BAM!
On April 6, 2019, bad boy MMA fighter Conor McGregor stepped inside a Dublin pub.
McGregor owns a brand of whiskey. So he offered to buy a round of his Proper No. 12 to all the pub patrons.
One old guy said, no thanks.
So McGregor, who at one point held two MMA belts and also fought boxing legend Floyd Mayweather, socked the old man right in the ear. The old man absorbed the jab gamely. But he quietly turned away, clearly ceding to McGregor’s physical dominance.
The infuriating thing is that none of the mainstream news media reported a fact I know deep in my heart:
This old man was the standing boxing champ of that local Dublin pub.
He won the title back in 1989, against another local drunkard named Ciaran. Since then, nobody has dared to challenge the old man’s reign. Except Conor McGregor.
Here’s where I’m going with this:
McGregor winning that pub fight was much like a copywriter beating a long-standing control. (A control, as you probably know, is your best ad, the one that’s been running successfully for a long time, and outperforming all competition.)
Maybe you see the similarity. If you beat a control, it’s impossible to say what that really means.
Maybe your new copy really is a highly trained fighting machine. Maybe it could beat all competition, even on a world stage filled with killers.
But… maybe, just maybe, you sucker punched an old man who was teetering on a bar stool after his third pint. Maybe the old copy was so outdated, so weak, and so ready for change that even a finger tap would have done it.
Nobody can tell for sure.
Which might be bad if you’re looking for copywriting “truth.”
But it’s certainly great if you’re a copywriter looking to make a name for yourself. So go out and start brawling. Get yourself a control, even if it means pushing over some tipsy, harmless geezer.
Last thing:
I have an daily email newsletter. Much of the content is me pushing over long-standing but tired claims like “he won a control, therefore he must be great” and replacing them with something more interesting.
If you’d like to sign up for my emails so you can see me terrorizing these bits of conventional wisdom, here’s where to go.