“They laughed when I sat down at the piano…”


Advertising buffs will instantly recognize these two opening lines. The first is from an ad penned by the legendary John Caples promoting music lessons by mail. The second is the beginning of a Martin Conroy-written Wall Street Journal ad, which my friend Brian Clark, aka Copyblogger, describes as “the greatest sales letter of all time.”

What do these two ads have in common, besides being amazingly successful and almost completely ageless? (Both ran for decades essentially unchanged, largely unheard of in the fast-paced world of advertising.) The answer is simple: these unusually effective ads each tell a story.

That these stories resonated with readers for so long is very telling. In The Narrative in the Neurons, Wray Herbert describes another timeless piece of text, the opening lines of The Tower Treasure, a Hardy Boys novel first published in 1927:




When subjects read this passage and several others in an fMRI machine, researchers were able to observe which parts of their brain were activated as the subjects read different elements. Depending on what was happening in each sentence, quite different brain activation patterns were observed:


Wray notes,


Clearly, the narratives in the successful ads resonated in some special and universal way with their readers. We’ve all experienced moments of social discomfort, much like the would-be pianist who sits down at the piano only to have his friends laugh. And we’ve all had moments of pride when others acknowledge our skill or accomplishments. Is the narrative nature of the wording in “They Laughed When I Sat Down…” bringing these deep-seated memories to the surface to produce a more profound effect than had the ad simply suggested that we could impress our friends if we could play the piano?

My advice: to engage potential customers, write a vivid story involving your product. It’s worked for the best copy writers and most successful ads in history, and it can work for you.

Related resources:
Why Good Ad Copy Works
Your Unique Story Proposition
Livia Blackburne – A Brain Scientist’s Take on Creative Writing

Join 23,647 smart marketers like you.