I was mid-sentence when the client raised his hand.
“Sorry to cut you off,” he said, “I’m just noticing something—”
I stopped talking and leaned into the screen.
“—looks like you replaced a lot of exclamation marks with periods?” he said.
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I nodded and leaned back. “Yeh, I think I removed all of them, actually,” I said. “I was gonna suggest replacing all of them with periods.”
“All of them?” he said, his tone incredulous. “I’m not arguing, by the way,” he showed me his palms. “I did hire you to edit this thing,” he took a beat. “I’m just curious because I liked them, you know? I thought they created energy?”
“The most powerful element in advertising,” said copywriting great Bill Bernbach, “is truth.”
And exclamation marks are, very often, less “truth” and more contrived enthusiasm, hype.
And, very often, The Reader sniffs this out, resenting the manipulation.
Years ago:
A direct marketer named Michael Senoff did a fantastic interview with copywriter, Ben Settle:
“One question people ask,” Michael said, “is how can you avoid sounding too ‘hype’ in your copy without losing the impact of the big promise, of the benefits?”
Ben didn’t hesitate:
“One way to do this really, really fast,” he said, “is just to either get rid of all the exclamation marks or use them really sparingly. That alone will kind of take away that ‘hype’ feeling,” he said, “especially if what you’re saying is true, which it should be anyway.”
He goes on:
“If you’re saying something that someone really needs to hear,” said Ben, “it doesn’t really matter how you say it… so much as just saying it. Just saying it alone makes it exciting.”
Indeed, truth is the ultimate exclamation mark.
Put something truly valuable, truly beneficial in front of the ideal prospect, the ideal market — and you won’t need to shout to make it compelling.
Just saying it — with a period — makes it exciting.
I leaned into the screen again.
“Honestly,” I said, “it’s a great question and thank you for asking it.”
The client nodded. “Really, I’m just curious,” he said. “I’m sure there’s a reason.”
I sipped some coffee. “Have you heard of Bill Bernbach?” I said.
