They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano But When I Started to Play!

This is no doubt one of the most famous advertising headlines in history, written by the direct marketing expert John Caples in 1926.  The ad was to solicit correspondence course students for the U. S. School of Music.  The full-page ad was dense with copy – several hundred words filling the entire page.  Then, as now, the debate raged about whether people will read long copy.  Or, should copy be short and crisp?  Fast forward to today:  should blogs and other social media copy be short or long?

John Caples famous ad

Ads starting, “They laughed when….” are still being written. A few recent examples: “They Laughed When I Went To Buy Tax Liens, But When Those Checks Started Rolling In”, “They Laughed When He Ran Away From the Basket… Until He Sank the Three Pointer!” and “They Laughed When I Said There Was a Secret to Writing Good Headlines.”

Why was the Caples ad so successful and compelling and still being imitated?  For starters, it uses one of the oldest tricks in the books – it teases you in.  You want to learn what happened when he started to play.  Did they stop laughing?  Did people listen?

It also fed the desire of most people who wished they could play the piano like Chopin or Rachmaninov.  Gradually, Caples reeled them so they could learn how to play right in their own homes.

So, we still need the answer to the question:  when people today are collapsing under information overload, will they read long copy?  Or is it necessary to feed readers with bite-size chunks of copy?  Here is my answer:  it depends.  I know, that sounds like fence sitting.

Whatever Works

But what do your readers want to learn about the subject?  Is it complex? Does it need more explanation than short copy allows?  The answer to the question is to write as long as it takes to make your case.  I was pleased that Copy Blogger wrote about this and came up with pretty much the same answer – whatever works.

Here is another recent point of view from Direct Creative Blog.  I liked this a lot:  “You should be interested in that part of the market who are interested in your products. These are the people seeking information and who will read your copy, even very long copy.”

I was reminded of that when I was in the market for a digital camera.  All of a sudden I started noticing ads for digital cameras.  They were always there, but I wasn’t in the market.  When I decided I needed a new digital camera I read everything I could, even long copy, or especially long copy, because I wanted as much information as I could find before I made a decision to buy.

We do need to remember this:  the difference in social media copy is that it is being read on a computer, most likely a laptop and more often on a smart phone. So the key points need to be “above the fold” to capture the reader’s attention. That is the reason Twitter limited messages to 140 characters because that’s about how many fit on the screen of a cell phone.

Well, I’ve written a lot make a point:  use short copy when that’s all you need to make the sale.  Use long copy when that’s what you need to make the sale.  End of debate.