30 Copywriting Secrets from the Best Ad Campaign of All Time

To understand why the Volkswagen ad campaign was so successful, to understand why the copy was so effective, you need to understand something of the environment in which these ads were created.

When you sit down to write your headline, think visually. If you can find an intriguing or funny or puzzling visual to go with your headline, you can relax. Your headline doesn’t have to try so hard to be “strategic” and “on-brand.” And you can ignore that excellent conventional wisdom you’ve heard for years about how to write your headlines

Contrary to popular opinion, a picture is rarely worth a thousand words. And a thousand words usually need a picture or two. A picture usually needs a headline. And a headline usually needs a picture. Your goal as a copywriter is to write headlines that only work when they are placed next to the picture. Your best headlines only work when they work with the visual. If your ad has a visual, your headline should not be able to work when the visual is removed.

Headlines serve one essential goal: Compel potential customers to read your copy. That’s it. No more. Interrupting people isn’t enough. Grabbing their attention isn’t enough. Your headline must motivate them, tease them, intrigue them and compel them to read what you have to say in your body copy. So how do you do that? If you study the most successful ad campaign in history, you’ll discover three ways to get readers to read your body copy.

Your first job as a copywriter is to interrupt people. No one is going to read your copy until you can first grab their attention and get them to pay attention to you. In print advertising and online, you only have two ways to grab people’s attention: a great headline, or a great visual. But what can you do if you don’t have a strong visual? What if your product is boring to look at? That’s the challenge that Volkswagen faced. They had to create advertising for the Volkswagen Beetle and the Volkswagen Station Wagon. Both vehicles were boring to look at. The ad agency on Volkswagen account knew that if your visual is lame, your headline has to be amazing. And so their copywriters wrote some of the most memorable headlines in advertising.

Hey, want to know one of the easiest ways to grab the attention of a potential customer? Want to learn one of the easiest ways to write a headline? Ask a question. Putting a simple question mark at the end of your headline helps you take a straightforward feature or claim and make it a little more interesting and a lot more compelling.

Writing a headline that starts telling a story is an effective way to grab attention and motivate prospective customers to read your ad. This technique works just as well for brochures, email newsletters, website landing pages and direct mail sales letters. People love a good story. So if you can start your ads as well as Jane Austen started her novels, you will always find work as a copywriter.

If you read just about any book on copywriting or advertising, the author will tell you that one of the best words to put in your headline is the word, “NEW.” That’s because people are fascinated with the latest news. The latest tablet. The latest weather report. The latest movie. If you put the word “new” into your headline, people will notice, and they’ll read your copy. That’s the theory. But what do you do if your product is no longer “new?” What if you don’t have any news to tell, but you still have a product to sell? What do you do then? You tie your product to the news. Find a subject or a person that is trending, and tie your advertising message to that.

The best headlines make you stop and think. They have a "hunh?" factor. The undisputed masters of this headline writing technique is the creative team who created the advertising for Volkswgen in the 1960s and 1970s. They wrote some of the most clever headlines in advertising history. Learn how.

What would you do if someone read your copy and started laughing? Would you be upset? You don’t have to be. Humour is one of the most effective tools in your copywriting toolbox. If you can craft headlines and body copy that put smiles on people’s faces, you’re a rare copywriter. And a valuable one.

One of your main jobs as a copywriter is to translate product features into benefits. People buy benefits, not features. In print advertising, one of the most effective ways to communicate product benefits is by demonstrating them with a visual.

As a copywriter, you have to talk about your competition. So how can you compare your product against a competing product without sounding like a high-pressure, boasting salesman? How can you compare your product against the competition in such a way that your potential customer feels respected, even flattered? By getting creative with your headline and your visual. 

If you’ve been writing copy for any length of time, you’ll know that one of the hardest things to write is a good headline. Headlines have one of the toughest jobs in advertising: grabbing the attention of distracted people and persuading them to pay attention. If people don’t read your headline, they don’t read your copy. So you can appreciate why headlines are so important. And why writing them is so difficult.

Here’s a tip to help you write better headlines, faster. I learned this tip when I was a copywriter in Ottawa, back in the late 1980s. Write your body copy first, and find your headline in the copy that didn’t make it into your final draft.

Grabbing someone’s attention with a great headline is one thing. Having a conversation with that person in your body copy is a lot harder. The first thing you must understand about the opening line in your body copy is that it must deliver on the premise of your headline without repeating it.

The opening line of your body copy has only two functions: one, deliver on the premise of your headline, and two, compel your reader to keep on reading. For this reason, writing a great opening line is just as tough as writing a great headline. But one shortcut to writing a great opening line is to open with a question. Take a look at these ads for Volkswagen to see what I mean.

Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad. One way to improve your copy is to make it more interesting to read. One way to make your copy more interesting to read is to use irony. One place you can be ironic is your opening line. When you make your opening line more interesting, you increase your chances that your reader will read all your copy, right to the end.

When you sit down to write an advertisement, aim to say one thing. Stick to one idea. Don’t be like the advertisers who try to say dozens of things in one ad. Be like the ad agency that created these Volkswagen ads: say one thing.

If you want prospective customers to read your copy all the way through, and not get confused along the way, you need to follow a simple, step-by-step script. I’m talking about a logical way to structure your sales pitch. When your prospective customers read your copy, they expect to read a sales pitch that is logical, and easy to follow. Like a good movie script, your sales copy needs to follow a logical structure. Here's how.

For every feature of your product, there are usually multiple benefits. Discover them all, rank them in order of their importance to buyers, and then spell them out in your copy, one after the other. The benefit of doing so is simple: people will buy your product.

Back in the 1960s, a car in the United States developed a reputation for being an “honest” car. The car was the Volkswagen Beetle, and its reputation for being an honest car was largely because of the advertising campaign that launched the car in North America. How did Volkswagen persuade people that their car was honest? With advertising that was filled, not with hype, but with proof. If you want people to trust your advertising, learn a lesson from Volkswagen.

When you go to Amazon to buy a book or a blender, do you ever read the reviews? Most buyers do. Most buyers want to know what other people think of a product before they buy it. But the opposite phenomenon also happens. Some people will buy a product simply because others bought it. This phenomenon is known as “Social proof.” You can use social proof to your advantage in your advertising copy. 

Anglers in Maine catch trout using dry flies with barbless hooks. Unless the anglers keep tension on the line all the way to the net, they lose the troutYour sales copy must do the same. You must keep your reader hooked all the end of your copy if you hope to land a sale. Learn how it's done.

If your write an ad or brochure or sales letter that is factual and true, will prospective buyers believe every word you write? Not necessarily. Many people don’t believe what they read in advertisements. Many people don’t trust the claims made by manufacturers. So how can you help your readers to trust your copy? By being specific.

If you’re like most copywriters, you want potential customers to trust your copy. You want them to find your copy compelling, interesting and, most of all, believable. If that’s the case, my recommendation to you is that you let an amateur write your copy for you. Don’t panic. What I’m talking about is including a testimonial in your copy. In the world of sales and marketing, a testimonial is a statement made by a satisfied user of a product or service. Testimonials make your copy more believable because they show potential buyers why your current customers are happy with your product. But testimonials only work if they meet two criteria. They must be specific, and they must be authentic. 

One of the hallmarks of a good copywriter is original copy. You know good copy when you read it because you’ve never read it before. Good copy is original. It says familiar things in unfamiliar ways. One way to be original is to use parallel structure in your copy. 

If you want people to take an interest in your copy, you have to make your copy interesting to read. One way to do that is to take a strong feature of your product and spin it into a theme. 

Clichés are the mark of a hack copywriter. But all copywriters think in clichés. If you’ve ever sat through a brainstorming session to create a headline or a slogan, you’ll know that clichés are the first things that everyone thinks of. But just because an expression has been beaten to death, excuse the cliché, that doesn’t mean you can’t use that cliché in your copy. The secret is to take that cliché and give it a tweak to make it original again.

How can you get a prospective buyer to see things your way? By painting a picture with words. People are visual. They respond to images, pictures, colors and shapes better than they respond to words. So if you can create an image in the mind of your potential buyer, you are more likely to make sense, make your point, and make a sale.

How you end your copy is almost as important as how you start it. What you say in your last line is almost as important as what you say in your first line. One way to finish your sales pitch is to come full circle back to the beginning of your copy. Let me show you what I mean.

One primary goal of all your copy is to change people’s perceptions about your product. I realize that you and I write copy to sell products and services. That’s a given. But a great deal of what we write doesn’t lead to an immediate sale. Instead, it leads to a potential buyer seeing our brand in a different way. Since one goal of all copy is to change people’s thinking, your copy should end in a way that makes the reader think. What you say at the end of your copy should motivate prospects to think differently.

What does good copy sound like? When you read a sentence or a paragraph or well-written copy, what does it sound like? To answer that question, look at some of the ads written during the 1960s and 1970s for Volkswagen. This ad campaign is considered the most successful ad campaign of all time. Let’s look at one of their ads to hear what good copy sounds like.