We are not in the business of being original. We are in the business of reusing things that work.
Bureau, consumers are exposed to more than twice as many ads today as fifteen years ago, but pay attention to only 20 percent more.
The object of advertising is to sell goods,
Avoid pompous words and fancy phrases.
Copywriters are salespeople whose job is to convince people to buy products.
The surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare—are effective largely because they deal in pa...
Clever advertising can convince people to try a bad product once. But it can’t convince them to buy a product they’ve already tried and didn’t like.
Direct marketing . . . is the only form of accountable advertising.
Grade your performance as a copywriter on sales generated by your copy, not on originality.
Instead of creating aesthetically pleasing prose, you have to dig into a product or service, uncover the reasons why consumers would want to buy the product, and present those sales arguments in copy...
To sell, your copy must get attention . . . hook the reader’s interest . . . create a desire for the product . . . prove the product’s superiority . . . and ask for action.
Experienced copywriters turn those features into customer benefits: reasons why the reader should buy the product.
Of course, I have never agreed that creativity is the great contribution of the advertising agency, and a look through the pages of the business magazines should dramatize my contention that much adve...
The words in your copy should be like the windows in a storefront. The reader should be able to see right through them and see the product.
In their pamphlet Why Don’t Those Salespeople Sell, Learning Dynamics Incorporated, a sales training firm, cites poor ability to present benefits as one of ten reasons why salespeople fail to make the...
Writers should be paid a fair dollar for a fair day’s work … and that writing is a professional service worth the fees that other professions command.