Hiding Your Sales Copy

Right away, you can see the problem with this.  Doesn’t make much sense to advertise if you’re going to hide the ad…right?  Well, I didn’t mean hide it in the sense that you make it invisible.  I meant making it seem like it’s not an ad.  Disguising your copy so that it doesn’t set off the reader’s radar.

Now you’re probably thinking of Ralph from A Christmas Story when he found out the secret code from Orphan Annie was nothing but a commercial.  And yes, hiding your sales copy that way will have the same kind of effect on people… “A crummy commercial?  Son of a $$$$!”

But only if you pull a stunt similar to what Ovaltine did.  They had this huge build up that wrecked the boy with anticipation every day and then delivered a let-down.  A ‘surprise- we got you to read our ad!’ technique that’s doomed from the start

People are still using this tactic and guess what?  It still doesn’t work.  How much spam do you get per day with a heading that’s completely unrelated to the body?  Do you even know anyone who has ever bought anything from such email?  (Ok…we can exclude the pornography industry here…the tactic might work for really seductive stuff that sucks people in with sheer temptation.  But unless you’re selling something that definitely will draw interest from 50% of the population with just a picture, then don’t count on something like that working.  And if you are selling porn, please quit sending this stuff…I have kids for heaven’s sake, you perverts!)

Back to our topic…how do you hide copy without it becoming a turn-off?  The first thing to remember is the ad’s placement.  The great Gary Halbert (God rest his soul) once tried to increase a yellow page ad by turning it into a magazine article…with the same kind of language used in a magazine and the same kind of layout.  The experiment failed miserably, and the reason is simple…the ad was not going into a magazine.  When someone looks in the yellow pages, they expect an advertisement.  So your sales copy should give them exactly what they want.  No hidden agendas.

But what if the ad were going into a magazine.  And the full page ad followed the same layout, font, and language used by the publisher.  Eugene Schwartz called this ‘borrowing conviction’.  You make your ad match the surrounding elements, and soft sell it.  So that it looks more like one of the writers simply reporting on a product.

The audience already has a certain amount of trust in the writers of the magazine they’re reading.  That trust is transferred into your ad.  Believe me, this works.  It’s like hiding green beans in a three-year-old’s mashed potatoes.  (Actually, my wife still does this to me so I’ll eat my all my veggies.)

So how do you accomplish this?  Actually, it’s a lot easier than most people realize.  But it does take some work.  Some research before running out and buying ad space.

Online Advertising

Affiliates:

If you’re advertising through affiliates, then you need to provide them with the tools to sell your products.  That means more than just a simple banner for them to place somewhere on their sites.

Start with your sales copy.  Make it easily customized so that it won’t sound out of place in your affiliates’ newsletters or sites.  Make it easy for your affiliates to change ‘I’ to ‘we’ so the sales copy will flow with their own style.  Your sales copy shouldn’t have any major formatting to it, like fonts or colors.  At the most, use simple

and tags, so that the text will easily conform to the affiliates’ CSS file.

Provide pictures, but don’t use background colors that only fit with your own site…or use GIFs with transparent backgrounds.  Provide them separately, so the affiliate can paste them into the content without it having to conform to your own design ideas.  Even if you’re a designer, remember that the affiliate probably isn’t.  If one part of their site or newsletter looks better than the rest, it’ll stick out like a sore thumb. (I realize you want your ad to stick out normally, but let’s stick with the subject of this article.)

Paid Ads:

If you’re paying for an ad placement on another site, then do your homework before submitting your files.  For pictures, match the background colors, so it’ll fit in with the site.  And make your text match the fonts and colors already used on the site.

Placing an ad somewhere like MSN’s home page presents a few problems though.  The user can specify color backgrounds and font sizes.  So a font in your graphic ad could easily look out of place no matter how big you made it or what color you use.

So you use the default settings.  The fact is, people rarely change those settings.  And most sites have custom colors that somewhat match each other.  Their green setting won’t look to bad with an ad background that matches their blue setting.

In Print Advertising:

Magazines:

Just as in online ad placement, magazine ads require some preliminary work.  Go through a few issues and notice the kinds of fonts, colors, sizes, etc. they use.  For full page ads, turn your sales copy into an entire article…one with the same kind of subject matter the magazine covers.  Even provide an author name.

If you’re only buying a quarter of the page, then turn it into a filler:

• Hire an expert copywriter like CopyForSale.com to make sure you’re hitting the right notes.

Newspapers:

Aside from doing all the design work mentioned above, make your sales copy newsworthy.  Use a journalistic approach and language, and report something the reader is interested in.  Use a headline and build your story pyramid style…with the whole story mentioned in the headline, and then branched out into details:

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Hiding your sales copy can be one of the most effective ways to get around banner blindness (the tendency of people to skip over and not even register an advertisement).  And with the way marketers have bought up every blank space imaginable for their ads, banner blindness has become a scourge that sucks advertising money dry.

If you’re thinking about using this technique, don’t go it alone.  Use a professional who knows how to write for the publication you want to target.  I have experience writing press releases for newspapers, articles for magazines, and ad content in websites.  Contact me now and let’s get your project underway.