Breakthrough Advertising

A copywriter's operating system from Eugene M. Schwartz's 1966 book of the same name (Boardroom 2004 reissue). Schwartz wrote direct-response copy "for the best direct marketers in America" (Edelston foreword, p. iii). The book's one-line thesis, which he discovered only on rereading it eighteen years later: "There is a way to develop an entirely new market for a new or an old product. That way involves a certain number of clearly-defined steps. And in this book I show you every single one of those steps." (p. v)

Core Principle

Copy cannot create desire — it can only channel it. "The power, the force, the overwhelming urge to own that makes advertising work, comes from the market itself, and not from the copy. Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already-existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copy writer's task: not to create this mass desire — but to channel and direct it." (p. 3)

Because mass desires are built by social, economic, and technological forces "far greater than advertising itself can command" (p. 5), advertising that taps an already-existing desire commands an economic force "hundreds of times more powerful than the mere number of dollars the advertiser can spend on it" — Schwartz's Amplification Effect (p. 5). Advertising that tries to create a desire instead of channel it "is no longer advertising but education" and "can produce at best only one dollar in sales for every dollar spent" (p. 5). The Edsel — "a good car, backed by a deluge of fine advertising, that died trying to fight the overwhelming switch in demand" (p. 4) — is Schwartz's reminder that you cannot fight a mass desire.

The foundation: before a single word of the headline is written, three diagnostic questions must be answered (p. 14):

1. What is the mass desire that creates this market?
2. How much do these people know today about the way your product satisfies this desire — their State of Awareness?
3. How many other products have been presented to them before yours — their State of Sophistication?

The next three sections answer each question. Then seven techniques govern the body copy. Then six final-touch craft skills reassemble the ad as a living document.

Part 1 — The Diagnostic Triad