Adjectives, Ogilvy and async
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Morning folks, and welcome to this week’s tip, example and thought. Today we’ve got:
Tip: Get rid of your adjectives and adverbs and replace them with cold, hard facts.
Example: An iconic Rolls Royce ad from the late 50s is my favourite case study of the facts > adjectives tip.
Thought: Async communication and scheduling every conversation are driving me up the wall. Am I alone in this?
Let’s get to work.
Tip: Replace your adjectives with facts
One of the writing truisms you hear all the time is "delete your adverbs and adjectives." And it's not wrong! Getting rid of descriptive terms makes your writing more concise - especially if lots of those descriptive terms are basically saying the same thing.
But it doesn't necessarily make it more persuasive. To do that, you need to go a step further and replace those adjectives and adverbs with facts.
Don't just say the car's really fast: tell me how fast it goes. Don't just tell me your software saves time. Tell me how much time it saves and (more importantly) what processes it's going to replace/speed up.
You'll find that this often takes more words - but it's worth it because you make a persuasive case. You're painting a clearer picture in your reader's mind, and showing rather than telling.
(I ripped this tip out of a four-part checklist I put together a few years ago. Take a look if you're interested - still a p good resource. Free, no email or anything required, just download the PDF.)
Example: David Ogilvy was the king of facts vs adjectives
Here's my all-time favourite example of the approach I outlined in the above section.
In the late 1950s, ad agency Ogilvy was hired to do Rolls Royce's ads. Here's their main headline before Ogilvy came on board:
"The best car in the world." Not really telling us much!
Not only is "best" an adjective, it's a completely subjective adjective. Says who? What makes it the best? Why does that matter to people who might want to buy it?
So the Ogilvy folks got to work on some customer research, and eventually landed on this - ripped right out of a review by a car magazine:
Man, I love it. You can see that they figured out that one of of the big benefits of the Rolls Royce is that it's quiet.
But writing "this car is quiet" is still pretty zzzzzzz. So instead of writing that, they replaced it with facts. Now, reading that, I can clearly imagine how quiet it is - and what it's like to drive one.
(Also, I think of it every time I'm driving on the motorway, in my 2014 Mazda that definitely does NOT have this feature. Music up to 11 just to hear it a little bit.)
The whole ad is one of my favourites of all time. Take a look at it on swiped.co
Thought: async is killing communication
Here's something I've noticed as the world's shifted to remote working: work culture is really moving away from "shoulder-tapping."
In the pre-COVID days, it was pretty normal to swing by someone's desk, get them on the phone for a quick question, flick them a message and get a response.
But now it's much more regimented. Want to have a conversation? Schedule a Zoom. Send a Slack message? Response will come eventually, but don't count on it. Call someone's phone and they'll look at it in fear and revulsion - they certainly won't be answering.
It all feels a bit more silo'd, harder to get things done quickly, and less spontaneous. The adoption of remote work is great - but I think something hard-to-quantify has been lost as well.
Am I just particularly annoying to talk to? Or have you noticed this too? Let me know.
That's all. Have a great rest of your week.
Sam
PS: Don't forget to forward this newsletter on. Great for anyone interested in learning how to apply pretty straightforward copywriting tips to make their marketing much more effective.
PPS: Or have me review your copy. $799. Great value for money if you ask me - you'd be amazed at how many high-impact, low-effort copy changes there are on any given landing page. Book here.
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