Recently, a woman was telling me about how she used an
ad in her “swipe file” to create a promotion, and it completely
crashed and burned. Not one single sale.
Turns out she simply substituted all the details of the
original ad she was “swiping” with the details of her product.
Look, you might be able to get away with the old “word
substitute” routine every now and then. And you might even
make some good money doing it. But that sort of thing
usually doesn’t work. At least not from what I’ve seen.
Why? Because swipe files are basically only good for “how”
you say something…and not necessarily for “what” you’re
saying.
For example, I once wrote an ad to property investors in the
United Kingdom with a headline I “swiped” from an old ad
(from the 1950’s) selling a television repair course.
The headline was: “Why Haven’t TV Owners Been Told
These Facts?”
I thought, “That’s a great headline! Lemme ’swipe’ that
bad-boy!” And my headline said:
“Why Haven’t UK Property Investors Been Told About
This?”
The result?
Well, the ad didn’t exactly “bomb” (there was a nice curiosity
element to it, after all). But it didn’t do nearly as well as we
wanted.
Reason why is because I didn’t consider that the original ad
I “swiped” was playing on a suspicion people had
about TV’s back in the day. TV sets were acting up a lot and
people were really getting ticked off. And so the headline
was structured to play on that aura of “foul play”.
But the UK property investor market is not in this state of
mind. And so I took a hard look at the market, and their state
of mind as it is (not how I imagined it, but how it is) and
came up with a different headline that gave us a better
response.
Now, please, don’t get me wrong here. Swipe files are
extremely useful for wording specific phrases, closes and
even entire paragraphs (I mostly use my swipe file for
different “structures” — to lay out the sequence of information
in my ads for maximum effect).
But it’s dangerous to play “Betty Crocker” with your sales
pitch — simply pouring all the details of your product into
another ad, just like you’d pour cake mix into a mold —
without making sure the different elements of that ad jives
with the market first.
Ben Settle is a seasoned freelance copywriter and
direct marketer. If you liked this article then check out
Ben’s website at http://bensettle.com — where you’ll find
over 500 pages of advertising ideas, strategies and
tactics just like this one — as well as rare swipe file ads
and hot marketing information not easily found
anywhere else.
