Print Matters

How to Write Great Advertising

Print matters still. In fact, it matters more than ever, even – maybe especially – in a world of continuous rapid-fire media innovations because it provides the standard – the acid test – for relevance and communication power.

Why print? Because it’s the purest form of advertising – an idea given power visually and crafted to move people with words. If you don’t have an idea, it shows. If you can’t write, people know. You can’t hide emptiness behind a mesmerizing glare of glitzy TV production or trade on the familiar voice of a spokesperson to make a connection for you. It’s just you and the reader. So print is the acid test for advertising as well as advertising people.

Unlike electronic media, print requires our attention. If you lose your concentration when you’re reading and your mind wanders, what do you do? Why, you read the sentence or paragraph or page over again – too often more than once. A woman named Evelyn Wood built a speed-reading franchise on this simple truth. Her instructors don’t teach you to read faster; they teach you to concentrate better so you don’t have to reread. That’s why Evelyn Wood graduates not only seem to read faster, they also remember better.

People process print differently, too. An Israeli researcher demonstrated this with an often-cited experiment. He exposed a group of young people to a simple story, half of them in a video mode, the other half in print. Tested at similar intervals – two days, two weeks, two months or whatever – the subjects revealed fascinating differences not so much in their ability to recall the basic story, but in the connections they had made with the material. Their relative ability to repeat the plot line differed only slightly, but when asked questions such as, “What do you suppose Rachel’s life was like before this story began?” and “What do you think is going to happen next?” the TV kids went “Huh?” The print kids, however, had developed entire scenarios that combined material already in their heads with the story they had read. “I think Rachel grew up in the city, in a house near the harbor,” said one. “Rachel and Ben are going to get married and have three children, two boys and a girl,” said another. IN short, Print—as a discipline and as a medium—matters to advertisers more than ever. This book shows how to harness its principles for greater profit.

Product Details
240 pages
paperback
ISBN: 978-1-933199-10-8