Victor O. Schwab’s How to Write a Good Advertisement was originally written in 1962, there was no internet and television was emergent in terms of being an advertising format that copywriters would be working on. I bought it as part of several books during CoVID and am slowly working through my reading pile now.
Schwab looked to write a straight forward guide for copywriters of the time. Schwab focuses heavily on the psychology of advertising to elicit the right kind of reaction from the consumer.
This psychology is something that modern marketers have had to relearn through marketing science. Yet Schwab was quoting academics, rigorous market research surveys and psychology studies 50 years earlier.
Schwab’s style throughout the book is to show examples that work and why they work. Despite Schwab teaching copywriters about media that would be seen as largely irrelevant now, the lessons are still invaluable.
Each chapter is clearly set out and has questions at the end of the chapter is that the reader can reflect on what they’ve learned and apply their thinking. There is also an exercise or two so that you can apply what you’ve learned from the chapter.
Performance marketing
The mail order copywriting section in How to Write a Good Advertisement is particularly interesting because of its focus on what we’d now call performance marketing. Schwab talks about performance marketing copywriters having to become hard nosed in nature. By hard nosed, Schwab described a mindset as a single-minded focus on the sale.
This section also covered testing in a way that would feel very familiar to online advertising practitioners now.
Conclusion
While Schwab doesn’t give you models, frameworks or mnemonics to aid retention or learning of principles, relying instead on trying to build muscle memory of the student copywriter.
You can find out more about How to Write a Good Advertisement here.
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