Greetings humans.
Today we dive into not the contents of the message, but where the message is.
Let's goooo 📈
– Neal
It’s not “what” but “where”
Insight derived from A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters by Dan Nelken.
Creating a headline for an ad is incredibly difficult. It has to:
- Hook them
- Highlight the problem
- Communicate the value
- Hint at who it’s for
- Be unique/novel
- Do it all as quickly and in as few words as possible
Luckily, the visual is there to help.
The text often sits on top of or adjacent to the visual. Something like this:
This tactic all about getting creative with where the headline is placed.
Ask yourself
“Where’s the most perfect or powerful or ironic place for your headline to appear?”
(Note the headline above is from A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters.)
For example, the perfect place for a NYC taxi ad is:
And if you run a chain of restaurants in Austria at highway rest stops:
And no, before you roll your eyes and go: “I run a startup, I can’t afford to start building 100 foot tall billboards!”
I agree.
You probably shouldn’t do that unless you’ve got a massive budget. But remember that with a combination of Photoshop and AI you can easily make anything look real.
Some more examples
Speaking of tunnels
This ad is extremely unignorable:
3M Security Glass
This ad has gone viral numerous times:
What better way to make a point about your product than to than to put “$3M” in a public bus stop. Note: it was there for a day, and it was only $500 of real money and it was protected by security.
Interactive ads
This is a clever two part ad:
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Perfect for a non-profit that helps find housing for those who need it.
For some reason benches are popular props for this:
Transforming the everyday
Use the environment to create an absurd scene your product can help with:
Using people as props
Build up to it
These two ads show that you can build up to the punchline:
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Remember, it doesn’t need to be in the real world
Many of these ads have gone viral one or more times since they’ve been captured and thrown online.
I think that’s proof that you could them as real or photoshopped images and run them digitally.
Here’s an example of a clever ad that was intended as an image from the start:
So get creative and figure out ways to place integrate the headline with the visual—whether it’s real or digital.
And I recommend A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters by Dan Nelken for more great ad-making ideas.
Something fun
Or, as I like to call them, PaRappa the GPT Wrapper. From Reddit.
