Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [135]
7.4. Interesting text
It is not the purpose of the ad or commercial to make a
reader or listener say: “My, what a clever ad.”
Morris Hite, advertiser
In the early 1900s, advertisers hired famous writers, such as Sherwood Anderson, Daniel Defoe, and Stephen Vincent Benét, to write ads. For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald composed an ad for a laundry in Muscatine, Iowa, “We keep you clean in Muscatine.” However, Aldous Huxley raised a note of caution: “Any trace of literariness in advertising is fatal to its success. Advertisement writers cannot be lyrical or in any way obscure. They must be universally intelligible … it must be immediately moving and directly comprehensible.” Ogilvy agreed with this; he believed that great writers, such as Hemingway, Shaw, and Faulkner, were failures at writing ads.
7.4.1. Consider interesting writing
You could not use guidelines to produce an ad as interesting and relevant as this: “Sometimes it takes a family of four to stop a drunk driver.” It appeared on a billboard along with a car that had been crushed in a drunk-driving accident.
Interesting writing can improve recall, tie into favorable connotations, and enhance the customers’ expectations. It seems most relevant for hedonic products and where the customer has little need for information.
The situation with respect to high-involvement goods is not clear. Interesting writing has potential—and some risks. The writing should not attract attention to itself. You do not want the customer to think “My, what clever writing!” because this might divert attention from the message. The key point for high-involvement products with strong arguments is that interesting writing, if used, should reinforce the arguments as it does in the text from the following print ads.
This headline, in a Bill Bernbach ad, “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz,” was followed by “At your public library, they’ve got these arranged in ways that can make you cry, giggle, love, hate, wonder, ponder, and understand.”
A Scottish travel ad: “When the lads are piping with all their hearts, you feel you’re marching off to glory.”
A 1961 ad by the Papert, Koenig, Lois agency: “If your Harvey Probber chair wobbles, straighten your floor.” The text explained the effort that goes into each chair. It concluded with “The lovely chair above could be made with 14 less dowels, 2 yards less webbing, thinner wood, and so forth. You wouldn’t know the difference, but Harvey Probber would. Of course, in a few years, you would know too.”
Evidence on effects of interesting writing given low involvement
Consider the following sentence from a history textbook on the Vietnam War written for high-school students (a low-involvement situation): “In South Vietnam, communist forces (the Viet Cong) were aided by forces from communist North Vietnam in a struggle to overthrow the American-supported government.”
This sample came from a 400-word passage that Graves and Slater (1986) used in a contest in which three teams of writers made revisions. The first team, two linguists, aimed to improve clarity. They added conjunctions to better show relationships, repeated key ideas, and revised the organization. For example, they concluded that the sentence above followed the rules for clarity, and they only added the phrase “in particular,” by starting ““In South Vietnam in particular ….”
The second team, two college composition instructors, focused on “simplifying information, adding background information, supplying transitions, emphasizing key material, and keeping the passage smooth and readable.”
The third team, a pair of veteran Time/Life editors, tried to make the passage interesting. They replaced weak verbs with more colorful verbs, added nuggets of information, and inserted vivid anecdotes and details that focused on people rather than events: “Aided by communist North Vietnam, the Viet Cong guerillas were eroding the ground beneath South Vietnam’s American-backed government. Village