This summer, one of my clients ran into some trouble with a Facebook ads campaign.
The product they were advertising was a plastic ball, filled with ceramic beads, which you’re supposed to throw into the washing machine and use instead of detergent.
I was in charge of writing the advertorial, so I wrote a first-person confessional with the headline:
“How I wash blood stains out of my clothes WITHOUT laundry detergent”
Facebook didn’t have a problem with my blood-stained headline. They also didn’t have a problem with the questionable product (I still don’t understand how or if it works). But they did have an issue with little things like:
* The use of words like “magic,” “crazy,” and “trick”
* Specific claims such as “it saves me hundreds on laundry detergent”
* Before-and-after pictures of clothes washed with this breakthrough technology…
In short, Facebook didn’t like anything that gave this ad the unpleasant but familiar odor of an old-school infomercial.
But wait a minute.
Maybe that comparison is not really fair.
Because right now, I’m hand-copying a very old and very successful infomercial.
It’s for Tony Robbins’s Personal Power tapes.
This infomercial looks like a segment from 60 Minutes. It opens with Tony and Fran Tarkenton, a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback, boarding a helicopter, and then flying around Southern California.
Once they land, Tony and Fran go inside a fancy house, smile and nod at each other, and chat about the good results people are getting from Personal Power.
The rest of the infomercial is punctuated by lots of testimonials, most of which are saying, “This system works really well, and it’s helped me.”
When you get the chance to buy the tapes, there’s no massive price anchoring, and there’s no “But wait, there’s more!”
If all this is starting to bore you, that’s kind of the point.
Because this infomercial was pretty classy, really not sensationalistic, and would have fit in perfectly into a Facebook advertising campaign today.
(And like I said, this infomercial was immensely effective. It helped launch Guthy-Renker Corporation, which at that time was just an experiment between a couple of guys, and now has revenues of over $2 billion a year.)
The point of all this?
Maybe these Facebook compliance requirements don’t have to hamstring sales…
Maybe direct response copywriters have just gotten into too much of a Gary Halbert and John Carlton groove…
And maybe there are plenty of other effective ways to sell stuff without !!! and crazy/amazing/jaw-dropping before-and-after.
Or maybe not.
But if you get the Facebook ban hammer, it’s something to keep in mind, and maybe something to comfort yourself with.
Anyways, if you need help with writing Facebook-compliant advertorials that still make sales, you might get some ideas here: