Answer These 3 Questions Before Prospects Lose Interest
Plus: What NOT to do while precious time is ticking away
In my basic formula for scripts that sell, step two is “introduce the product and describe it.” This sounds rather mundane, but it is possible to screw it up. How? By not being clear about what you’re offering. Remember: Confusion is a sales killer.™
To avoid this pitfall, I developed a rule of thumb years ago. In the first 30 seconds of a commercial, I always try to answer these three questions:
What is it?
What does it do?
Why is it different?
Why 30 seconds? My reasoning is that this is the maximum attention span of the average viewer. We’ve all been watching 30-second TV ads for decades, which means we’ve been trained by general advertisers to expect this unit length — on linear TV and now connected TV, which I’m told only offers 30-second slots (no 60s or 120s). This fact about the average viewer may change as the younger generation matures and TikTok-length videos become the norm. (Or maybe not.) But today, it still applies.
To see how answering these three questions works in practice, let’s consider a Promising Product from a few weeks ago. Only premium subscribers have seen this ‘product with potential’, which makes it a good time to remind the rest of you to…
Here’s the product:
Let’s imagine we’re making a video ad for this product. The ad will start and the clock will be ticking. We have 30 seconds max. What do we do?
Well, we know what we don’t want to do. We don’t want to waste time with jokes and gimmicks. That is, we’re going to lose people if we try to entertain or amuse them. We may get a smile or a laugh, but as the great Claude Hopkins put it: “People don’t buy from clowns.” (David Ogilvy liked that line so much, he put it in one of his books.)
Alvin Eicoff also had a version of this advice:
Too many copywriters don’t understand that when they write a commercial they are knocking on someone’s door and asking to come into their living room. If they would use this frame of reference, they wouldn’t come into the living room with animated beavers, chorus lines, or semipornographic models.
So what’s the correct approach? As Kantar research has shown in the realm of digital advertising (where avoiding ad-skipping is a primary goal), “you need to intrigue viewers early on and give a compelling reason for them to continue watching.” Kantar says the best way to do this is to evoke a strong emotion — and that’s where the problem opening comes in.
By cleverly dramatizing a real problem our prospects face in their daily lives, we can hit a marketing trifecta: 1) intrigue them, 2) generate a strong emotion (e.g. frustration, disgust, embarrassment), and 3) build instant rapport.
For this product, we might go with something like, “Are you sick and tired of pet hair everywhere? On your couch? On your carpet? On your clothes? On your guests’ clothes?” while showing increasingly dramatic, desaturated horror scenes of fur covering everything.
OK, so we have the viewer’s attention. “That’s me!” she is thinking while reflexing nodding her her head in agreement. Now what?
The very next thing we want to do is get to the point and tell her what we are selling. Here’s where my three questions come in:
What is it?
Their Amazon headline nails it: It’s a “multi-surface fur removal tool.”What does it do?
It cleans up shed fur quickly and easily.Why is it different?
No need to clean the brush — just press the button.
In a few lines of copy, these three answers might come together as follows:
The Magic Roller is a multi-surface fur removal tool that makes cleaning up fur fast and easy. Simply roll it over any surface to make it ‘fur free’ in seconds. Then, press the button to drop all that fur right in the trash. No more messy adhesives or sticky tape. No need to spend time cleaning the brush after you clean the house.
So: How well do advertisements on the air today answer my three questions? Below I examine a few from the latest DRMetrix report and, where relevant, suggest ways to improve them.