In Victor Schwab’s essential book about copywriting called “How To Write A Good Advertisement”, there is a list of 100 good headlines along with comments about why they were effective.
You may have seen this list in other forms (“100 Greatest Headlines” etc) as, like many things, the original material has been recycled many times.
One of the headlines has always had me somewhat puzzled. It’s this one…
“This Is Marie Antoinette – Riding To Her Death”.
Now, I got the “curiosity” angle and there’s an element of drama.
But I was still a little puzzled because curiosity on it’s own is rarely effective.
Schwab had this to say about the ad…
“An often-repeated ad for a set of books. It pulled over eight times as many responses in 1/4 page size as were ever received from a double-spread.
This is the only straight ‘curiosity’ headline included here. Its headline was relevant – not, as so commonly used, one of those trick devices to force attention when advertising a product not closely related to the headline.”
You know, this still didn’t fully explain the success of the ad to me and for some reason it’s nagged at me.
So you can imagine my interest when I came across this headline once again in the Joe Vitale book “The Seven Lost Secrets Of Success” that I mentioned in a recent post.
Because the “Marie Antoinette” ad was written by Bruce Barton.
And the real secret to its success was not the curiosity angle, but the emotional impact Barton created.
Here’s the section from the book…
“Barton used emotionally packed archetypes in his ads. One of his most famous ads, done quickly and almost by accident, included a sketch of Marie Antoinette ‘riding to her death’. He asked ‘Have you ever read her tragic story?’
By drawing a connection to an emotionally charged mother-figure from history, Barton was able to touch the deepest emotions of people.”
The success of the headline now makes a lot more sense, I think you’d agree.
Note the importance of the subhead (“Have you ever read her tragic story?”), the graphic and the context.
Something else this case illustrates is the danger of “swiping” elements of copy without properly understanding the context in which they were used.
I’ll have more to say about how to ‘swipe” effectively in a future series of posts.