Jul

22

Soap Operas Suck… you in

Filed Under Ramblings | Leave a Comment

As a copywriter, you gotta get hip to human nature. And one of the best ways to do so is to observe what’s going on inside of yourself.

I recently hung out at a friends house, and she’s absolutely nuts about an absolutely ridiculous Spanish soap opera.

Now, while I was there, this soap opera got aired, and of course she had to watch it.

(These soap opera fans are dependent on their daily dose).

Now, I don’t speak Spanish, and I watched the soap opera just from the periphery of my eye… well, at least intially.

The characters? Mainly women who were trying to poison each other so they could marry the handsome rich guy. Guys that would beat each other up or hire tugs to get rid of an adversary. It was completely ridiculous, over the top. But you know what?

I suddenly noticed myself asking my friend: “What did she just say?” and then again and again.

The addiction hit me too.

Despite how candidly crappy the actors were, how much the script sucked – I got hooked on the story. Because it was about jealousy, greed, despicable acts, romantic love,  intense hate and injustice, compassion, joy and sorrow – all pact together so densely into such a short time frame.

So if we want to get out copy read – could we actually learn from those soap opera script writers to get readers hooked?

Jul

9

Copywriting Radar Beep, Beep

Filed Under CopyWriting | Leave a Comment

When you surf the web, every once in a while you notice an AdSense up showing up somewhere.

And then you notice it again on another site, and again on another site, and again, and again…

… and that’s when a little lightbulb should go off in your head.

Because there’s a high likelyhood that the ad copy that they use in that ad is pulling like magic, specially if that ad leads to a direct response style salesletter that either converts into sales, leads, or wasted money. These guys measure, track, test and analyze everything, and if they put a lot of money into an ad that shows up all over the web all the time, then it means: this ad works. And it probably does so like gangbusters. So study it and learn from it.

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