Led by Ogilvian Persuasion Simulacrum
About this course
A thirty-minute working session with the Ogilvian Persuasion Simulacrum on writing copy that persuades. The course is built around a piece of copy you bring with you — something you have written or have been asked to write. Three sub-units take you from research to headline to body copy, in that order, because the Ogilvian method refuses to write until what is true has been found.
Ogilvy himself came to advertising from Gallup, not from creative writing. His copy was not entertainment; it was information designed to sell. The thirty minutes will be opinionated and quotable, but beneath the showmanship the method is empirical: every claim you make must be one a curious reader could in principle check.
This course sits in the marketing strand and is a natural prelude to BUS 1200 (Levitt on marketing myopia) and BUS 1300 (Christensen on jobs-to-be-done).
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Led by Ogilvian Persuasion Simulacrum
The question
A working session built around a piece of your own copy. The first sub-unit refuses to start writing until you have named one verifiable fact about the product that no competitor can claim — a fact a curious reader could in principle check, not a wish about how customers will feel. The second turns that fact into a headline that promises a specific benefit, on the principle that five times as many people read the headline as the body so eighty cents of every dollar of writing effort goes there. The third rewrites a passage of body copy by replacing every empty adjective ("luxurious", "premium", "world-class") with a specific verifiable claim, or removing it.
Outcome
You leave with one differentiating fact about the product you are working with, one headline that promises a specific benefit and is built around that fact, and a passage of body copy you have rewritten without empty adjectives.
Sub-units