Saturday morning, whilst tucking into my crunchy nut cornflakes, I watched a rather interesting news piece on the BBC about how newspapers are essentially suffering from a failing business model; and are looking at new ways to raise income due to the falling numbers of people buying papers… mainly because of the Internet.

Their immediate solution is to start charging readers a subscription fee for looking at content online, an initiative that is being championed by Rupert Murdoch, and admit that one day, newspapers will no longer be around.

As an ‘Ad Man’, I find something incredibly sad about the migration of newspapers away from traditional print and on to online. Especially as it seems very real that one day newspapers will no longer exist… especially with the rise of e-readers… meaning we could one day say farewell to the beautiful art-form that is the ‘long-copy advert’, which these days is a rare beast, but when it appears it’s a compelling and persuasive one.

Will we really see the death of the newspaper?

So am I over exaggerating when I say that newspapers will one day disappear? Meaning we will see the end of the ‘long-copy advert’.  Well, Philip Meyer who is Professor Emeritus of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill stated in his book ‘The Vanishing Newspaper’ that the first quarter of 2043 would be the moment when “newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition”.

What happens in o.5 seconds before a crash in a Mercedes Benz

Advertisers have for many years begun abandoning traditional press advertising in preference to advertising on the Internet. And why wouldn’t you choose the Internet? Especially when you can target more effectively and see exactly how many people have interacted with your advert and spent with you. Already in Switzerland and the Netherlands, newspapers have lost half of their classified advertising to the Internet… meaning they are struggling to survive… the writing, as they say, is definitely on the wall for both the newspapers and the ‘long copy advert’.

What’s so important about the ‘long copy advert’?

For me, the long copy advert taught me everything I know about creating a compelling advert that sells. I always considered a press advert as a pure form of advertising… it was simple… it followed a structure known as ‘tease’ (the headline) ‘tickle’ (the copy) and ‘bounce’ (the call to action).

It also gave you the discipline of knowing as much as possible about the product or service you were tasked with selling. Account Handling would hand you what they felt was the information you needed to tackle the given brief… but I would always go further and do my own research and find out as much as possible; from the history of factories to the origins of the stitching used to sew a piece of clothing together… all because you never knew where that magic angle would come from to create a compelling advert.

Approaching an advert from a long copy point of view also proved to me that there is always something new and interesting to say about what you are tasked with selling… even if you are selling that thing for the 50^th time. I always believed that if I approached a brief as I would a long copy brief, I could find 20 or 30 facts that I could then make into countless short snappy headline and visual driven adverts.

Long copy yes, but if you're a woman it's a compelling read

No one is really going to read all that copy, are they?

Talk to anyone who works in Direct Response Advertising and they will tell you that that short copy doesn’t sell. In split run tests, long copy invariably outsells short copy. They will then quote you this famous little story:

Max Hart (of Hart, Schaffner & Marx) and his advertising manager, George L. Dyer, had an argument about long copy. Dyer said, “I’ll bet you $10 I can write a newspaper page of solid type and you’d read every word of it.”

Hart scoffed at the idea. “I don’t have to write a line of it to prove my point,” Dyer replied. “I’ll only tell you the headline: ‘This Page is All About Max Hart’.”

Basically what Dyer was saying is that as long as the copy is interesting and relevant to the person reading it… they will read the whole thing. I personally subscribe to the following belief:

‘The correct length of sales and marketing copy is the exact length necessary to create an overwhelmingly compelling desire to heed your call to action. And not one word more or less’.

I’ve been in several meetings where young marketing managers have told me that the copy is too long and no one will read it… yet as an agency we have proven time and time again that if the copy is interesting and relevant, people will read it. Even on the emails we produce, which you would normally assume is a place for short copy, our long copy approach has seen rises, not falls, in opening and click-through rates.

Copy and design in perfect harmony

I’m a designer… all those words just get in the way of me wanting to create a beautiful design piece.

It always makes me smile when a designer comments that ‘the copy is too long, can you make it shorter’. You then look at what they are designing and immediately I begin to wonder whether they are looking at the piece from a commercial point of view or just a design point of view.

I think it is best to have a foot in both points of view… and the best designers I have worked with have always understood the importance of the words and have embraced them as an essential piece of the design… just like white space! I always remember one writer responding to an art director when he mentioned that the copy is too long… he said, “make the copy part of the design… don’t just stick it on as an afterthought”.

Can the ‘long copy advert’ survive the death of the newspaper?

People would argue that the ‘long copy advert’ is already disappearing; thanks to the impatient way we want to consume information. And with video being able to be played on e-readers and the internet, I can’t see that people will engage with a compelling advertising read… not when they can have more senses stimulated with sound and vision.

I would like to think that the ‘long copy advert’ will live on in the future, and that people will still be stimulated by product or service information crafted in a way that tells them all they need to know in a compelling, engaging and entertaining way. But I fear our sound-bite Twitter fuelled YouTube world will take over and there will be no place for long copy… apart from in the scripts for the videos that are used to sell.

Hopefully, though, there will be people in our industry who will keep the ‘long copy advert’ alive and pass the lessons that creating one teaches you down to the next generation of Ad Men (and women)… I know I certainly will.

If you’d like to see how a ‘long copy advert’ can help your brand… why not give Red C a call on 0161 872 1361 or click here

You can write a long copy advert to sell anything, even a chocolate bar

Tags: Advertising, Broadsheet Advert, Copywriting, Direct Marketing Agency, Direct Response Advertising Agency, Ford Press Advert, George L. Dyer, Hart, Long Copy, Long Copy Advert, Manchester Advertising Agency, Manchester Design Agency, Max Hart, Mercedes Benz Press Advert, Newspaper Advertising, Online Marketing Agency, Press Advertising, Publicis, Rolls Royce Press Advert, Rupert Murdoch, Schaffner & Marx, Short Copy, The Vanishing Newspaper, Wispa Press Advert

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 10:19 am and is filed under Blog, Copywriting, General Interest, Influences, Press Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.