01/24/2007: "Should Advertising Be Humorous and Entertaining?"

The only job of the copywriter is to sell. Copywriters are not entertainers. They are not engaged to write funny copy or to entertain watchers, viewers or readers. And yet many copywriter try to do just that.

Too many copywriters try to impress their peers. They try to be comedy writers. They try to be writers of series episodes. But the question is --- do they sell the damn products?

Claude Hopkins, the father of modern advertising and author of Scientific Advertising, said that advertising is selling in print. He said that advertising was not to entertain. He said humor should never be used.

While I'm as modern as the next person, I agree with Hopkins. I believe that my job as a copywriter is to sell my clients' products and services. If I want to write humor --- and I have --- I do so for a television show or a humor piece in a magazine.

If I want to entertain, there are many other venues. My ads are not such a vehicle.

So this brings up the question --- do ads such as the Geico commercials really sell insurance. Focus groups show that a younger age group at least remembers them. But we may remember a tornado that we lived through. Does that mean we want to have one pass through our back yard every day?

When I'm looking to buy a car and pay out $30,000 to $55,000 of my hard earned cash, I want to know the difference between car A and car B. I want to know if the car I'm interested in does well in side impact crash tests. Someone else may want to know how quickly it goes from zero to sixty. Point is, we all want to know the "real" reason to buy. We want details. Paying out money is serious business. We don't want to laugh or be entertained. We want details --- enough details to at least get us interested.

The bottom line is this --- write to sell. Write simply. Don't try to impress. The copywriter is a salesperson. If people love the ad, they generally don't buy the product. They're recalling the ad because it's entertaining. That's not good.

It makes no difference how you write the ad or what you say. A good copywriter doesn't want people to say, "Oh, how well written!" A good copywriter wants the reader or listener to say, "I have to have one of those widgets." Anything less than that and the copywriter has failed.

Advertising should sell. If it doesn't do that, it's a total failure --- no matter how cute it may be. Cute doesn't sell.