The Adweek Copywriting Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America's Top Copywriters

by Joseph Sugarman

The moment you get the reader to say “No” or even “I really don’t believe what he is saying” or “I don’t think that relates to me,” you’ve lost the reader. But as long as the reader keeps saying yes or believes what you are saying is correct and continues to stay interested, you are going to be harmonizing with the reader and you and the reader will be walking down that path toward that beautiful room in the art gallery. To show you a specific approach to this method, let’s take an example from an ad I wrote for one of my seminar participants. Entitled “Food Crunch,” it offered dehydrated survival food. On occasion, when one of my students wrote a good ad that did not succeed, I would help him or her by either suggesting minor copy changes or sometimes rewriting the entire ad myself if I felt I had a better overall concept. The first ad, by John Sauer, was written right after our major fuel crunch in 1973, when there were lines of cars at gas pumps that had little or no fuel to pump. The ad is shown on the next page with my ad above it. John chose the concept of insurance as the best approach in his ad. I felt that insurance put people to sleep. See if you agree with the copy statements in my ad as I tie in the then-current feelings of helplessness during the fuel shortage with John’s product. We all take our food supply for granted. And for good reason. Americans have always