Watch the video above or read below.

Matthew Burns:
I’ve been going through some stuff, Stephen, lately with writing. You invited me onto another account, and I’m working with a junior writer, and I’m doing a lot of explanation and I’m helping to guide the writer to hit every line. So the one line leads to the next line, and it made me think of this ad by Rolls-Royce back in 1959. So it’s not a video, it’s not a YouTube play. I’m going to put it up here. I know you and I have talked about this ad tons and specifically the copy. It’s the copy that’s so good, but I’m going to put it up. So take a look at this.

Stephen Semple:
And for background, this was written by one of my favorite ad guys. This was done by David Ogilvy.

Matthew Burns:
That’s it, right? I’m just going to do this. I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy. I’m not trying to pretend I’m an Ogilvy writer. I write much differently than he did. But let’s talk about this opening line.

Stephen Semple:
I’m going to give you a couple of things for background here that’s important. One of the things David Ogilvy believed and talked about a lot was in print advertising, 80% of the work that’s going to happen is in the headline. I’m going to say, and if you’re an email marketer, 95% of the work is in the subject line.

Matthew Burns:
Absolutely.

Stephen Semple:
And so often when we see stuff being written, you can tell very little thought or time or effort was done to the headline. This headline is amazing because not only is it interesting and intriguing, we often talk about don’t tell me how to feel. Make me feel it. This car is so quiet. The only thing you’re going to hear is this. Immediately, you understand, like at 60 miles an hour, we didn’t go, oh, it’s really super quiet. Oh, you don’t hear road noise. The loudest thing is this. The electric clock. That is so powerful. There’s also an interesting story if we have time, that we can talk about how he came up with that headline. There’s an interesting backstory on that. If we’ve got time at the end.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, I definitely think we should get to that and we’ll leave time for that because here’s the power of this message. So let’s say it’s an average image. It’s actually an everyday image of the car with a couple of kids walking out towards it. So it’s a family car. Obviously, the financial stability of that human might be a little bit higher than most because the price. I think this is a 1959 ad, and the price of the vehicle was 14 thousand. I mean 13,900. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Remember, you could buy a house in Toronto at that time for that much money, right?

Matthew Burns:
Right, a hundred percent. Thank you for keeping it relative, Stephen. But that line, if you look at rest of the ad, it’s all features and benefits. The entire rest of the ad is features, benefits. There’s one line of emotional. What did we talk about for the last, what are we on? Like episode 50 of sticky sales stories. For 50 episodes, we’ve been talking about emotion, emotion, emotion, emotion, emotion. Well, 80% of the copy in ads for magazines and newspapers and stuff did the lifting so that it bought the time and attention for somebody to go in and do the rest of the work. And I was like, holy crap. It’s one line, guys. One line.

Stephen Semple:
Right? But remember what we’ve always said, entertainment buys the time and the attention. Intrigue. Interest. That’s what that headline did. The headline bought that and then in the features and benefits, you can then be really strategic in terms of how you write them to get people to read the whole way through. And Ogilvy was a master at that, a hundred percent. You can still do a features and benefits ad if you have an entertaining opening. That’s what this tells us.

Matthew Burns:
Remember, 50% of the page, of this graphic, was holding my attention visually. Like, Hey, what’s in there? Are they like me? Can I interject myself into this scenario? And then really large, bold header copy, and then everything else is muted. And it’s for those people that are high. I mean emotionally, it grabbed them. I just love the layout of it. And we don’t do this well enough anymore, I don’t think as advertisers in general.

Stephen Semple:
No, we really don’t. And if you think about all you did, and here’s the reason why Ogilvy will talk about the headlines, 80% of the work, all you did was look at the picture and read the headline. You got the message. That’s all you have to read.

Matthew Burns:
Wait a second. I got all excited because actually that’s amazing. That’s all we’d have to do today because the rest of it is website. Website is features and benefits and facts. Everything else, all you do is drive them to the website. Now, today, we could get rid of the features and benefits, just put in the website because anybody that wants more details is going to go, Look, anybody that wants to buy is going to, there’s one direction to point them in, right?

Stephen Semple:
Today you would just make the picture more glamorous. You’d stick with that headline, you point ’em to a URL. That’s what you would do today. But back then, no. You actually had to let people get these things, right?

Matthew Burns:
A hundred percent.

Stephen Semple:
But the other part is we’ve often talked about great advertising. One of the tests to great advertising is can I do it as a magazine?

Matthew Burns:
Yep.

Stephen Semple:
Can I do it as a billboard?

Matthew Burns:
Yep.

Stephen Semple:
Could I do this as a radio ad?

Matthew Burns:
Yep.

Stephen Semple:
Could I do this as a trade show?

Matthew Burns:
Yes.

Stephen Semple:
That message I could do anywhere. So when the message is great, you can run that message in any medium.

Matthew Burns:
And it says so much about the brand itself, the engineering. Because when you go through the copy, it talks about the engineering at all the steps they’ve taken to make this thing so well-put-together. Why it was such a luxury vehicle for the time. That one line says so much, everything’s so well put together. Didn’t say that I’m making this up.

Stephen Semple:
It didn’t have to.

Matthew Burns:
It didn’t have to. It’s saying everything that I want to know, it’s safe, it’s put together. Well, it’s probably going to last a really long time because if everything’s put together well, it’s going to last a long time. And all of that by saying the loudest thing in the vehicle is the electric clock.

Stephen Semple:
Win the heart first and then all the other copy won the mind. And today we could structure that differently. You would just drive people to the website to get that feature and benefit listing. But it’s brilliant. And way back decades ago when I did my marketing degree, one of the things that – and look, and we have partners recently graduated from marketing, and it’s amazing, it’s not done any longer. They used to teach you how to write, and one of the things that you would do is you’d take ads and you’d hand write out the copy over and over again. And when you do that, you would actually get the rhythm of how that person was writing.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly.

Stephen Semple:
And it’s funny, and David Ogilvy was the one that I copied. I did that with a lot of his stuff. I loved his ads because of that balancing of entertainment and heart. And along with the mind, he was able to balance that rhythm. And even if you read through all of the features, you’d notice there’d be the odd one that got a little bit more emotional bringing you back.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly. Something just clicked for me. Remember it wasn’t too long ago, you had written a website copy for Kreos Aviation in Saskatoon. And I said to you, I said, oh man, this is a Stephen writeup. I said, my god, this couldn’t be any more Stephen. But this goes to what you just said though. This is actually pretty powerful. You emulated hard how Ogilvy writes so that it influences everything else you do.

Stephen Semple:
Oh yes.

Matthew Burns:
Your web copy for the most part. I mean, I read a lot of your web copy, so I can say, yeah, that’s a Stephen Semple writing. Most people aren’t getting to the same website that you’ve written. So they don’t know that. They’re not saying, oh, this one was written by them, that was written by them. But man, now it hits home how powerful that actually is. How much effort you’ve put in to do that thing. Dude, congratulations. I never connected it until right now. That’s awesome.

Stephen Semple:
Well, one of the very first partner meetings I was at, I was introducing myself to the partner group. One of the comments Roy made, because David Ogilvy is a direct response writer but writes direct response emotionally. One of the comments that Roy made is Stephen writes in the Ogilvy style, and I had never shared with him that whole Ogilvy thing until after that.

Matthew Burns:
Oh, that’s brilliant.

Stephen Semple:
So here’s what I’m going to say to young writers, go back to find ads with really good copy. And often you’ve got to go back to find old things where the copy’s longer. And don’t type it out, hand write it out. Get that book and hand write out the ads and hand write them out over and over again, word for word. Copy them by hand over and over again and you will get the rhythm of what they were doing and you’ll actually become… And here’s the weird thing, is you’re not copying them. It’s the style that will come through.

Matthew Burns:
Brilliant. I think that’s awesome. Okay, we’ve got a couple minutes. How did Ogilvy get to this magic?

Stephen Semple:
One of the things we talk about is how it takes time to really find the magic in a message. And when somebody hires us, we have to spend a full day talking to them, or two. So Ogilvy used the same process. He would go out and he would spend a day or two with a customer and basically talk to everybody. And really what he was doing was he’s trying to find the magic. And at Rolls-Royce, he was really frustrated and he’s literally walking out the door going, I don’t have it. I understand the car and everything, but what’s the hook? And a mechanic made the comment to him about how this car is so quiet. The only thing you hear… literally a mechanic said that to him.

Matthew Burns:
A mechanic or engineer? Engineer from Rolls-Royce or a mechanic?

Stephen Semple:
A mechanic.

Matthew Burns:
Oh, that’s awesome.

Stephen Semple:
A mechanic.

Matthew Burns:
That’s incredible. They didn’t know their own power.

Stephen Semple:
A mechanic made the comment to him, and I’m sure not quite as elegantly.  But the whole idea of like, wow, this is when you’re driving in those car, you’ll be like doing 60 and you can hear the clock. It was like, that’s it.

Matthew Burns:
That’s all. That’s amazing, man.

Stephen Semple:
And it’s literally, he was walking out the door and had a random conversation with a mechanic and he went, that’s it. That’s the hook. And instantly from the time he walked to that to the car, the rest of the ad was now written already in his head. You’ve had those moments. You’ve had those moments.

Matthew Burns:
The funny thing is, I wrote an ad for a client over lunch once because they said something I liked.

Stephen Semple:
It took me two days to get to this point, but once I got to this point, it took me 12 and a half seconds to do the rest of the work.

Matthew Burns:
Oh dude. No, that’s exactly it. That is a cool story. I actually want to tell that story. With permission. I mean, it’s not your story.

Stephen Semple:
And Ogilvy is dead, so you can’t ask him.

Matthew Burns:
Guys, we’ve been wanting to do an Ogilvy one for a while and this one just popped up as the right one to do it with. We might have to come back and do a couple more because there’s some really, seriously, I’m going to put it back up again guys.

Stephen Semple:
We have to do the Man from Hathaway.

Matthew Burns:
That’s one we the man from Hathaway. So stay tuned. It’s coming. We’re going to do Man from Hathaway. Thank you buddy. We will see you next time.

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