The 7 habits of highly effective copywriters: #5 delightful intrusions

“I feel so seen!”

'Ding!' Push notification: you’ve just successfully connected with your reader. That’s huge. That's significant progress towards overthrowing the resistance.

The resistance against being sold to.

No doubt, you’ve come across Robert Collier’s timeless copywriting advice, “enter the conversation already occurring in the prospect’s mind”.

Why is this so important?

Because they’re onto us. TV viewers, screen scrollers, radio listeners and readers of the printed things (yes, they still exist) are savvy. They know exactly why we’re popping up all over the place, yelling at them to “buy, buy, buy” and they’re having none of it.

Their countermove is simple, yet deadly. Tune out, click away or unsubscribe and... checkmate.

Grabbing and holding attention is the only game in town. And when you consider what your copy is up against - the myriad distractions of modern life – you may be tempted to believe the only available strategy is to shout ever louder.

It’s not. It’s simpler and quieter than that.

See, if I remember one thing from Prof C’s Communications 101 lecture it’s this: the first rule of attention is relevance. It’s why we call out someone’s name before launching into what we want to tell them. Otherwise, they miss half your message while their brain decides whether it’s meant for them.

Having gained your audience’s attention, the next vital step is ‘interest’. And there is nothing more interesting to us humans than ourselves.

Which is why getting personal in your copy is essential. It’s how you call out to your audience by name.

Of course, there's a line to walk here. We’re shooting for “OMG! I thought it was just me…” not “OMG! They’ve been through my rubbish bin!”.

Getting that balance just right is what this, the 5th habit of highly effective copywriters is all about…

Delightful Intrusions

So, if we’re going to the trouble of gate-crashing our customers’ brain-natterings, it’s best to ensure we’re joining the right conversation; the one that’s happening in the most people’s heads.

Song lyrics do this really well. The genius of a hit song is the way they give voice to the barely acknowledged thoughts and feelings we have about our shared experiences. It makes the specific universal and, in the process, helps us understand something about ourselves.

Take this kicker from masterful singer-songwriter, John Prine:

“She read romance magazines up in her room

And felt just like Sunday on Saturday afternoon.”

Most of us have experienced those ‘Sunday night’ feels (ugh). And we understand how out of place that feeling is on a Saturday.

Having brought us to our knees with a single rhyming couplet, Prine connects us, not only with the character in his song, but with all humanity. He’s a trespasser in our mind, yet we don’t mind at all.

It’s a delightful intrusion.

Great copy is the same. I mean, you don’t always have to get this deep into the existential, but that same level of connection is achievable.

And it works just as well for low-involvement purchases as it does for those that require a more significant investment.

For FMCG brands, it’s often our secret ‘at home’ behaviour that offers the most fertile conditions for connection. Many have built much of their identity around the way customers use (or misuse) their products; Lipton Tea’s ‘Jiggler’ campaign… Oreo’s ‘Twist, Lick and Dunk’…

One of my favourite examples comes from toilet paper brand, Sorbent. This hilarious ‘Folder or Scruncher’ ad ran back in 2007:

At a surface level, the ad embraces the inevitability of toilet humour, leaning on a reliable “it’s funny, because it’s true” comedy trope.

But what this delightful intrusion accomplished was to make Australians ponder “Am I a folder or a scruncher? I mean, no one has ever bothered to ask before… what does this SAY about me?!?”

It was Myers-Briggs for the bathroom.

Point is, whether you fall on the ‘folder’ or ‘scruncher’ side of the fence, you’re still thinking about toilet paper a whole lot more than you normally would. And it allowed them to step away from the usual conversation about toilet paper being ‘soft’ or ‘strong’.

That campaign has had a lasting impact. Some 13 years later, my own kids came home from school giggle-whispering in the back seat about whether they're a ‘folder’ or a ‘scruncher’. It’s virtually like having a sports team; people are loyal to their side.

So, how do we come up with these delightful intrusions?

The answer to this is predictable; research. You ask a few to know the many. Then, you look for the thoughts, emotions and behaviours that bind the group together, rather than what sets them apart.

One of the most impactful pieces of copy I’ve written to date was an e-book for a major fertility clinic. To write this, I was gifted a wheelbarrow load of uncut diamonds – 120 pages of focus group research stuffed with real quotes from real couples about their experiences with infertility.

All I had to do was to tell their stories, using their words.

Some things they said had me nodding along, others made me laugh out loud… the grief that laced some of the comments crushed my chest, bringing tears to my eyes. It was an honour to bear witness to this particular conversation.

Some moments in this piece may not have been delightful intrusions, but welcome ones, nonetheless. The reader felt seen. They felt understood. Not because of me, but because they were connected to each other through their (mostly unspoken) fears and sense of isolation. I merely provided two hands to stitch it all together.

In this way, copywriters have the advantage when connecting with our audience. Songwriters, poets and authors must fish about in their own bucket of experiences and cross their fingers that someone responds with “Oooof! Hard relate.”

We get to know (kinda, almost) for sure.

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