First things first. Good ad copy is more likely to sell products than bad copy. Duh number one.
For all its intuitive logic, though, there's isn't too much data on it when you go looking. So this piece on HBR is a welcome find. (Read here). I especially like the analysis of the 'stylistic' elements. (From the 'creativity can't be measured' school ? Feel free to call it anything else you like then)
That the connection isn't a straight one, however, is my duh number two.
There's plenty of good copy that don't necessarily produce sales results. Back in India in the nineties, for example, there was the One Black Coffee' spot from Ericsson mobile phones that did everything else - entertained, got talked about, won awards - but didn't move product, apparently because people couldn't recall which brand it was for !
More interesting (because unusual) , though, is the converse possibility of indifferent copy producing decent results.
Around ten years ago , this Indian grocery store - call it X - in Dubai was airing their TV spot a million times a day during cricket matches. The message was simple : X had the best quality Indian spices specially imported from India. The production ? Horrible is putting it politely. (Rumor had it that it was shot on home camera and featured the owner's daughter) It was an assault on sense and sensibility. But - and here's the thing - it was an assault at scale (relative to their business) and that seems to have paid off despite everything.
That was the first most of us had heard of X. Today many of us shop there for Indian spices (and other grocery items) that one doesn't easily find in other stores. In the intervening period, X has expanded to several new locations .By all accounts, X - and by extension, that horrible copy - has been a success.
In hindsight it makes sense : have good product, make it known, sell. On the cheap.
This goes back to the age old message-vs-media question. Do you spend more on creative or airing ? Unlike big established advertisers for whom production costs are so much lower than media costs, X would have had to take the call to invest their little pot on airtime rather than on pleasing copy. That it worked ticks off the established norms about how effectiveness depends on the product category,market and target audience. Such shoddy copy couldn't have worked with hipper , fancier, bigger brands.
Or, dare I ask it, could it ?
Because it also opens up questions. First is about how exactly advertising works. How do people process ads ,especially subconsciously ? While great copy will be remembered and bad copy disliked , do sales reflect that ? What's the role of brand-name versus reason-to-buy ? Taking one side to its provocative extreme : can bad copy work by being so terrible that it sticks ? It's obviously no one's case to go out and produce bad copy - duh number three - but the point is that the creative strength (or weakness) of any copy cannot be taken for granted when planning.
Second are the new questions in today's ad-avoiding digital landscape. What holds a person's attention well enough to keep that Skip Ad button at bay , what copy lengths are best (or, 'what is the shortest you can go' ?) , how does it fit into a phone screen ...etc. Also some less obvious ones : like , say, about how you should evaluate a static banner ad. Sure, it's almost conventional by now to downweight banners for their low CTRs but could they be contributing as pure, non-response display communication ? That can't be answered by web analytics. Nor is it easy to run sales effectiveness analyses. In practice, many questions are simply unanswerable. You just need to take the judgement call. `
Another aspect of this is the democratization of business today. Entry costs of marketing have never been lower as small businesses get on to digital. While search and static display remain the predominant channels, the share of video will grow fast and the X sort of examples will be heartening. The implications also extend to the agency ecosystem : competition could well go beyond rival agencies to under-the-radar freelancers and the like ... but that's another story !
But to the owner of X goes the final word in my piece. One can picture him / her being dismissed , even laughed at outright, by agencies - but I guess you'd know better than to underestimate the guy who's put his own money on the line !
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