Cashvertising

Cashvertising

In 1925, a twenty-three-year-old copywriter sat in a cramped office at Ruthrauff & Ryan on Madison Avenue and stared at a blank legal pad. His name was John Caples, and his assignment was to sell piano lessons by mail to people who had never asked for them. Nobody wanted piano lessons. Nobody was lying awake at night wishing they could find a good correspondence course. The challenge was to manufacture desire out of thin air and direct it toward a coupon at the bottom of a magazine page.

Caples wrote down several headlines. His supervisor crossed most of them out. Then Caples wrote a single line that would make advertising history: "They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano -- But When I Started to Play!" The ad ran in Physical Culture magazine and pulled more coupons than anything the US School of Music had ever published. The copy told the story of a young man named Jack, who walks into a party, sits down at the piano without warning, and performs Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata while the room falls silent in shock. His friends had mocked him. Now they were begging him to teach them. The product was a home-study course. But the ad was not selling lessons. It was selling the moment when the laughing stops.

That distinction -- between the product on the shelf and the emotion in the reader's chest -- is the whole of advertising psychology in two sentences. It is also the engine that drives Drew Eric Whitman's 2008 book Cashvertising.

Whitman spent years in the trenches of direct-response copywriting. He wrote for the direct-marketing division of the largest ad agency in Philadelphia. He was senior copywriter for a major direct-to-consumer insurance company. He served as associate copy chief at Day-Timers, the catalog giant. He was not an academic theorizing about persuasion from a corner office. He was the person producing control packages and tracking which headline beat which challenger, which offer format doubled the response rate, and which fear-based appeal sold more units than any rational argument could.