Do Long Copy Ads Work

In all my years of creating advertising, there is one question that I have been asked more often than any other. One issue that has caused me more problems with clients than any other. One particular advertising and direct marketing approach that creates more concern and disbelief than any other.

So, what is this troublesome question?

Well, since I tired of answering this question myself, I propose that we ask some of the all time greats in the history of advertising and direct marketing what they think about this issue.

Let see what they have to say. bookstore. He not only built the agency he founded, Ogilvy Mather, into one of the biggest and most successful in the world, he also wrote two popular books on the subject: Confessions of an Advertising Man in 1963 and Ogilvy on Advertising in 1983. bookstore. In Confessions, he had the following to say on the subject of long copy: There is a universal belief in lay circles that people won read long copy. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Claude Hopkins once wrote five pages of solid text for Schlitz beer. In a few months, Schlitz moved up from fifth place to first. I once wrote a page of solid ray ban sunglasses outlet text for Good Luck Margarine, with most gratifying results.

Every advertisement should be a complete sales pitch for your product. It is unrealistic to assume that consumers will read a series of advertisements for the same product. You should shoot the works in every advertisement, on the assumption that it is the only chance you will ever have to sell your product to the reader or never. Says Dr. Charles Edwards of the Graduate School of Retailing, at New York University, "the more facts you tell, the more you sell. An advertisement chance for success invariably increases as the number of pertinent merchandise facts included in the advertisement increases." Ogilvy goes on to discuss some of his personal experiences with long copy ads and shares an anecdote which to this day remains the best explanation of what kind of copy people like to read: Research shows that readership falls off rapidly up to 50 words of copy, but drops very little between 50 cheap ray ban and 500 words. In my first Rolls Royce advertisement I used 719 words one fascinating fact on another. In the last paragraph I wrote, "people who feel diffident about driving a Rolls Royce can buy a Bentley." Judging from the number of motorists who picked up the word "diffident" and bandied it about, I concluded that the advertisement was thoroughly read. In the next one I used 1,400 words.

We have even been able to get people to read long copy about gasoline. One of our Shell advertisements contained 617 words, and 22% of male readers read more than half of them.

Vic Schwab [you hear more from him later] tells the story of Max Hart (of Hart, Schaffner Marx) and his advertising manager, George L. Dyer, arguing about long copy. Dyer said, "I bet you $10 I can write a newspaper page of solid type and you read every word of it."

Hart scoffed at the idea. "I don have to write a line of it to prove my point," Dyer replied. "I only tell you the headline: Page is All About Max Hart Twenty years later, in Ogilvy on Advertising, he had even more to say on the subject: All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short. [He then goes on to give numerous examples of successful long copy ads.] I could give you countless other examples of long copy which has made the cash register ring, notably for Mercedes cars. Not only in the United States, but all over the world.

I believe, without any research to support me, that advertisements with long copy convey the impression that you have something important to say, whether people read the copy or not.

Direct response advertisers know that short copy doesn sell. In split run tests, long copy invariably outsells short copy. Later, he explains one of the most important differences between the long and short copy styles of advertising: Advertising people have an unconscious belief that advertisements have to look like advertisements. They have inherited graphic conventions which telegraph to the reader, "This is only an advertisement. Skip it."

There is no law which says that advertisements have to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract more readers. Roughly six times as many people read the average article as the average advertisement. Very few advertisements are read by more than one reader in twenty. I conclude that editors communicate better than admen.

If you pretend you are an editor, you will get better results. When the magazine insists that you ray ban wayfarer slug your ads with the word advertisement, set it in italic caps, in reverse. Then nobody can read it.

If you abandon the conventional graphics of advertisements and adopt editorial graphics, your campaigns will become islands of good taste in an ocean of vulgarity. In a later chapter, Ogilvy puts an exclamation point on his argument: Long copy sells more than short copy, particularly when you are asking the reader to spend a lot of money. Only amateurs use short copy. bookstore. Originally written in 1938, Caples himself revised the book four times until the late 70 and a fifth edition, published in 1997 and edited by Fred Hahn, has been issued posthumously. Here what he has to say on our subject: The short copy ads, set in poster style and containing only a few words of copy or a slogan, are usually used by advertisers who are unable to trace the direct sales results from their advertisements.

Advertisers who can trace the direct sales results from their ads use long copy because it pulls better than short copy. For example, the book club advertisers, the record clubs, and the correspondence school advertisers use ads containing 500 to 1500 words of copy. Also, you will find that real estate advertisers, patent medicine advertisers, and classified advertisers put as much selling copy into their ads as the space will allow. These people cannot afford to run so called "reminder copy." They have to get immediate sales from every ad.

Advertisers who sell their goods and services by means of direct mail letters have found it profitable to use long copy in their advertising. Long copy is such a tested and proven success that the four page direct mail letter has become a rule rather than an option. Where the instruction used to be "Say whatever you must say, then stop," it now is, "Say it in four pages and make it worth reading."

This does not mean that long copy should be used merely for the sake of filling space. Long copy should be used in order to crowd in as many sales arguments as possible. Here are some additional points Caples makes with regard to length of copy: Advocates of short copy say, ray-ban wayfarer "I don think anybody will read all that small print. Let cut the copy down to a couple of paragraphs and set it in 18 point type."

What the advocates of short copy should say, if they want to be accurate, is this: "I don think everybody will read all that small print." This is perfectly true. Everybody will not read it. But the fact is that the very people you are most interested in will read your ad. These are the prospects who will buy your product or service if you tell them sufficient reasons for doing so.

The question arises: Why wouldn it pay the short copy users to make their advertising do the utmost selling job by including more sales talk? Answer: the chances are that it would pay them.

Here is a solution to the problem of long copy versus short copy that should satisfy the champions of both sides of the question. Put a brief selling message into your headline and subheadings. Put your detailed message into small print. In this way, you accomplish two things: (1) You get a brief message across to glancers with your headline and subheads. (2) You give a complete message in small print to the person who is sufficiently interested in your product to read about it. Later in Tested Advertising Methods Caples goes on to say: After you have found your most efficient size ad, you should jam your space full of copy, no matter whether it is a one inch ad or a full page ad.

Brief, reminder style copy consisting of a few words or a slogan does not pull inquiries as well as long copy packed with facts and reader benefits about your product or service.

If you want to see efficient use of space, look at mail order catalogs or at the mail order ads in magazines or in your Sunday newspaper. Some of the strongest pulling mail order ads have contained as many as 1200 words of copy set in small print. Don be afraid to use long copy or small print. Just be sure that your copy is interesting. bookstore. And don be afraid of long copy. If your ad is interesting, people will read all the copy you can give them. If the ad is dull, short copy won save it. Later in the book, he devotes an entire chapter to long copy ads entitled "How Editorial Style Ads can Bring Increased Sales." After discussing numerous highly successful examples he says: If you use the editorial style approach, you will have a powerful factor working in your favor. People buy newspapers and magazines to read editorial material ads. Readership studies show that the reading of editorial material is five times as great as the reading of advertising.

Now that we heard from two most famous men in advertising history, let ask some of the real pioneers in the field for their views on long copy.