Quitting While You're a Headline.

Last week, my friend Rob Schwartz and I were texting. We text with, what is for me, a good amount of frequency. We're also in a group text together--but when we want to get right to the heart of matters, we text directly to each other.

I'll admit, I've not really accepted texting as a regular form of communication. I think Martin Boase, founder of the great Boase Massimi Pollitt agency once said something about advertising being an uninvited guest in your living room. 

In my world, texting--even calling someone on a cell phone--is a bridge too far. You're no longer invading the phone on their wall or in their hallway--you're all at once in their groin pocket. That's about 97-times more intimate than I'm willing to be with people.

And, really, I am not anti-groin.

For years I've buffeted Rob with my conviction that people in journalism are doing a better job reaching viewers than people in advertising. All that old-fashioned AIDA stuff that the ad-industry's forgotten, seems more alive in magazines and newspapers. Attention. Interest. Desire. Action.

I even keep a 28-page (and growing) compendium of sites I like that take complicated information and make it simple--from both a design and a writing point-of-view. If there are 500 urls listed in my document, 490 of them come from journalism; ten from ad agencies. 

(Years ago, when I was head of copy on IBM, I'd growl at media people. 'On a complex brand,' I'd froth 'your job is to find a media space that allows us to simplify an involved story. Like we used to do in print. Just because print has all-but disappeared doesn't mean the need for print-like thinking has disappeared.' Invariably, media would come back with a plan that included little but 728x90 and 300x250 banners.)

I had sent Rob an article that I related back to advertising. And I wrote, how could anyone not respond to this headline:

We quickly had this exchange:

I've taken to saying of late, that my stock in trade, the butter and jam on my bread, is my headlineification ability. 

I can sling 'em like no one else. Or practically no one else. As I like to say, "worms matter."

Writing headlines is not about advertising alone, of course. Headlines go beyond that. They represent the speaker, writer, or editor's ability to coalesce and synthesize information in such a way as to get attention and heighten interest. That's about 97.94650-percent of effective communication: getting attention and being interesting while communicating.

I remember the late Chris Wall, Vice Chair of Ogilvy, all 6'10" of him, standing and berating a group of us. In one hand, he held a New York Times. In the other, The Wall Street Journal. "I don't want to hear about how much you have to do. They fill these papers every day and do a pretty good job." 

Yep.

Writing headlines is important not matter what your job. If you're an art director, you also need to find imagery and design that stops the viewer, that makes her think, that brings them deeper into the communication. If you're an account person, a planner, in media and you present in meetings, it's no good to present a flat-line powerpoint. It pays to get people's attention and keep deepening your connection with them.

So much what I see in the advertising world forgets that it needs to get attention and that it needs to be interesting. Regardless of media, so much just assumes that because it's on the air or ostensibly published pixels, it's worthy of being looked at. In other words, 97.94650-percent of all work lays there like the detritus that collects in storm drains after a deluge. 

There are about twenty headlines below. Which ones stop you? And which ones are soporific? And why?

Why can't we do better?