Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz: The Biggest Lesson I Learned

It’s the latest edition in “things I’ve learned from the Copywriting Challenge” set of articles. This time, I’m going to talk about the biggest lesson I learned from reading Breakthrough Advertising by Gene Schwartz.

For those of you who are interested in what some of the greatest copywriters ever can teach you, here are some of the lessons I’ve learned from other masters of the copywriting craft:

Like the above articles, I’m going to start with a brief review of how I found the book. Let’s get to that now.

Breakthrough Advertising Review

I said about The Robert Collier Letter Book that it was dense. Breakthrough Advertising isn’t dense in the sense that Collier’s book is – the language is actually pretty plain.

However, it’s not an easy read for another reason. This book is deep. By that, I mean that you aren’t going to get everything from this book in a single sitting. Not even close. (Well, maybe you are, but my small brain certainly hasn’t.)

This book delves heavily into psychology. Sure, it covers the same ground that all of the other books in this challenge have covered. Things like:

Having great headlines
Picking the right angle to hit your customer with
How to seal the deal
How to use testimonials to aid in boosting the trustworthiness of your product

What separates Breakthrough Advertising from the other books on the list is the amount of time it spends on pulling apart the psychology of the prospective customer. As such, those are going to be the features that I focus on in this little article.

Before I do though…

Lesson One: Mail Order Techniques Are Best Applied to Places Other Than Mail Order

Those of you who have read the Copywriting Challenge article or read a few books on copywriting will no doubt have suffered a painful thought: Does all that direct mail stuff work today?

I mean, very few of us are going to take the time to write letters, post them and spend the money on postage stamps. What about newspaper ads? People don’t read newspapers much anymore and when they do, they certainly don’t read the ads.

Well, Schwartz puts it clearly in the introduction. He says;

“Can they be used by non-mail-order copy writers as well? Most assuredly. J. K. Lasker once said that mail order makes a copy writer, but his real pay-off comes when he applies his mail order techniques to general advertising. I think that B.B.D. & O., Ted Bates, Ogilvy, Young & Rubicam and a dozen other agencies prove this every day. “

People will say that copywriting, and especially long form sales letters, do not work anymore. They’re “scammy” and “tired” and nobody falls for them.

You don’t have to mail letters and follow the exact same methods that the old-timer copywriters did. In fact, they probably are played out. But when you learn about direct marketing, you’re not learning about the specific technique – you’re learning about the model and the psychology behind it.

This brings us neatly to the biggest lesson I learned from Breakthrough Advertising.

The Main Lesson I Took From Breakthrough Advertising: Make Your Reader Do The Work For You

Copywriters, by and large, are people that don’t like to work too hard. If you can write a simple ad and have it convert, then fantastic. If you have a project that makes money for years, then that’s great. Keep it ticking over in the background.

What if I were to tell you that most aspects of copywriting can be outsourced… to the reader?

One of the best parts about Breakthrough Advertising is that it gives you examples of how to use language so that your reader will anticipate your product and already believe it by the time you give him the words that you’re selling him or her with.

In particular, he talks about how you can make your reader test your claims in their mind.

Picture this:

You’re running through a problem scenario. Say someone wakes up and their eyes are always sore. You know and state that it makes it incredibly difficult to get out of bed in the morning. With the kids to get ready for school, the last minute body grooming you were going to do last night and the boss that’s cranky if you’re even two minutes late, you make the reader picture everything that can possibly go wrong as the result of their malady.

Your reader subconsciously knows that you’re going to introduce the eye ointment soon. They’re waiting for it. They know you’re going to tell them about the great offer you’re going to give them.

So, do you just go for it and hope that your story is tragic enough that they’re going for the solution right away? Do you tell them about the benefits of your product?

Or do you continue the story by making them run a test of the product. Do you fabricate a further visualisation about two people – one of whom struggles through the day, and one who never experiences the eye problem in the first place?

Because then you’re not presenting a solution to the problem. They’ve already imagined what life is like for people who don’t suffer from your reader’s issue. They’ve essentially run a case by case comparison already, and felt the benefits versus the pains.

You’re merely suggesting after the fact that there is a way by which they can realise what they already know to be true based on their own weighing up of the pros and cons.

Final Thoughts

This book has hundreds of lessons like the above. I’ve focused on one lesson, because it’s important that you understand that imagery and psychology are far from “dastardly tricks” but instead permanent features of salesmanship which will always work. (Also, I’ve picked this lesson because it’s conveniently good for an article’s length.)

Breakthrough Advertising is expensive and sadly out of print. You can try and find used copies online – like through Amazon or ebay– they pop up semi-regularly. You could also try libraries and the like. Or, if you were particularly inclined, you could find out who owns the rights to the book and go and bug them into making a new print run. That’d be fantastic, because it’s currently a shame that this book is so rare.

(Or, you could join exciting fellows like me and become a rare book collector. It’s a pretty fun hobby as far as buying old stuff is concerned.)

Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz: The Biggest Lesson I Learned