ clients can make it hard to keep his work creative. So how does Brooks recommend his copywriters keep their creative juices flowing?
This first thing he recommends is that copywriters follow the rule of Filling the Well. Look at other ads, Communication Arts magazine, The One Show, etc. Don’t limit yourself to only these resources, though. Brooks mentioned that there is so much great stuff online that isn't ever entered into shows that only looking at these kinds of publications would really be shortchanging yourself.
Keep abreast of new art and pop culture movements that you can draw from, and always maintain another creative outlet. Many creatives at McCann do freelance work, spec work that they might find interesting, or anything else they enjoy. To fill his own well, these days Books is busy writing a radio drama with a friend.
Challenge 2: Clients
Understanding the client’s direction and working within their guidelines can be a stumbling block for copywriters. With the technological focus of many of McCann’s clients in particular, being able to ramp up and understand the detail of a lot of the products and services their clients offer can be tough.
Brooks works almost exclusively on the Verizon account. He had this to say about how tough it can be to just understand what it is you’re writing about sometimes:
[It’s] tough getting to know not only just all the services and products and the nuances, but there’s also all this legal stuff and there’s also political stuff you should know within the client. So all of that can be pretty challenging. I’m now on Verizon Business which is their communications and networking and internet type stuff…and that was even a bigger jump because now I was entering this world that was just like, ‘I have no idea what a sonnet ring is and how IPB6 is going to affect their private IP lines…and how it applies to government versus how it’s going to apply for a vertical enterprise.’ It’s like, ‘you’ve got to be kidding me.’ The challenge of that was just being able to embrace it enough to learn it.
Compounding the challenge of becoming familiar with a client and their products, the bigger the ad agency, the less direct contact copywriters have with their clients. Brooks feels like not having direct contact with the client really slows things down. “It’s more work to spend time directly with the client as a copywriter…[but] being able to have that resource of direct contact with the client is very helpful”
Challenge 3: Deadlines
Every agency has deadlines and projects, but McCann turns it up a notch. As a branch of McCann Worldgroup, a worldwide ad agency based in New York City, the copywriters at McCann Erickson Salt Lake City often act as if they’re working at a Madison Avenue agency in New York.
“[Clients will say], ‘We need this done by tomorrow morning,’ and it should take us two weeks to do it,” Brooks said. “And sometimes we just have to say, ‘OK, we’ll do it. We have to do it. If we stay all night, we stay all night.’”
Challenge 4: Politics (both internal and client)
Aside from writing extremely technical pieces for their clients on a tight—sometimes impossible—deadline, a copywriter has to deal with the politics of each of their clients as well.
One of my big projects this week is a video for a Verizon client. The president of the company had reviewed a few options presented by his group and they weren’t particularly good concepts. He selected one and said, ‘Yeah I like that, I want that, let’s go with something like that.’ Then [his marketing team] came to us and said, ‘Well this is kind of the one [the boss] selected.’ We looked at it and went, ‘Uhhhhh, that’s not very good.’
We presented a few other options to his team, and, in the end, I think his team basically chickened out and didn’t want rock the boat and pushed the one that he had already said yes to. So we’ve had to go back and figure out, ‘Alright this could be really bad, but how do we make it good?’ And we figured out a way to work it out. So [the boss] go, ‘OK, you listened to me, and you’ve done what I wanted,’ but it’s still going to be a good piece.
Challenge 5: Voice
Setting aside your own voice for the voice imposed by a client’s marketing team can be very hard for someone who studied writing in college. Brooks says that setting aside his own voice to conform with his clients’ was more frustrating at the beginning of his career than it is now. “Now it’s not as much of a problem,” he says. “To some degree, it’s wisdom and to another degree, it’s just being beaten down. You have to adopt a voice; you have to play the role. And that can be difficult particularly when it’s just stupidity and you just have to swallow it and go, ‘It’s so stupid. These people are being stupid, but this is what they’re going to want. This is what they want, and this is what they’re going to get.’”
Despite the challenges they face, there are copywriters out there hitting the mark every day. They're involved in creating work that reaches people, and that can be very satisfying.
No matter what kind of ad copy you write, you can create copy that sings. Follow the tips, be aware of the challenges and just go for it. You'll do just fine.
Reference List
Deck, Jeff, & Herson, Benjamin D. (2010). The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the
World, One Correction at a Time. New York, New York: Crown Publishers
Eisenberg, Bryan, & Eisenbery, Jeffrey, & Davis, Lisa T. (2003). Persuasive Online
Copywriting: How to Take your Words to the Bank. Austin, Texas: Wizard Academy Press
Handley, Ann, & Chapman, C.C. (2011). Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) the Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business. Hoboken, New Jersey: Josh Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Story, Louise (2007, January 15) Anywhere the Eye Can See, It's Likely to See an Ad. The New York Times. Retrieved from nytimes.com
Truss, Lynne (2006). Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. New York, New York: Gotham
WebmasterRadio.FM (Producer). (2011, January 3). Ad Copywriting and Crowdsourcing
[Audio Podcast]. Retrieved from iTunes Music Store.
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