Your Attention, Please!

As imposing as the new headline on Tye's ad is, often readers simply will not read beyond those opening words. Think how little you read of many ads apart from the headline and perhaps the subhead. That's because most of us look at ads as if they were miniature billboards--giving them a quick glance as we're on the way to somewhere else. So no matter how brilliantly you may lay out a sales argument in the body copy, it may not get read for one simple reason: It looks like work.

Take a lesson from advertisers who deliberately ladle on great steaming gobs of copy in places such as electronics and computer catalogs to appeal to information junkies. They know they have to do a lot of selling to motivate a reader to make an instant buying decision on a expensive item. So despite their long copy, visual relief is interspersed throughout so the copy appears in digestible bites and is therefore easier to read.

You can fashion such copy bites or capsules in a number of ways. One is with bulleted "blurbs" (such as in Tye's new ad). Another is with "callouts," which are bits of copy that surround and describe a picture of the item you're selling. Each callout can make a sales pitch while pointing to the item. Another way to attract readership is with photo captions. Almost everyone is drawn to captions, so it's a perfect location to make an important point. Lastly, in larger ads, sectioning off two or more paragraphs into a sidebar is a way to break up the copy and, at the same time, attract the eye to a special and easy-to-read feature.

Remember: Your advertising is an uninvited guest in the reader's editorial sanctuary--a good reason to make your message read and look as enticing as possible.

Contact Source

Paradox 21 Inc., P.O. Box 480, Solon, IA 52333, http://www.nfnq.com

This article was originally published in the December 1997 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Your Attention, Please!.