6. Thinking In Words and Pictures

One of the most important skills in advertising copywriting is to be able to visualise your message in pictures as well as words. The brain picks up on images much more quickly than it does on the written word, so if you want to capture someone’s attention it is easier to do it with a photograph or diagram than with a sentence.

In most advertising, you will notice that images are used to immediately set the scene for the copy, which effectively acts in the same way as the punch-line in a joke.

So you could, for example, try to visualise a situation where your message, the single line of copy containing your USP, will act as a pay-off.

It is also possible to use text itself as imagery. The way copy is presented, in terms of typefaces, colours and so on, can be important in helping get a message across. It can even be the substance of the message. As an example, consider the following ad for Sudafed, a decongestant, created for Pfizer Consumer Healthcare by Karl Sanderson and Dan Heady of the advertising agency Bates UK. The ad ran in Britain in 2001 on Trivision posters, which are outdoor units with slatted faces that allow up to three different copy messages to appear one after the other: