If you happen to be advertising a particular brand’s product, Ogilvy says it’s best to use the brand name in the headline. If you do, even though people may forget specifics of the product, they still might remember the name.

“Our soap has 20% more aloe in it,” will be less effective than “Happy-Body soap has 20% more aloe in it.”

This is a very important rule in a society like ours. There are thousands of ebooks out there, dozens of soaps, a zillion places to get a steak. There is no shortage of products of any kind, so why should someone pick your product? Is your soap really different from the dozens of others? Somehow, consumers doubt it. Instead, they buy based on one of two things: price and comfort.
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If your product is in any way resonant to a particular geographical area, try to use a local name in the headline. Not only will you be hitting residents at their comfort level, you’ll also take advantage of another effect that I call “The Joneses Effect.”

People like to keep up with the Joneses, and though it’s a cliché it’s also obvious enough to bank on to some degree. If a headline reads “70% of all Seattle Residents Use Poxy-off!” and you’re not one of them, you start thinking maybe you’re doing something wrong or you’re missing something.

There was a test done a while back where a room with five people was given a simple 50/50 question to answer. The catch is that four of the people were secretly told beforehand to answer each question incorrectly, no matter how simple the question was.
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This doesn’t mean you need to report the news in your headline. “300 Dead on the Gaza Strip” isn’t going to help you sell oatmeal or diamonds or much of anything. What it does mean is that you should be newsworthy.

If you don’t know how to do this, start with stating the most obvious benefit of owning your product. It may be a little better than an existing product on the market or may be completely new. Perhaps it just solves an existing problem a little more effectively.
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This is part one of a series summarizing the important points of the advertising bible, Ogilvy on Advertising, specifically the chapter entitled Wanted: A Renaissance in Print Advertising.

I just finished reading one of the most brilliant books on advertising ever, Ogilvy on Advertising. One chapter of this book is probably as perfect as you’re gonna get as far as the nuts and bolts of effective advertising go. We’re going to look at some of Ogilvy’s ideas on writing good headlines.
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As if the English language wasn’t tough enough already with its sheer word count, we’ve also got to deal with punctuation. Little dots and lines and swooshes that mean God knows what.

Like the semicolon, the ugly redheaded stepchild of the Devil himself. I’d almost bet money that there was some point in your life when you put a semicolon in a sentence and immediately regretted it. “Is that right?” you thought. “Is that even what a semicolon does?” You probably sweated over it for a few minutes and then did what everyone else does: deleted the damn thing and rewrote the sentence so you wouldn’t even have to use one.
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