I often describe myself as a copywriter who’s trying to put herself out of business by writing a little less every day. When a colleague rings my bell asking for help with an ad, I rarely hop to the keyboard and deliver. More likely, I’ll ask to see the layout and say something annoying like “are you sure we really need a subhead?”
All the best ad copywriters I know are equally unhelpful — we guard our words like weapons to be deployed only when absolutely necessary. Sheer laziness? Perhaps. But I prefer to think of it as a deep respect for the power of visual communication, and a corresponding conviction that the less you say, the more you will be heard.
To be clear, I’m referring here to at-a-glance advertising moments like a billboard or a social post. Rich storytelling and deep information have their place. But split-second ads speak in a language all their own, and they almost always speak most eloquently in brief.
I’m hardly the first to advance this notion; any creative or marketing strategist will tell you the same thing. Yet somehow the push to say more — to slip in just one more line of romance copy or one more benefit bullet — is a constant source of tension in creative work. It seems in advertising as in life, knowing when to shut your mouth isn’t easy.
As with so many creative challenges, I think logic may be to blame. A marketer’s job is to explain what’s so great about her product. And isn’t ad copy the perfect tool for the job? I say no. I’d argue an ad can’t explain anything, no matter how much copy it carries, because explaining is simply not what ads do. Explaining is the realm of brochures and selling pages and infomercials. Ads don’t have time for that. They’re too busy just trying to be noticed in the first place.
Good ads run on instinct. They short-circuit the rational mind and smack us right in the heart, the gut, the funny bone, or even the soul. Why did my gaze linger on that magazine spread? Why did my thumb pause mid-scroll, allowing a rare moment of focussed attention on my phone? If I knew the precise answer to these questions I’d be famous. But I guarantee it wasn’t the body copy that caught my eye.
In the quest to capture a reader’s attention, visuals will win out over words every time. And the less you clutter up good design and photography with copy, the more effectively those powerful tools can do their job. Sure, a strong headline contributes to a great ad. But to stake your creative strategy on the strength of your verbal argument risks throwing away the value of the tactic.
This principle is more relevant than ever now that most advertising is consumed on a screen the size of a graham cracker. Great social posts and email headers play by the same rules as glossy magazine ads and billboards, but in an even more frenetic environment. When skillfully created, they work their magic faster than the eye can read and the brain can process.
So we’ve established that the audience for ads is pretty much irrational. Meanwhile marketers are paid to provoke these irrational beings to profitable action. And that’s precisely why easing up on copy and betting on visual impact is so hard. A logical, fact-based copy argument gives the illusion of predictability: the more information we convey, the greater the likelihood our audience will be convinced. Staking the success of our work on instinctive reactions to raw creative stimuli, by contrast, seems crazy. How can we possibly know how that picture will make them feel?
Of course we cannot know. Creative work is not data modeling. And while keen consumer insights, smart research and sharp strategy can take us a long way toward predictability, ultimately, truly backing a creative approach requires a measure of faith. The one thing we can predict, however, is that in moments of fleeting, distracted attention (read: all advertising moments), heavy copy won’t get read, and it may very well compromise the one shot we have at gaining awareness to begin with.
Hear that click? That’s the sweet sound of someone not reading your ad.
