On Dan Heath’s new podcast, “What It’s Like To Be,” I heard Dan asking a TV meteorologist, a criminal defense lawyer, a forensic accountant, all the same question:
“Who’s the most famous meteorologist/criminal defense lawyer/forensic accountant, real or fictional?”
This got me wondering who the most famous copywriter might be, real or fictional.
I had a gut feeling. I double-checked via simple Google search, by looking at the total number of results.
As far as real copywriters go, there’s really only one possible option for a copywriter that a rando off the street might know.
That’s David Ogilvy.
There’s something about the pipe, the smart suits, the English disdain, the French castle.
Sure enough, Ogilvy was the only real copywriter who has more than 1M indexed Google results about him.
As for fictional copywriters, it depends on who you consider a copywriter.
Don Draper, the creative art director from the TV show Mad Men, clocks in at over 2M Google results.
But was he really a copywriter or more of an idea man? I’ll let you decide.
Meanwhile, the most famous, fictional, 100% copywriter that I’ve been able to find is Peggy Olson, also a character on Mad Men, who only gets around 220k Google results.
Should we stop there? Oh no.
It turns out several celebs out there have a copywriting background… but are not today known as copywriters.
One of these is novelist James Patterson. Before Patterson set out to write 200 books (and counting), he was a copywriter and later the CEO of J. Walter Thompson, one of the biggest and oldest ad agencies in the world.
Patterson has 6M+ Google results to attest to his fame.
And if we’re already going with celebrities who have copywriting in their history, and maybe their blood, then we get to the most famous copywriter of all time, real or fictional, live or dead, even though nobody nowhere would identify him as a copywriter.
I’m talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald worked for a time as a copywriter before becoming the author of the quintessential great American novel, The Great Gatsby, and later a topic of almost 13M Google results.
So there. Now you know. And now you might ask yourself, “What did I just read? Did I really need this in my life? How did I wind up at the bottom of this email?”
If any of those questions is flitting through your head, let me point out that interest in famous people seems to be hardwired into our brains.
Tabloid writers and sales copywriters know this fact well, and they use it over and over and over. Because it works to draw attention and get people reading, day after day.
That’s a free lesson in copywriting.
For more such lessons, including ones that you might not be able to shrug off by saying, “I guess I knew that,” you will have to buy my Copy Riddles course.
The whole big idea behind Copy Riddles is the appeal of famous people — at least famous in the small niche of direct response copywriting.
I mean, on the sales page, in place of a subheadline, what I have is a picture featuring Gary Halbert, Gary Bencivenga, Stefan Georgi, and Ben Settle, all of them celebrities in the micro world of direct response, all of them paid off on that page as being integral to the course.
If you’d like to buy Copy Riddles, or if you simply want to read some gossip about famous copywriters, then head here and get ready to be amazed and shocked: