Ad Copy: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Creating good ad copy should be simple: write effectively in order to successfully advertise a company’s products or services. But “simple” and “effective” can sometimes be difficult to pull off. And some ad copy, quite frankly, just isn’t very good, and thus may fail to do its one job: reel in customers!

In the interest of seeing great ad copywriting everywhere, we want to take a look at some examples we think could use improvement, and offer some suggestions to improve them. As a palate cleanser, we’ll look at some great ad copy examples, and break down why they work so well.

Needs improvement

Ocean Spray

Starting off, we have a questionable campaign from Ocean Spray. Its cranberry juice is a simple product that needs simple, straightforward copy, but the company hasn’t realized this here.

Behold these two jumbled subway ad messes:

The most obvious, immediate suggestion is to remove the text in white; it’s both trying too hard and, ultimately, unnecessary. The one on the left is especially confusing. Copy shouldn’t be a puzzle, unless that’s the goal of the ad. Your audience should be able to understand and absorb it immediately, not be repelled by it.

“Crans-form” actually isn’t bad for this ad medium. You could say it’s a little corny, but it’s also clever and catchy enough to work for a ad campaign. The pun also works because it’s applied to various settings, making the customer associate the product with these different areas of their life. But again, that’s where the copy should end.

Even if the white text in these ads could be reworked to be better, it would still be best to leave it out entirely; just keep the first line, nice and snappy. But kill the hyphen. Make it Cransform so it’s all one word like the source of the pun.

Finally, replace “the” with “your” in this template to make it more relatable to the target audience: Cransform your workday; Cransform your road trip. Cransform this ad, and lives will be Cransformed!

Tillamook

Can it get any cheesier than what we saw from Ocean Spray? Of course it can, from a literal cheese company, where some ad copy has found its way onto the package itself:

“FOUR CHEESE EQUALS MORE MELT PLEASE” is the kind of copy that can keep you up at night. It’s not just annoying, it doesn’t even make sense: adding different types of cheese to your mix doesn’t make it any more melty, assuming you were already starting with a cheese that melts well.

Here are some ideas to replace it:

• 4 cheese 4 the win
• Easy, breezy, quadruple cheesy
• Fiesta in a bag
• Flavor 4 all
• Flavor 4ever
• Mix up the party

There are many directions Tillamook could go with this copy that would be better than the current choice.

Voltarol

Are you exhausted on the train home from work, perhaps with sore muscles from yesterday’s workout? The copy on this London tube ad may give you a headache as well:

With this ad from Voltarol, the first impression is a lot of text that’s probably difficult to read on a moving train, and just not interesting. A screed like this will cause eyes to glaze over instead of capturing the attention of a captive audience. Brevity is essential to ad copy in order to reel in new customers — it’s only on the product itself or a webpage where the copy should go into more detail.

It’s not just the amount of text that’s the problem — the writing itself isn’t great, either. “I’ll have to be fine”? Really? Overall, Voltarol’s attempt at a cheeky rhyming poem is just plain bad.

The theme of the poem isn’t bad though, as anyone who is serious about lifting weights knows just how brutal the few days following a leg day can be. If this product helps relieve such discomfort, then that’s great, and they’re smart to market this angle. Again, it could be done better and with more brevity, though. Here are some suggestions:

Leg day?
We got you.

Post-leg day struggles?
We got you.

When leg day leaves you reeling
Voltarol fights the feeling

Pause the hustle
And take care of your muscles

The copy on the right, and the image of the product, can stay. That all can be paired with any of the suggestions for the central piece of copy above, no problem. Just cut the “ode to the empty seat” copy on the left, because the “ode” — i.e. the poem idea — isn’t going to work.

Great ad copy

Now let’s switch it up and appreciate some examples of great ad copy.

Nike

Nike has a history of great ad copy (“Just Do It,” the Colin Kaepernick “Believe in something” ad, etc.), and this ad with Caitlin Clark is no exception. In fact, it may be one of its best ever:

The WNBA’s Caitlin Clark broke the NCAA all-time scoring record while playing basketball for the University of Iowa, which is what this ad refers to. And it does so in such a brilliant way, by referencing the notion of being responsible for something you break in a store. In other words, Clark now owns the record after she broke it.

This ad copy is an ice cold double entendre. It’s the kind of ad where even if it’s not relevant to you — if you don’t watch women’s basketball or wear Nike — you can still appreciate how good it is, because it simply goes hard. Which could be one simple rule of thumb for identifying good ad copy: the GHR (Goes Hard Rule).

Nike understands how to let the greatness of the athletes featured in their ads speak for itself, complimented by minimal, but excellent, smart copy. They have their finger on the pulse of sports culture, and intuitively understand the GHR. Because the ad compels even those outside the target demographic to appreciate how good it is, it will bring some of them into the fold, successfully expanding Nike’s market.

Bic

Now, here is an ad with a different, lighthearted vibe, that is arguably just as good:

How can you not love it? Everyone’s favorite odd-couple friends, Martha and Snoop, are incredibly endearing. They are the perfect vehicle to advertise the *wink wink* multi-functionality of these Bic lighters.

The ad is well-designed, pairing the brief, effective copy with each member of the lovable duo, along with eye-catching colors. It successfully captures two elements of good copywriting touched on so far: brevity and understatement. Neither the Nike ad nor this Bic ad spell out the message to the audience, making them think and thus making the ads more impactful.

While it may sound silly to say a more lighthearted ad like this “goes hard” the same way as the Nike ad, the same level of quality implied by that phrase is found here as well, just in a different style. It’s on point and effective in its own, humorous way.

Volkswagen

Lastly, we have a legendary ad campaign from Volkswagen.

The German car company initially had a tough time gaining traction in the United States following World War II, as it was literally Nazi-founded. It also couldn’t compete under the unofficial rules of car advertising at the time (late 1950s), which heavily evoked and pushed a big, glamorous, American Dream lifestyle.

That’s when the ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) came in clutch with a campaign that flipped the rules of the day upside down:

The social status game of car advertising was getting old, and DDB had the bold vision to break free from the pack. They chose to lean into Volkswagen’s perceived weaknesses and frame them unapologetically as strengths, using self-deprecating humor and a novel style.

“Lemon” referred to the slang for a defective car. They had the confidence to embrace this term, knowing their cars weren’t defective. “Think small” was a direct reference to and rebellion against the big, flashy lifestyle that was the dominant theme of car ads.

One by one, every ad in the campaign went on like this, each breaking the rules and making Volkswagen stand out. The result? Volkswagen captivated audiences with its unique confidence and selling proposition. The brand’s image turned around dramatically in America, fueling a huge increase in sales.

This campaign is now regarded as one of the most successful in advertising history. In retrospect, it’s easy to see why.

This campaign successfully combined brevity, understatement, the Goes Hard Rule, and humor. It also got another strategy right that can be risky, but with great potential payoff: going against the grain, being counter-intuitive, and defying conventional wisdom. All these factors added up to create some of the greatest ad copy of all time.

Wrapping up

We live in a world dominated by advertising. Since we can’t avoid it, it might as well be good. It should tell you honestly what it’s selling and how it will benefit you, and maybe even dazzle you or make you laugh in the process. These are the hallmarks of great ad copy.

This blog post is largely subjective, of course. You may think the examples we’ve listed as bad are actually good, and the ones listed as good are bad. And you may have different reasoning and philosophy surrounding it all.

You also might not like our suggested edits in the “Needs improvement” section. That’s OK — we’ve planted a flag, stirred the pot, and mixed some metaphors — all, we hope, for the greater good.

As always, we invite you to join the conversation. Comment below any thoughts you have about the ad copy discussed here, and any other examples you think deserve attention — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

---

Further reading

• The industry with the most insane ad copy, product copy, and names: Pre-Workout Names: Pretty-Wacky Nonsense
• Writers on the craft of writing sentences: great advice for naming
• Don DeLillo on writing, words, and language
• Our collective boat is always rocking on the Turbulent Seas of information and messaging coming at us from everywhere. Don’t despair — this is actually an opportunity.
• Zinzin offers tagline development and other copywriting Services in addition to our core naming work.