A creative director in Chicago told me my headlines were too clever by half

Back in 2009, a creative director in Chicago told me my headlines were too clever by half, that nobody reads ads for wordplay. I started writing straight benefit statements instead, and response rates went up almost 30 percent. Has anyone else had to dial back their creativity to actually sell something?

3 comments

3 Comments

reese_nelson19d ago

Ha! So the lesson was "stop being clever, start being boring." Love it. Bet that director was the same type who says "nobody reads" every single day. Meanwhile your 30 percent jump proves they were reading your stuff just fine before. Funny how "too clever" really means "not flat enough for my taste." Sales don't lie though. Numbers have a way of silencing the critics. Plus now you can say you got paid to dumb it down. That's a win in my book.

jordan90318d ago

Oh man, you nailed it. "Not flat enough for my taste" is exactly what's going on with most of these creative directors. They get nervous when something doesn't follow the formula they already have in their head. And yeah, that 30 percent jump is the real story here. Numbers don't care about feelings or opinions, they just sit there and tell you what works. The funniest part is that "dumbing it down" actually made the copy more accessible, not worse. Sometimes simple wins because people can actually process it without a decoder ring. Plus, getting paid more for writing less? That's basically the dream scenario right there.

dakota_patel9816d ago

Oh man, same thing happened to me a few years back! I was writing these super clever product descriptions thinking I was being clever and some marketing director told me to "cut the fluff and just say what it does." Felt like a punch in the gut at first lol. But after I stripped everything back and just wrote straight forward benefits, the conversion rate shot up like crazy. It's honestly humbling when you realize your fancy wordplay was just getting in the way of people actually buying stuff. Numbers really don't care about our feelings haha.