Page 33 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

10 GRAMMAR DOESN’T
MATTER . . . OR DOES IT?

Conversation around your dinner party table flagging? At least
one guest over 30? Start a fight by suggesting that grammar doesn’t
matter in advertising. (Or, if you want to be cleaning red wine sauce
off your ceiling for weeks, that it doesn’t matter anywhere at all.)

Does it matter whether national brand advertising is grammatically
correct? David Ogilvy declared he didn’t know the rules of grammar.
Read his ads and you can see that he did. You can write copy that is
hard-hitting, persuasive, even entertaining and also avoid trashing
the English language. But maybe there’s something that matters even
more than correct English, something to do with the fundamental
truths about your product. Like is it any good? Do enough people
want to pay for it? And, ultimately, will your revenues from selling it
outweigh your costs in producing and promoting it?

The idea

From a credit card company (now defunct)
Driving home from London one weekend, we passed a poster for a
particularly fashionable credit card brand. In their infinite wisdom,
the credit card company, or their advertising agency, managed to
create a headline of such stunning illiteracy that my five-year-old
picked it up.

Maybe the “creatives” put their heads together and tossed around
two versions of the same headline—good and bad grammar—before
deciding the bad version was more populist or some other crappy
justification. Maybe they just didn’t know the difference. Either way,

24 • 100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS