Name That AD – Prize Competition
18/01/2011

Last week a client asked me to write a headline that captured the essence of his company.  I was to position it as modern and progressive (yet adhering to traditional values), innovative, environmentally friendly, client-focussed, well-established, having integrity and offering excellent value for money.  Oh, and could I make it short and snappy?

Well, I’m a firm believer in making a headline work hard, but this sounded to me like slave labour!  To his credit, he recognised the power of a short headline – maximum 7 words for best effect I was taught as a trainee copywriter – but he failed to appreciate the cardinal rule of a winning headline: that it says one thing only, and says it memorably.  ‘A diamond is forever’ for example.

Ideally, it should major on a benefit or promise (You too can have a body like mine!), include the name of the product or service (Guinness is good for you), and come with a call to action (Just do it).
You begin to appreciate, perhaps, why some of the best headlines are recognised as minor masterpieces, and are still the most powerful weapon in the advertiser’s armoury.  They have survived successive waves of new media to be celebrated in hot metal, dry transfer lettering, photo-composition and, most recently, digital imaging.

As a copywriter I count myself lucky to have escaped the retraining that was thrust upon my fellow paste-up artists, visualisers and rapidograph wielders who have survived, if at all, as Mac Operators.  The copywriter’s art can still be performed, thank goodness, on the back of an envelope or a napkin at your local wine bar.

Of course, a brilliant headline should be the exclusive property of the product or service it advertises, and not readily interchangeable with another.  So to test the quality of some of the industry’s would-be immortal lines, see if you can put names to the following headlines.  A bottle of best bubbly to the first to email a complete and correct set of answers to: prize@roystonsimpson.co.uk

1)            Whose crisp bread is for ‘Ladies who crunch’?

2)            Which cologne makes you ‘smell like a man, man’?

3)            Whose electrical store is ‘the last place you want to go’?

4)            Who do you go to when ‘it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight?’

5)            Whose frozen peas are ‘as fresh as the moment when the pod went pop’?

6)            ‘Don’t be vague, ask for __________?

7)            Which daily is ‘a newspaper, not a snooze paper’?

8)            What is ‘less bovver than a hover’?

9)            Whose children’s shoes ‘have far to go’?

10)          Which cereal is the ‘breakfast of champions’?