The Red Shoe Diaries advertorial structure

A man, his heart broken after a tragic love affair, is searching for answers.

So he puts out an ad in the newspaper:

“Looking for women who keep a secret diary. I want to know your stories of love, passion, and betrayal. Write me at PO Box 903, New York, NY, 10276.”

For some reason, week after week, a new letter arrives in response to this ad.

The man goes to the postal box, picks up the letter, and then, walking along desolate train tracks with his dog, he starts to read a new story of love, passion, and betrayal.

So opens each episode of the 90s erotic TV show Red Shoe Diaries. (The forlorn man was played by a young David Duchovny, before he starred in the X-Files and Californication.)

I bring this up not because I am reminiscing about my adolescent days and the significance that an occasional TV nipple had in my life.

Instead, I want to tell you about a successful advertorial I wrote recently.

This advertorial is for a pet safety product (I won’t say exactly what as a courtesy to my clients, because the campaign is still running profitably).

While I was doing research for this advertorial, I came across lots of horror stories that all tied into the product.

Any one of these stories would have made a good lead for the advertorial.

And I was sorry to let any of the stories go.

So what I did was a kind of Red Shoe Diaries structure.

I opened with one horror story, told in the first person by the purported author of the advertorial.

But then, rather than moving into other sales arguments, I told other horror stories, one after the other.

And to do this, I brought in a kind of David Duchovny narrator (in this case, a police officer who showed up to the scene of the original horror story).

This narrator reeled off 2 or 3 more horror stories.

Now, I can’t say for certain, but I believe this multi-story structure is one of the main reasons this advertorial has been so successful to cold Facebook traffic.

In case you are selling something that lends itself to lots of good — i.e. chilling — stories, maybe you’ll find this approach valuable.

And if you want to get me to research and write up such an advertorial for your product, then hit reply, write me a sultry yet short email, and we can take it from there.