No product or service can long endure if it lacks the all-important ingredient-mass appeal; that is, the capacity to satisfy the needs, desires or ambitions of large numbers of people. Make sure, in your own mind at least, that what you contemplate selling has this quality. And now to the dissection room! The reader must resign himself to a running account as if outside the room,because the “corpus delicti” (the actual ad) cannot be reproduced here. Ladies and gentlemen, we see here a beautiful advertisement, handsome enough to grace the pages of our swankiest fashion magazines, the kind the reader glances at and then turns to the next page, the thought never occurring that such an ad could conceivably lower itself to making a sales pitch. But this is a dissection room; so we will proceed to examine the parts. First, the headline. Now where is it? Oh yes, here it is -very dignified type style, size about 14 point. Nothing wrong, except that this is a mail order ad which should cry for attention. The headline copy is all right except that the claim is considerably toned down by the size and character of the type-a sort of whispered call to action-hesitant, unsure, and by its meekness, transferring that feeling to the reader. Now we come to the sub-caption, paragraph heads, and body copy. Very neat, clean specimens-but where is the urgency? the punch lines?
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Mail Order Special Report
08-30-2007
