Copywriting Friday: The best ads don’t create desire, they borrow it

It’s decent advice (depending on context), but while this idea might sound limiting, it’s actually the opposite. The hardest part of persuasion is conjuring desire out of nowhere. It’s much easier to tap into the wanting that is already there, in everyone, waiting.

If we can do that, our only job is to aim.

In this Copywriting Friday, we’ll see how copywriters have done this across five different ads from three different centuries. We’ll cover how they:

• Choose their emotional lever.
• Aim at a desire that already exists instead of inventing one.
• Stage the benefit so the reader feels it as they read it.

To see what that looks like, we’ll walk through a hundred years of advertising: a heartbroken bridesmaid, a skinny man getting sand kicked in his face, a classic pianist silencing a room, a soap brand that told women they were beautiful, and a search box that fell in love. Five ads across three centuries, aimed at both sexes, pulling opposite emotions.

The belief that great copywriters share

Eugene Schwartz put it as plainly as it can be put. In Breakthrough Advertising, he wrote:

“Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product.”

The force that makes an ad work, he argued, comes from the market, not from your keyboard.

So where is that force reliably found? In the sales psychology book Cashvertising, author Drew Eric Whitman set out what he called the Life-Force 8, the eight wants “biologically programmed” into every one of us.

We can’t confirm the biological basis for his claims, but we fully endorse the Life-Force 8 for copywriters who are looking to improve their aim. Here they are:

1. Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension.
2. Enjoyment of food and beverages.
3. Freedom from fear, pain, and danger.
4. Sexual companionship.
5. Comfortable living conditions.
6. To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses.
7. Care and protection of loved ones.
8. Social approval.

Appeals built on these eight, Whitman argues, outsell other human wants because you’re plugging into a current that’s already live. We think of the Life-Force 8 as a map that helps us “go deeper on the benefits.” Now that you have the list, you can look at almost any famous ad and watch it reach for one of the eight.

So let’s do that here, to show you what we mean.

Aiming at a desire that’s already burning

In 1923, The Lambert Company ran a Listerine ad about a woman named Edna. And Edna has a problem. She’s being left behind.

“Edna’s case was really a pathetic one. Like every woman, her primary ambition was to marry. Most of the girls of her set were married, or about to be. Yet no one possessed more grace or charm or loveliness than she. And as her birthdays crept towards that tragic thirty-mark, marriage seemed farther from her life than ever. She was often a bridesmaid but never a bride.”

Remember that this is an ad for mouthwash. It could focus on the fact that fresh breath is more pleasant than halitosis, but the copywriter aims for needs that run far deeper. If we were to measure the ad against the Life-Force 8 (that were written down far later), how would it do? We rate it as hitting 3, 4, and 8.

• Freedom from fear (the quiet dread of being left behind).
• Sexual companionship (Edna wants to marry).
• Social approval (her whole set is pairing off while she watches).

Mouthwash is the mechanism for the change, but belonging is the benefit. The campaign was widely credited with turning a minor antiseptic into a household name, with sales rising dramatically over the years that followed.

Now jump two decades and swap the target from a woman to a man. In the Charles Atlas ads that ran in the back of comic books from the 1940s on, readers met Mac, a self-described “97-pound weakling” who gets sand kicked in his face.

Here’s one of the (numerous) variations that the ad ran in over the years.

The ad pulls on many of the same levers as “often a bridesmaid.” Mac, our scrawny weakling, is reaching for freedom from the fear of humiliation, sexual companionship, social approval (see last panel), and being superior. That’s 3, 4, 6, and 8.

Here’s the thing. Nobody had to teach a scrawny boy to want those things. The ad simply names them and points at the product.

Both of these examples pull on fear and shame, but the aim doesn’t have to be dark. In 1926, John Caples wrote one of the most successful mail-order ads ever made, for the U.S. School of Music. It’s so famous that you almost certainly know it:

“They laughed when I sat down at the piano. But when I started to play!”

This ad’s story is pure aspiration. A man everyone assumed was a fraud sits down, plays flawlessly, and the room falls silent, then adoring. It aims at the same social approval and superiority as the Atlas ad, minus the bully. The desire is to be admired. The handle is triumph, not dread.

That’s 6 and 8.

Fast-forward almost 80 years. In 2004, Dove and its agency Ogilvy launched the Campaign for Real Beauty. This was built on research suggesting that only a small fraction of women considered themselves beautiful.

While the beauty industry had spent a century selling products through insecurity, Dove decided to aim at the same desire, social approval and self-worth, from the opposite side. Essentially, the message is that you can get 3, 4, and 8 without moulding yourself into what society wants. You are already enough. It is the Listerine desire, but turned inside out.

According to Ad Age, the campaign helped grow Dove sales from $2 billion to $4 billion in three years. As a bonus, you may remember this ad as a viral hit in the early years of the campaign.

Each of these four examples work by aiming at deep desires the audience already had.

So here’s a question for your own copy. Which of the eight primal desires does your product or service actually serve? A backup service isn’t selling storage. It’s selling the protection of loved ones and freedom from fear. A course isn’t selling skills. It’s selling the desire to be superior, to be admired, and perhaps to be more comfortable (better paid) for it.

This is the strategic layer beneath the familiar “benefits, not features” advice. Find the primal current, and you don’t need to push nearly as hard.

Don’t just state a benefit; stage the scene

Aiming at the right desire is only half the job. A desire named is not a desire felt.

A weaker Listerine ad might have said: “Bad breath can hurt your social life. Use Listerine.” True, but forgettable.

Instead, the image and copy built a scene the reader had to stand in. The friends are marrying off one by one. The birthdays “creeping towards that tragic thirty-mark.” Readers of that ad didn’t note a benefit. They watched one slip away from one specific woman, and put themselves in her shoes.

This sense of being there is a close relative of future pacing, the practice of helping users imagine that they already have their desired result. The Atlas ad does it with the final “Hero of the beach” panel. Caples does it with the pianist’s hands hovering over the keys.

The purest modern example of staging the scene is a 2010 Super Bowl ad from Google called “Parisian Love.” There is no voiceover, product shot, or anything that could be reasonably called a sales pitch. The whole ad is a search box, and someone typing into it.

Here are the searches:

• study abroad
• paris france
• cafes near the louvre
• impress a french girl
• long distance relationship advice
• churches in paris
• how to assemble a crib

Nobody tells us that a romance began, that he stayed, that they married, or that a baby is coming. We assemble all of it ourselves, out of search queries, in sixty seconds.

The benefit of Google Search is never stated once. It is staged so completely that stating it would break the spell.

Before we close this section, here’s a simple question to help avoid abstraction and stage better scenes.

Could I point a camera at this?

The phrase “bad breath can hurt your social life” can be written down, but it can’t be filmed. It’s abstract. This is why the image of Edna that the copywriters have conjured works so hard. The reader isn’t just watching Edna. For one moment, the reader is Edna.

Name the thing standing in your customers’ way

Nobody lies awake wanting mouthwash or a correspondence course. So the copy builds a bridge, and it usually does it by naming an enemy.

Listerine popularized a clinical-sounding word most readers had never heard, halitosis, and made it the single thing standing between Edna and everything she wanted. A few years later Lifebuoy pulled the same move with two initials, B.O., running hundreds of tiny comic-strip dramas in which body odor was the hidden reason a romance stalled or a job slipped away. In each case, an ordinary product was recast as the removal of one specific obstacle between the customer and a Life-Force 8 payoff.

What is the “halitosis” in your market? The unnamed thing standing between your customer and what they most want. Name it, honestly, and your product becomes the key that removes it.

The wanting was always there

Of course, Edna wasn’t real. Mac wasn’t real. But the desires those ads borrowed, to belong, to be admired, to keep the people we love safe, have been real in humans for thousands of years, and they aren’t going anywhere.

That’s the whole strategy. You don’t create the wanting. You find it, you aim at it honestly, and you stage its payoff so vividly your reader feels it before they’ve decided to buy.

Do that, and your product stops being a thing on a shelf. It becomes the one item standing between your customer and a desire that’s older than advertising itself.

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

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