In copywriting, make your headline a zinger if your visual is lame

This article is an excerpt from my Udemy course, 30 Copywriting Secrets from the Best Ad Campaign of All Time.

Your first job as a copywriter is to interrupt people. No one is going to read your copy until you can first grab their attention and get them to pay attention to you.

In print advertising and online, you only have two ways to grab people’s attention: a great headline, or a great visual. Of the two, visuals are better at grabbing attention than headlines are. So if you have a funny or clever or quirky or intriguing image at your disposal, use that to grab your prospect’s attention. But what can you do if you don’t have a strong visual? What if your product is boring to look at?

That’s the challenge that Volkswagen faced back in the 1960s and 1970s. They had to create advertising for the Volkswagen Beetle and the Volkswagen Station Wagon. Both vehicles were boring to look at. The ad agency on Volkswagen account knew that if your visual is lame, your headline has to be amazing. And so their copywriters wrote some of the most memorable headlines in advertising.

Here’s an example of what I mean (Ad A). I think you’ll agree with me that the visual in this ad isn’t going to win any awards for creativity. But the headline, now that’s creative. You see, the one thing that was different about the Volkswagen was that the body didn’t change from year to year. If you bought a Volkswagen in 1967 the body looked just like the body of the 1957. All that Volkswagen changed during those ten years was the insides of the vehicle. This clever headline plays upon that theme in a creative way. A boring visual paired with a clever headline gets your attention.

Here’s another great example (AD B). Nothing remarkable about that image. It’s just a profile shot of a boring-looking car. But the headline is a zinger. There was a craze in America for cars that featured a car with a roofline that sloped continuously down at the back. These cars were called fastbacks. And they went fast. Volkswagen played on this theme with a clever headline that made fun of their car. “Presenting America’s slowest fastback.”

Ad C

Another craze in the late 1950s and early 1960s was convertibles. Volkswagen didn’t make a convertible. But they made a car with a sun roof. So they created an ad (Ad C) with a boring photo of the product paired with a clever headline. The result is an ad that’s gets your attention, makes you smile, and almost forces you to read the body copy.

Here is an ad for the Volkswagen station wagon (Ad D). It’s an interior shot, as you can see. Nothing remarkable. But the strong headline works perfectly with the weak visual. The inside of the Volkswagen station wagon was roomy, twice as roomy as a typical station wagon in those days. So the headline makes total sense, and makes you smile: “There’s nothing like the great indoors.” There’s only one thing wrong with that headline. I didn’t write it!

Here’s our final example. The visual, you’ll agree, is nothing to get excited about. Just a picture of the car and a picture of the engine on the ground beside it. But it’s the headline that makes this ad a winner. Or, I should, it’s the headlines, plural. “We made the car go faster.” “And the engine go slower.”

You can appreciate why the creative team on the Volkswagen account won so many awards for their ads. They were able to take any photo of their product, no matter how boring and unflattering, and combine it with a clever headline that made potential buyers stop whatever they were doing, and read the ad.

If your product is also boring to look at, be encouraged. The headlines you and I have just been looking at were written in the 1960s. And yet you and I are still talking about them. A clever headline is just the beginning, of course. If you’re a really good copywriter, you also know how to write zingers at the end of your copy. You know how to end with a bang. A strong ending is really, really important. Now if only I knew how to end this article . . . .

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This article is an excerpt from my Udemy course, 30 Copywriting Secrets from the Best Ad Campaign of All Time.