Steve Hayden
Don’t write a check with your advertising that your product can’t cash.
If you want to be a well-paid copywriter, please your client. If you want to be an award-winning copywriter, please yourself. If you want to be a great copywriter, please your reader.
The Bible, save for Genesis, is a great source of book titles, but only occasionally of opening lines. For these, study Country and Western lyric, the very font (if not wellhead) of common emotion, everyday irony and freighted pith. My favorite Country and Western lyric: “If your phone don’t ring, it’s me.” A brilliant example of morphemic loading for everyone who toils in the dark trenches of commercial prose.
If you are lying, of course, they will tear you to pieces. So make the truth as interesting as it can be, and never look down on your audience. […] Learn compassion and beware of the ego sickness that devastates so many in our trade.
Ein Arbeitsbeispiel, mit Kommentar, für Apple:
click to embiggen
“We ran this ad in 1981, welcoming IBM to the personal computer market. Somewhat like Belgium welcoming Hitler to the border. Oh well. The clever bit was that, even though Apple was tiny at the time, this ad made a two horse race out of a twenty horse race […].”
If you have something valuable to add or some interesting point to discuss, I’ll be looking forward to meeting you at Mastodon!