What Poetry and Snobbery Taught Me About Advertising
About style, trend & rhyme over reason.
I was a poetry snob who only got into copywriting because I went to night school after an almost useless college degree.
Here’s the first thing I learned:
Steal from anything that’s not advertising.
“Nice,” I thought. “I know something that’s not advertising!”
And it’s good advice.
It’s how British marketers got around anti-tobacco laws by quoting The Surrealist Manifestos.
It’s not an advertisement.
Advertising likes to copy art.
But sometimes it’s the wrong thing.
Like when rhyming was abandoned for trend and left to die.
The angry young wannabe poet still lives inside me — even if we rarely talk.
He reminds me that poetry didn’t stop rhyming to sell cars, chocolate bars, or ointment against acne scars.
It did so because the world went to hell.
Don’t Bore Us, Get To The Chorus
In 10 minutes you’ll have the scientific and historical explanation to why both poets and copywriters shot themselves in the foot — and their readers in the head — when they stopped rhyming.
And someone literally gets shot in the hand!
You also get 3 tips for penning a better love letter.
Signals Are Costly And Best Used Softly
Scientists prove: Song makes the heart grow fonder!
Costly Signalling Theory is why we irrationally believe in spent resources.
It’s how evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics explain the impractical tail of the peacock — and give the boring answer to why advertising is important.
We instinctively trust an organism that spends resources on its message — because it makes it less likely to be bogus.
It’s why the stag grows several pounds of unnecessary bone on top of its head, hoping to hook up with some cute young deer.
Ressources spent = Pain.
Old-school economists would like resources to only be a matter of money and utility.
But humans almost never think that way.
If they did, we’d give cash on Valentine’s Day.
Ressources can be sacrificed to show purpose.
Because it’s costly to stand up for something and show your soft belly.
It can be brutal candor to show risk willingness — if you can f*cking handle it.
Or just the alchemy of creativity.
Here’s a book about it. It’s so nice I read it twice.
We believe in the message that’s intertwined with meaningful and valuable signals.
It’s probably why singing evokes more emotion than speaking — simply because it’s harder to do.
When I try to make you continue reading at the end of this paragraph, it’s because I know I’m competing for your attention.
When I try to be cute and creative about it, it’s because I want it to seem like a magic trick, not manipulation.
And when I tell you now, it’s because I want you to think I’m revealing myself, so you’ll have more confidence in me.
Trust the rhyme, you’ll be fine.
Don’t trust me? Read on and see!
When The Verse Got Its Curse
How the teenage rock star of poetry killed the rhyme and gave us actual rock stars.
Are you still reading? Yay, it worked!
The rhyme died in the 1870s.
At least rhyming in poetry began its decline.
Industries and factories were loud as hell, and classic styles didn’t capture the noise of the new world.
It was when literature had its most rebellious teenage idol in gunslinger Arthur Rimbaud and when Charles Baudelaire found The City of Light so dark he had to switch to prose in Spleen de Paris.
Rimbaud revolutionized literature as a teenager, got shot in the hand during a lovers’ quarrel, and was played by DiCaprio in the 1995 film Total Eclipse.
Modernism happened because modern life happened.
Romantic ballads were a bad fit for humanity’s sudden acceleration into the future.
WW1 gave birth to dadaism, surrealism, expressionism, more or less the weirdest isms, and after WW2, philosopher Theodor Adorno finally declared it “barbaric to write poems after Auschwitz.”
Most people had already stopped reading poetry before then.
Not entirely — but pretty much.
Poets were the rock stars of their day until they broke the rhyme.
Maybe that’s why we got actual rock stars.
The new poets of the people.
Sure, there’s an Allen Ginsberg or Yahya Hassan every generation or so. But that’s about it.
How many new poets did you read this year?
Are we running out of writers when musicians get the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Don’t get me wrong, I love poetry.
But it’s also super hard!
Every time I buy a book from a young poet, I go: “Oh sh*t, this is poetry now? I’m so out of the loop!”
And that’s what I love about it. I have a degree in literature, yet I’m always surprised.
My dad, on the other hand, asks a very reasonable question:
“What the hell does it mean?”
The Lesser Disaster Is Safer And Faster
Why people like boring things.
An important lesson from evolutionary psychology is this:
The human brain didn’t evolve to look for the best solutions — but to find the least disastrous.
Because the ancestor that chose safely chose wisely and survived.
When we interpret a message, we look not only at the message itself but the costly signals surrounding it.
The more coherent resources spent on something, the easier it is to believe in the organism conveying it. Less risk of catastrophe.
Look behind you! How much do you trust someone you can’t see?
In large part, that’s the appeal of recognizable brands.
They’ve spent too many resources getting famous to be apocalyptically awful.
If you’re going to Tokyo, love Japanese food, and have researched all the best restaurants, you already have the knowledge to look for value.
But if you are a stranger in a strange land and recognize none of the signals around you, McDonald’s is a sign from the heavens as something very unlikely to kill you.
Da-Da-Da-Da-Daaa! I’m Loving Not Dying Immediately.
That’s why my dad doesn’t like modern poetry.
Verse, rhyme, and formel dressing are quick ways to decipher if you’re dealing with a total fraud.
Even if the material is high-strung and hard to grasp, you know that the creator practiced and you understand the effort.
I spent half a life studying literature, so I find modern poetry to be a fun puzzle of history and deconstructed style.
“Oh, it’s neo-dadaism through the prism of a techno Oscar Wilde? How wonderful!”
I’ve paid enough of my own resources to feel both safe, intrigued, and a little entitled.
But with no recognizable signs to trust (other than the fact that someone published the book — and someone published Hitler, so…) my dad gets very few distinguishing signals that a modern poem is any different from the ramblings of the village idiot.
If you ever looked at an abstract painting and thought: “I could paint that” — even if you knew you couldn’t — it might just be your instinct brain missing costly signals that you aren’t being scammed.
Uncontroversial Commercial
Copywriters beware.
When the symbolist poets revolted against the rhyme in the 1870s, they spent risky resources breaking with expectations.
They were outrageous in their hunt for new styles to describe new ways of living.
They stood out in the marketplace because they used their creative capital differently and captured cultural tension.
100 years later, advertising did something similar.
In the early 1970s, rhymes in ad headlines and taglines were at an all-time high.
But in the post-modern 80s and grunge-ironic 90s, quaint rhymes didn’t capture much zeitgeist.
And they’ve been out of favor ever since.
25 biases and each is worth the price of the book.
Richard Shotton, author of “The Choice Factory”, writes that rhymes in print ads have counted for only 4% since 2007.
It’s strange.
Because in the 00s and 10s behavioral science discovered that rhymes have demonstrably better recallability and increased believability.
It’s called the Rhyme-As-Reason Effect and is caused by the Keats Heuristic and Fluency Heuristic.
The study “Birds of a Feather Flock Conjointly (?)” by Jessica Tofighbakhsh and Matthew S. McGlone concludes that messages with rhymes are 22% more believable than without.
Richard Shotton and Alex Thompson adapted the study to test memorability and found that rhymes were remembered 29% against 14% for non-rhymes.
Understanding how trends influence consumer behavior is valuable — but copywriters should not fall into the trend trap themselves and go industry blind.
If no one is rhyming and it’s demonstratively more effective, shouldn’t you stand out in the marketplace and not give a damn about peer pressure?
Maybe that’s why we need more outsiders in advertising.
Lovers Prevail Where Writers Fail
3 Tips for writing your Valentine’s Card.
I think cowboys, coaches, and carpenters have more success writing Valentine’s Cards than most writers.
Because the recognizable resources spent by an enthusiastic amateur beat an artistic ego’s attempt to challenge formal rules and venture into avantgarde.
I mean… Who would you rather have in your bed?
Ted Lasso or the pretentious poet with potential for catastrophe?
So here are three tips for writing rhymes to make someone swoon:
1: Finish on the good word. An important word followed by a contrived rhyme is a disappointment. A curious setup followed by an on-point insight is a gift.
2: Use Thesaurus.com as much as Rhymezone.com. Words don’t matter. It’s the stuff beneath and around them. Don’t get stuck.
3: If you break rhythm and metric, be deliberate. Building and subverting expectations can be powerful if used well. But don’t get lazy because you fell in love with too many syllables. How you use the verse says as much as the words themselves. If in doubt, go back to #2.
The End, My Friend
“If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” But had OJ done time, if the DA could rhyme?
This is the end of the essay.
At this point, I was sure I’d have a clever rhyme to send you off.
But it seems a bit predictable, doesn’t it?
Instead, here’s a quote and a song to play you out.
“Tell the truth enough — you’ll find it rhymes with everything.”
