Copywriting Swipe File Library

Oh yeah! I love old press ads - everything about them - layout, copy, images. They were killer.

I notice quite a few are from J. Walter Thompson - which used to be the world's biggest agency with offices in every major western country and some third world countries. I worked there. In the "olden days" when they took you on in the mail-room and then moved you round various departments until you found your groove.

Every month or so they'd have a viewing of TV spots from all the other JWT offices. And they were killer. You'd walk out of the theatre totally inspired.

But they never shared the press ads around. Don't know why. I think they may have had an in-house journal or something for that. Its a bit hazy in my memory - it was back in the Sixties after all. And you know what they say about remembering the Sixties. Um...actually, I've forgotten. Something about "If you can remember the Sixties - you weren't there".

Thanks so much for sharing this.

This is the MAJOR detail that gets left out of most swipe files. Ted Nicholas uses a one to five star rating system for his ads, he tells you which ones were successful, but even then, he leaves out important details.

The MEDIA is just as important as the AD. An could work great in, say, the Wall Street Journal but be a total dud in another publication.

HARD details to find. And it is significant for a copy writer to know the details too. Some are starting to argue that the PAST is dead and what worked is unimportant. Ask Dan Kennedy, a modern master, what he thinks about this "history is unimportant" type of thinking.

So here is an example of a successful ad.

The Headline: What is this woman doing? And a picture. You can see the ad on Bernstein's page that Alex Cohen linked to. This ad ran for over a decade, with at least 6 differetn pictures and minor changes in the copy that Bud wanted to test.

So you know that ad was a winner, but how did it pull in various publications. It killed in the "Women's" pubs and did OK in more general publications. A variant, What is this man doing, featuring Bud instead of his wife Mary, was tested and....it sucked. So what is this woman doing ran for over a decade and sold millions of dollars of books for Green Tree Press.

Now a more recent test by Green Tree Press made a remarkable discovery, they added ONE line of copy to the end of the ad and it REDUCED response by 20%.

Can you guess what the one line of copy said? I bet you can if you think about it. They took this line out, and sales jumped back up to where they were before the line of copy was added.

You are 110% right on, it does NO good to swipe from a dud ad. Even Bud Weckesser "borrowed" from the best selling ads of his day.

gjabiz