During his famous farewell seminar in 2006, Gary Bencivenga ran a “Pick The Winner” contest.
He’d show two different headlines or magalog covers and ask the audience to choose which one did better in a direct test. (Example: “HE PROVED IT to millions on PBS television…” vs. “Deadly artery plaque dissolved!”)
The interesting thing was that Gary himself admitted he wasn’t good at picking among these competing headlines.
Let me repeat this:
Gary Bencivenga, who has been called “America’s greatest copywriter,” admitted he can’t pick a winning headline from two solid but very different appeals.
​​So what hope do you have?
And if you can’t even hope to pick out a winning headline, how can you write a good ad?
After all, the headline often determines whether the rest of your ad will get a reading at all.
Before I answer this, let me switch gears for a second. And let me tell you about an interesting bit of research I came across in psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Kahneman and another psychologist, Gary Klein, had very different attitudes about expert intuitions (such as the ability of a top copywriter to pick a winning headline).
Gary Klein was all for expert intuition.
He studied decision making among firefighters, and he had many reports of how firefighters would make gut calls that turned out to be the right call.
Kahneman, on the other hand, didn’t believe much in the power of expert intuition.
That’s because he spent his time looking at decision making in fields such as finance, where he found that expert intuition was often negatively correlated to the actual outcome. (In other words, once you hear what an expert stock broker advises, you should do the exact opposite.)
So Kahneman and Klein decided to collaborate and answer the following:
When can you trust experts? And how can you develop expert intuition that you can rely on?
It turns out there are two conditions.
First, the domain needs to be predictable enough. Emergency room cases are predictable — but the stock market is not.
Second, you need an opportunity to get feedback, and preferably a lot of feedback, relatively quickly.
So let’s get back to writing copy.
Looking at the two criteria above, you can see why even a top copywriter like Gary B. might not have great intuition when it comes to picking headline winners.
Even if you think an individual market (say, the market for weight loss advice in 2019) is more or less predictable…
It’s hard to get enough feedback on what the market would respond to if all you’ve got is one direct mailing every six months, like Gary used to have.
Fortunately, that’s not the situation we’re in any longer.
With $100, you can promote an offer on a PPC network like Google display, and perform dozens of different (and statistically valid) copy tests.
This way, you can get almost immediate feedback.
You can learn which appeals work.
Plus you will start to develop a world-class copy intuition, which will soon outstrip even great copy masters from earlier generations.
Which goes back to something I read from another top copywriter, Dan Ferrari:
“Winning at direct response is mostly a matter of taking as many swings as possible. The C-level marketers that test 50 promos per year will beat the A-list marketers that test 5. Over longer periods of time, as variability compounds, this will become even more pronounced.”
Anyways, maybe this is valuable if you’re looking to write good copy.
And if you want to see some “Pick The Winner” contests I’ve run with several email lists I manage, you might like the following: