Where Are You Headed?
Sometimes it's not as much what your headline says as where you place it.
An advertising guru of considerable stripe once made the
pronouncement, "Copy is king"-meaning the sales message
in an advertisement is more important to its success than the
visual component. But today, in an era filled with dancing banner
ads and animated e-mail, words go down better when they're
presented in an arresting visual setting-even in print ads.
That's certainly the case for the ad highlighted here, where
the provocative composition of the headline draws readers in for a
look-see.
Produced for the Office of Economic Development in
Oakland, California-an organization whose purpose is to attract
businesses to relocate to the city-this ad gets an A+ for the way
its unique, stacked headline blocks attract (or, one might say,
distract) the eye. Because it's hard to lasso racing readers,
especially with a long headline, it takes a mold-breaking
composition like this one to pull the prospect in. You can't
help but be drawn to follow this headline's stagger, with
different-sized stepping stones, from the top left corner of the ad
to the middle. Equally important is the way it's broken into
fragments of phrases and individual words, each offered in a
different type size. But make no mistake, this mosaic wasn't
just thrown together. A lot of thought was put into making words
like "heck" and "Oakland" leap out of the
pack.
That said, the question always remains: Does this ad do the job
of getting businesses interested in moving to Oakland? To be
honest, I'm not crazy about the oblique message in the
headline, even though I know what it's getting at. But the
headline graphic made me quite willing to read the body copy, a
message that makes persuasive points about the benefits Oakland has
to offer over its more celebrated-and costlier-sister city:
"People tend to be more familiar with a famous neighbor of
ours. But as 300 new businesses will tell you . . . office rents
are lower than San Francisco."
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What should you take away here? Before assuming that the best
presentation of your headline-which is perhaps the most important
element of any ad-is three lines of horizontal verbiage stacked on
the top shelf, stop and ask: "Is this the most compelling way
I can present this headline?" The answer will probably be
no.
Jerry Fisher is a
freelance advertising copywriter and author of Creating
Successful Small Business Advertising.