The doorbell rang and the dog erupted.
Kelsey shushed her and patted her head and opened the door. I was upstairs.
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She called up to me: “Package for you.”
“For me?” I called down.
“Yeh.”
“Is it flat?”
“Yes.”
I collect old ads.
The older the better. I frame them and hang them around my office and look up at them when I’m bored or blocked, when I need inspiration. They remind me how consistent this discipline is, how little advertising has changed over time. Not the ads, per se, but rather the things that make them persuasive.
Copywriters have been compelling the masses in largely the same way — leveraging the same heuristics and appealing to the same innate desires — for over a century. In fact, a hundred years ago, in 1923, copywriting pioneer Claude Hopkins wrote a book about this concept, about the predictable and consistent nature of the human condition. He called it Scientific Advertising.
“Human nature is perpetual,” he wrote. “In most respects, it is the same today as in the time of Caesar. So the principles of psychology are fixed and enduring. You will never need to unlearn what you learn about them.”
For example:
“Curiosity,” wrote Hopkins, “is one of the strongest human incentives.”
If you make a person curious, by definition you have their attention. And in copywriting, few things make The Reader more curious than impossible headlines.
I came downstairs.
Kels handed me the flat package. She watched as I opened it and removed the contents: a seven-by-ten inch piece of paper, once a magazine ad, a relic, printed in 1941.
The image in the ad shows a man and a woman, well-dressed and stressed, sitting on a bench, suitcases by their feet. They’re looking at it each other. The man is wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. The woman is holding her hat, despondent.
The headline:
“We waited 21 years for a train… and missed it!”
An impossible headline deliberately makes a preposterous claim (like the one above) or promises a baffling outcome (like this classic: “How to clean out a drawer without removing its contents”) or otherwise opens a loop so strange and implausible, The Reader yearns to close it.
The ad copy tells a story of proud parents who missed the train to their son’s college graduation because dad’s watch lied.
It’s an ad for Hamilton watches, known back then for their accuracy:
Ad: Hamilton Watch Company, 1941
Notice how the headline twists the story, presenting something typical in an extraordinary way. This is done by writing the story first, then reverse-engineering the headline to bring it full circle, closing the loop in an elegant, satisfying way, a memorable way.
Kels was reading over my shoulder:
“How do you wait 21 years for a train?” she said.
“Exactly,” I said.
The dog barked.
