#53 The World’s Greatest Financial Services Copywriter

Issue #53 — Tuesday, April 23, 2019

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2019/04/53-worlds-greatest-financial-services.html

Posted by Denny Hatch

The World’s Greatest
Financial Services Copywriter

Louis Engel (1909-1982): “Creative Genius

Who Brought Wall Street to Main Street”

The most unbelievable newspaper ad ever published!

Louis Engel was Advertising and Sales Promotion manager for the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane. It had two offices in Manhattan as well as one each in Newark, NJ and Stamford, CT.

     Engel’s fame—and his greatest achievement—was a single full-page black-and-white newspaper broadsheet advertisement published in The New York Times October 19, 1948.

• With 6450 words jammed onto the page, it was the longest ad in the history of The New York Times.

• Not a single photograph, drawing, table, chart or graph was used anywhere to break up the monotony of black-and-white words, words, words.

• The page was not created nor designed to pull inquiries. However the following short paragraph was included at the end as an afterthought:

These terms are defined in a booklet, “How to Invest”, which we have just published. A basic guidebook for all security owners, this new publication develops in greater detail the story of how this stock and bond business works. It reviews the basic principles of sound investing, such as analysis of market trends, the diversification of holdings, and the management of a portfolio. We will be glad to send you a copy.
 

NOTE: To see the ad full-size and read Engel’s text:

https://swiped.co/file/about-this-stock-bond-louis-engel/

The Results: Astounding!

• One month after publication 5,033 requests had been received—4,000 of them the first week. 3,534 came by mail, 947 by telephone and 552 from visitors to one of the Merrill Lynch offices. Total number of items requested: 20,000+.

—Julian Lewis Watkins, THE 100 GREATEST ADVERTISEMENTS

• “What was most amazing,” Engel recalled, “was that we got hundreds and hundreds of long and thoughtful letters.” Some respondents were profusely appreciative. One person wrote: “God bless Merrill Lynch… I have been wanting to know this all my life… I owned stocks and bonds and I never really knew what I owned.”

• The firm ran the same advertisement, or slightly revised versions, in newspapers across the country, not only during the next few months, but indeed, for years thereafter. The total number of responses exceeded three million, and those returns translated into millions of prospective customers for the firm’s eager brokers. With that one concept alone, Engel proved himself a promotional genius. His subsequent aggressive campaigns, which were typically both educational and eye-catching, set new standards for brokerage firms and other enterprises in the financial services sector. 

—Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP)

The Secret of Engel’s Success: Brilliant Copy

Plus Forcing the Reader's Eye to Keep Moving

A number of years ago I wrote and published WRITE EVERYTHING RIGHT! Of the 81,000+ words, I believe the five most important words are these:

“Avoid gray walls of type.” —David Ogilvy

Here’s what I’m talking about:

These lazy editors have turned the “joy of reading” into grim hard work.

     For starters, imagine if you’re in the middle of one of these tedious texts and you are interrupted—ringing phone, doorbell or nature calls.

• When you return, you have recreate in your mind the thread of the writer’s argument.

• Finding your place means skimming, scanning and scrambling to figure out where you left off.

• The design give you no touch points to help you remember where you were.
 

Note Louis Engel’s design and layout—upper deck, headline, lower deck and subhead in the box—all designed to telegraph the importance of the message and preview what is coming.

How Engel forced reader’s eye to keep moving

In addition, Louis Engel strategically inserted three subheads, a call-out and no less than 18 crossheads (mini-headlines) to introduce individual paragraphs and sections.

     If interest flags for a moment anywhere in the piece, the reader’s eyes will flick to a mini-hed nearby and interest is recaptured.

     Further, if the reader is interrupted by a phone call or doorbell, touch-points throughout make it easy to see where to resume reading.

My Opinion:

All authors should consider using the visual techniques of copywriting professionals such in as this ad by Louis Engel to make their prose more inviting and readable. And I’m talking all authors:

• Presidential press secretaries, academics, lawyers, and judges.

• Business people creating memos, reports, letters and white papers.

• Writers of articles, non-fiction and maybe even fiction.

• Out-of-work professionals polishing their résumés.

• Since 2004, 1800 U.S. newspapers have crashed and burned. One reason: in the world of Tweets (280 characters) and Texts (160 Characters) the vast majority of readers today can only deal with bite-sized paragraphs.

• To save the newspaper industry, I urge publishers to always think of the 277 million texters and the 326 million Tweeters in the U.S.—literate folks who are used to communicating in bite-sized paragraphs. I urge newspaper editors and designers to employ the devices below described by Ed Elliott and David Ogilvy throughout their publications. The alternative: always keep their résumés up-to-date.

Ed Elliott’s 28 Devices Can Turn a

Skimmer into an Interested Reader

• Table of contents.

• Headlines and subheads.

• Photography, especially of people and action.

• Tables, charts, graphs.

• Illustrations clarifying or reinforcing the text.

• Captions under every visual. People read captions as they skim.

• A word or subhead that is bigger, bolder, blacker, or has a different color than other elements on the page.       

• Enlarged numbers, possibly followed by an enlarged or bold lede.

• A word or line set off at an angle or in a box or a burst.                 

• Text inside an arrow or a ruled box.   

• Anything that interrupts a page-by-page pattern of columns.

• Text with a light screen behind it.       

• Pull quotes.

• A paragraph set off in bold or with a double indent.      

• Handwritten indications.   

• Bulleted text, especially with bullets that are larger or different from other bulleted text.

5 Ways to Get Maximum Readership

• TEXT SIZE: Ten or eleven points is optimum for readability; maybe one point larger for older readers.

• COLUMN WIDTH: 35 to 55 characters is a good target range. 

  Ten or eleven point is generally most readable on a column width of about a third of a page. Larger than eleven point should probably be about a half page wide. Columns wider than a half page are not quickly read.

• ALIGNMENT: Rag right is often better than justified. It creates a text shape that allows an area for the eye to rest. It can also appear more inviting, less imposing, more personal.

6 Design techniques to AVOID

• AVOID: text without sufficient contrast to its background. Examples:

         —A background screen that is too dark.

         —Paper color that is too dark.

         —Text that is too light—printed in a color other than black.

• AVOID:  text printed over—or reversed out of—a busy or distracting background.

• AVOID: text reversed out of a dark color.

• AVOID: flush right or centered paragraphs.

• AVOID: text that is too condensed.

• AVOID: character spacing that is too tight.

• AVOID: running a headline across a 2-page spread. Can't be quickly skimmed so can get ignored.

Ed Elliott, Direct Marketing Designer/Art Director/Creative Director, Specializing in generating response to lengthy messages.

Takeaways to Consider

• NOTE: In 1953 Little, Brown & Co. published Louis Engel's book, How to Buy Stocks. It sold over 7 million copies across 8 editions through 1994.

• What separates the great advertising copywriter from other writers is a laser-like focus on achieving two aims—grabbing attention and keeping the eye moving all the way to the end.

• “You cannot bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it.” —David Ogilvy

• “People will not be bored in print. They may listen politely at a dinner table to boasts and personalities, life history etc. But in print they choose their own companions, their own subjects. They want to be amused or benefited. They want economy, beauty, labor savings, good things to eat and wear.” —Claude Hopkins

• Same thing with a letter, e-mail, memo or article. If the reader gets bored in the middle and never reaches the punch line, coda or call to action, the writer has failed.

• “It takes hard writing to make easy reading.” —Robert Louis Stevenson

• “Neatness rejects involvement.” —Lew Smith

• “Ugly works.” —Bob Hacker

• “Avoid gray walls of type.” —David Ogilvy

• “After two or three inches of copy, insert your first crosshead (mini-headline) and thereafter pepper mini-headlines throughout, They keep the reader marching forward. Make some of them interrogative, to excite curiosity in the next run of copy.” —David Ogilvy

• “An ingenious sequence of boldly displayed mini-headlines can deliver the substance of your entire pitch to glancers who are too lazy to wade through the text.” —David Ogilvy

• "Short words! Short sentences! Short paragraphs!"
—Andrew J. Byrne

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Word count: 1428