In Praise of Long Copy
It is fashionable, of late, to conclude that brief, punchy copy is best suited towards capturing the attention of people online, because as everyone knows, nobody reads anything online, ever.
This strikes me a conflation of a well observed and well documented browsing habit among most people, who tend to scan rather than read. And particularly in terms of lists of items (products, news headlines, categories, etc.), scanning is even more punctuated, limited to the first two words or so of each item.
Is it a contradiction, then, that some eyetracking studies have shown that the Ogilvy Layout still works? Or would it simply be a mistake to conclude that offline and offline behavior are so different that conclusions drawn from one medium simply couldn’t apply to another?
Now, in magazines, which are mostly read as a diversion, the first thing to get scanned are pictures. We are visual creatures and pictures typically convey a lot of information (and emotion) fast, so a strong visual is almost always going to be the first thing the eye fixes on when the reader is engaging in general browsing for interest. Please note, though, that this scanning order changes for task oriented individuals interacting with a website. People scanning a web page redefine “worthwhile” by relevance to their task, and therefore focus on the headlines first.
- Jeff Sexton, Tests Indicate Ogilvy’s Old School Layout Still a Winner
Behavior changes with context, so it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that the context of an online experience is different enough that the “old school” rules don’t apply – users don’t read, they scan, for instance. How is it that scanning – apparently superficially – conveys enough information that users can choose intelligently among the maelstrom of options available to them? Are they so focused on their task that all distractions are ruthlessly cast aside in single minded pursuit of their goal?
This post started as the result of an item in my Twitter feed, led through three other related, linked articles (all quoted here) and will probably terminate in a half-finished thought. All the while, I should have been assembling an analytics dashboard for a client. Using oneself as a proxy for examining the behaviors of others is never a good idea, but I doubt that my experience in the last 30 minutes is drastically outside the mainstream.
We humans have remarkable brains, capable of processing scads of data coming from multiple inputs. But we are hard-wired to attend to novelty, and generally not quite so good at efficiently filtering out distractions. Why do 30-50% of DVR owners not skip the ads? Is it because so much of the advertising out there is so good, we just can’t bear to miss it? Or is it because the change of scenery is, itself, interesting?
I’m inclined to think – though I can’t yet prove it – that the tendency towards brevity, pithiness and punchy copy has not been successful in the aggregate. There may be specific advertisers who’ve benefited, but if the whole of the marketing universe has simply been sub-divided into smaller pieces and split between more voices, the overall quantity of message hasn’t improved (and I’m of the belief that more voices in a conversation tend to degrade its overall quality.)
Can a truly persuasive, high-quality argument (in the sense of a position one wishes to communicate and convince others of) be encapsulated in a 10-word snippet? In 155 characters? Can a customer be won for a lifetime of loyalty with a one-liner? A statement so inexplicably powerful that resistance is futile? (Wouldn’t that be quite an effective weapon?)
First, thanks for reading and linking to my post. Second, thanks for asking such great questions. Third, here are my thoughts on the issues we raised:
a) Task-focused vs. browsing is more of a continuum than a binary state. As anyone who telecommutes to work knows, it’s entirely possible to be task-focused and to still get distracted by peripheral events. And novelty is the best bet for doing that.
b) Anyone who tells you people don’t read online is an idiot. People read anything that interests them, and oftentimes great articles or product copy or reviews of things that interest people can be found online, where those same people read that stuff. This very blog post is a perfect example of that.
c) what people fail to read online is dishonest, vague, we-we, corporate-style crap. But that has nothing to do with it being online and everything to do with it being shit copy.
d) Through the magic of hyperlinks, we don’t have to worry about length anymore. People who want to drill down on more details can select the links that allow them to do that – and they get the long copy they want. People who want to move forward with the sale can click on the links that will move them forward. Voila: readers now get the best of both worlds – but only if the long copy and associated links exist on the site, which requires the copywriter and web designer to summarily bitch slap anyone vomiting up the phrase “people don’t read online”
e) While people read online, they read differently than if they’re reading a book. Rather than reading a whole page and going to the next page in a linear fashion, they read from one link that interests them to the next link that interests them. This means that it helps to fashion your online content to facilitate scanning, and specifically scanning for links. Descriptive headlines and subheadlines help. Bolding helps. Shorter paragraphs help. Bullet points help. And using standard web conventions (colored and underlined text) for links helps a lot.
Anywho, sorry to spew all that up on your comments section, but I felt that your thoughtful post deserved some equally thoughtful responses.
It’s not my intent to be argumentative about your points, because I actually agree. I just want to point out some subtleties that I think sometimes get missed in the broader conversation:
a) I tend to find most dichotomies to be false anyway. The only exception I can think of would be life/death. (I forget who said, “All deaths are sudden: you’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive… your dead.”) So outside of a clinical context, we’re destined to put one argument against another when, typically, the answer is somewhere in between.
b) I routinely tell my clients that people don’t read online
I suppose I should be more specific: people don’t ready boring, inarticulate, self-serving techno/financial/business-jargon. (Then again, it’s usually someone on my client’s staff who’s written said jargon, so it’s perhaps a point better left implied.)
c) Indeed
d) I’m not sure I agree that the availability of hypertext relieves us of the responsibility to write cogently, thoughtfully, and efficiently (though I’m not sure you’re saying that it does, either.) Good copy is neither too short nor too long – it’s appropriate to the context, the message and the reader’s task.
e) I had to roll out this tired consulting chestnut, but it depends: people read recipe books differently when they’re looking to plan a dinner than when they’re actually cooking; people search for diapers on Amazon differently than they read nytimes.com on Sunday morning. Task relevance, is all I’m sayin’.
Thanks for the comments!