I have read loads of marketing books between college and my professional life.
Influence by Cialdini. Building a StoryBrand (on brand face marketing copy) by Donald Miller. This Is Marketing, All Marketers Are Liars and The Dip, by Seth Godin. Hooked by Nir Eyal, on digital behavior. Plenty of more on discipline, business, and marketing in between.
My clearest inspiration on impactful writing still came from a small, old book called “Obvious Adams“.
5 Pillars
- Speak simply. Short sentences to win and keep attention.
- Tone matters more than the words themselves.
- Say one true thing, everywhere, always.
- Answer “what’s in it for me?” fast, from the customer’s side.
- End with a clear, confident next step.
Who are you actually writing for?
You might think what differentiate writing for readers vs customers vs strangers.
The real difference in writing isn’t the platform. It’s who’s on the value receiving end.
With AI and automated ad platforms everywhere, plain, obvious copy has quietly gone out of fashion. People don’t trust machine-sounding words the way they trust a human spells. To some extent, they are right to be skeptical.
Copywriters like O.B Adams earned their instincts by physically going out, studying the product, watching how customers actually behaved.
That kind of effort isn’t the norm anymore. Today, even the observation and thinking part gets automated, which is usually a sign that the creativity underneath was never that strong to begin with.
What it takes to write good marketing copy?
It’s like being like O.B Adams, which means you can be selling anything big or small, something exciting/breathtaking, and it still reads like you are just stating the obvious. You are neither pushing the reader nor running them on a mental treadmill to “get it.”
The hardest part is not the writing. It’s staying close enough to the facts that you must not get carried away from them while observing the product or the person you are writing for.
The more obvious the fact, the better the understanding. And the better the understanding, the better the result.
Looking a subject squarely in the face and landing on the obvious conclusion isn’t easy. But it’s not impossible either.
Here is an example from modern day obvious writing;
Hiut Denim‘s jeans copy reads:
“Expertly cut using every ounce of our cutter’s 40 years of experience.”
No metaphors, no clever hooks, just a specific, true, obvious fact stated plainly about their craftsmanship.
Marketing copy vs competition
There might be a question that creeps in eventually: what will decision-makers, or competitors, think of copy this simple?
Literally who gives a sh*t. You’re not writing for them. You’re writing for the people who use your product, not the people who compete with it.
The clearer and easier your copy is to understand for your actual audience, the more profitable the business gets.
Marketing copy is just plain common sense, written down. There is no need to dress it up in white magic that impresses nobody but the ego of the person who wrote it.
Write obvious. It’s cheaper than going bankrupt while trying to sound clever.