Really?

My favorite thing in advertising, as befits a former copywriter, is the headline. This is the catchy phrase or pithy comment that grabs the attention, arouses the interest and leaves the reader with absolutely no choice but to read on.

Some of my favorite headlines: “Hello boys” (Wonderbra), “You know when you’ve been Tangoe’d” (Tango fizzy juice” and the best of the lot “Drink Amarios sherry and understand why birds fly” (Utter poetry).

Your headline is your opening gambit. It is the first thing that your prospective customer reads. It is the equivalent of knocking on the door of someone that you have never met before and having exactly five seconds to explain to them why they should give you another five minutes of their precious time to listen to you – remembering that you are knocking on the door of someone who immediately knows that you are trying to sell something to them, and who is therefore immediately ‘en guard’.

Given the above situational context, your headline better be, as they say, ‘off the hook’.  There are a number of different strategies you can pursue. Shock is an old favorite, a strategy much used by the so-called gutter press – “An alien ate my hamster” or “Grandmother turns neighbor into frog” or “Obama in Rihanna love-child shocker!”

A shocking headline essentially works by arousing curiosity, which is of course essentially the purpose of all headlines. This point is worth repeating. The fundamental objective of a headline is to get your readers to read on…

It is a common mistake to try and cram all the key selling points of your ad into the headline. This is a big mistake. A headline will never really give you enough room to really sell a product or service – the selling comes in the copy. It is only in the copy that you can build a compelling case – ‘this particular vacuum cleaner, madam, is not only a lovely pink color, it also has a whistle with which you can annoy your husband, and a compartment for holding a coffee cup and it folds up to fit in your handbag’ – that is copy.

There is a hugely incorrect prevailing myth in Kenya that I have heard repeated time after time across marketing departments and agencies that goes as follows: “Kenyans don’t read”.

This is one of the single biggest pieces of you know what that I have ever heard in my ten years in the game in this town. Every time I hear it repeated I want to throw things. Is this the same Kenya that I live in? Is this the same Kenya where working men gather every morning around newspaper vendors to pour over every newspaper available? Is this the same Kenya where women sit in salons for six to eight hours surrounded by nothing but magazines?

It is the ‘Kenyans don’t read’ mentality that causes us to produce so many ads in which we hard-sell in the headline, support with a huge visual and think that the body copy is for nothing more than contact details.

I would like to posit a revolutionary thought: Kenyans love to read!!! More to the point, Kenyans love information of any form from any source – TV, radio, internet, papers, magazines, gossips… often consumed all at the same time.

So if Kenyans do love to read, it therefore follows that we should write lots of copy. Tell people all about your product or service in great detail. If you demonstrate that you are really interested in what you are selling, the chances are that your readers will be really interested in it too. Plus you’re asking for money – why should someone give you money for something you are unwilling to tell them all about?

So once you accept that Kenyans do love to read, you will start writing lots of copy, which means you won’t have to say everything in the headline, and you’ll be free to use it to charm, intrigue and seduce.

Remember though, just as a good headline is supposed to make people read on, a bad headline can just as effectively stop them reading altogether. “My walls will say good things about me”… will they… really???