1: You must know to whom you are advertising. You must know your target audience intimately.
2: You must be fully and completely familiar with the product. Use it, touch it, smell it and, above all else, you must like it.
If you have those two points firmly in your head, the words will come easier and they'll be more convincing.
Words are very powerful. In the right hands they can even reverse the expression that “a picture paints a thousand words” by completely changing the perceptions in “the theatre of the mind”. As the famous photographer David Bailey once said:
“The visual person is always at the mercy of the writer. You see a picture of a little old man in wire-rimmed glasses entitled 'This man carved Pinocchio' and you think 'what a sweet old man'. But put the words 'this man is a Nazi War criminal' and immediately it becomes something else.”
FANTASY? PRACTICALITY? OR PRACTICAL FANTASY?
Copy, like any other part of an advertisement, is there to achieve one thing only – more sales (or, more accurately, higher awareness and more response).
There are many techniques and styles of copywriting and they all invariably centre on either lifestyle or reality, fantasy or practicality.
There are many divergent views on the alternative approaches.
FOR: Fantasy upgrades consumers' tastes... makes the merchandise more appealing and increases impulse purchasing.
It's fun – and translates that way to the consumer.
AGAINST: Lifestyle advertising can lose touch with reality. The reality of advertising's true function... it's like whistling in the dark.
Different approaches change like fashions. What's trendy one year is not the following year.
There appears to be a belief that modern consumers are more concerned with what it will do for them rather than what it will make them look/feel like.
Many advertising men believe we've been so busy selling the sizzle that we've forgotten all about the sausage.
Personally, I don't believe there is any definite right or wrong approach to any copy style – whether it's called fantasy or reality, imagery or factuality. It is certainly unwise for any expert to come out strongly for or against either approach.
Despite modern trends there will always be elements of each. Advertising, after all, very seldom deals with absolute truth. Product benefits will always be highlighted whilst product negatives will be avoided. That's simple salesmanship – advertising is only salesmanship in written and visual form, anyway.
Watch a reader of a newspaper or magazine; they're looking for news and information and they will read advertisements in almost exactly the same way. It follows therefore that copy written in a 'newsy style' will be accepted more easily. And 'conversational' often works better than 'controversial' or 'sensational'.
David Ogilvy always had something to say about advertising (mostly being fairly mundane but with an occasional glimpse of brilliance) and believed that advertising should always be based on a BIG idea.
It takes great courage to be simple and direct and to make the essential points tremendously visible to the consumer.
The product benefit must always be the key. And, in some cases, it would be naïve to ignore emotional imagery in favour of fact. Take an aftershave, for example. There are several product benefits: It may last longer... it may be soothing... it may be inexpensive – yet you don't need to be a genius to know that a woman buys it for the man in her life because it makes him sexy (to her) and that the man buying it for himself probably does so for exactly the same reason. So a great deal of advertising must concentrate on imagery and fantasy.
A paradox? Not really. An advertisement for aftershave (or ladies' perfume, for that matter) IS selling a product benefit – sex.
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