Copy Learn And Steal

I took a bus trip to New York City on Saturday, what a great city that is!, forget about operation imac I might change that to operation New York City!.Anyway my wife and I took an early bus trip into the city and had a great time, unfortunately we had to travel with these things called “other people” and a “bus driver”, so unfortunately we had to return at a certain time.

It was while on the 3 hour bus ride home that I was completely bored!, everyone else on the bus seemed to be sleeping, to add to insult about 5 of the people around me started snoring including the bus driver at one time, that will teach me for sharing my life story in future!.

So I sat their looking out of the window as you do, it was then I began to noticed the huge billboards all aglow along the highway. I decided to take notice of each one of them to try a get an idea of what they use for copy, and also how they design the layout itself. My idea was to see what one I remembered the best after the 3 hour long bus ride.

I could only think about how tough writing a billboard can be, the people who write the copy have just seconds to capture peoples attention while they drive, they also cant rely on the fact that people will write anything down. It all has to be taken in and remembered in the time it takes our sleeping and snoring bus to pass it by.

I noticed a lot of the usual words like “discover” and “Secret” in the copy, as well as huge colorful pictures of food for the restaurants billboards. On in particular listed what exit it was on and exactly how many miles down the road!, now that’s Geo targeting!.

Another one that stood out for me was along the lines of “Did you know that a simple chiropractic position could cause a stroke?”. This had a huge red background with yellow text, it stood out for miles!.

Their were a lot of food related boards as well as credit companies advertising offers. Now and again you would see what must have been a local company advertising something with copy related to that town.

What to take from it?

You really get to see what these companies use to capture peoples attention, then while they have it most of them seemed to list a benifit for you as a viewer, like “Get 10% Off” and “Save $$$”, they would also use a “them against us” approach like “Why Pay More Using —- —–, SAVE With Us!”.

A lot of different techniques were used, and for the ones that stood out the most I took mental note to figure out a way to use a similar approach with PPC ads, which also means you only have a few seconds to capture attention to get results.

I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to billboards before, but seeing some of the copy can really give you good ideas when you write your own ads and sales pages. Also the design’s gave me some good tips for image ads too, which I’ll be trying later on this week.

The board that stood out the most for me was the restaurant with the huge colorful picture of the food, then in huge bold letters it read “Wanna Try?” “Exit 7, 22 Miles”. And I was not even hungry, I think it was the steam rising from the plate that did it;). Also for shock value the “chiropractic” board had that “Really!… I didn’t know that” response.

So remember on your next trip take notice of what billboards you pass by, it might help you in your own copy endeavors?:).

Tags: billboard copy

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 4:41 pm and is filed under internet marketing blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.