No doubt about it – this is good copy. Well a good headline at least. The rest is awful but let’s look at the positives:
Well HAVE you ever not read a text? HAVE you?
1. It takes advantage of every copywriter’s go-to tactic – the rhetorical question. We like rhetoricals because they connect with the audience.
2. It confidently delivers a truth (advertising folk sometimes call it an “insight”) which may just give the reader pause for thought. In this case the insight is that text messages DO get read.
Anytime you give a reader pause for thought you have a chance to persuade them. You may also gain something akin to the reader’s respect for telling them something they didn’t already know.
After the headline the rest is pretty awful and yes, even we can spot some grammatical errors. Still; that headline is a winner.
We truly love this great copywriting below for several reasons. That opening paragraph is a show stopper. We present it as part of our Copy Savvy 101 workshops and can report that 98% of our participants find it funny, attention-grabbing and disarming.
Opening paragraphs like this aren’t written everyday.
Additionally, we love it because it is exactly what you wouldn’t expect from the client (ABC Shops). A brave copywriter submitted these words. Kudos to them.
Copywriting tip: when you have a left-of-centre idea never present it for appraisal by itself. Make it the third of three options when it will stand out against the vanilla opposition. This is especially true and easy to do when submitting alternative headlines or quotes for a media release. You may even deliberately choose to present two boring options as alternatives to your preferred, enzaned option. Yes we just made that word up. Feel free to use it.