Easy-to-process things feel truer, safer, and more appealing.
More quotes“Nobody reads long copy” is usually spoken by somebody hoping nobody notices they have written dull copy.
The Merrill Lynch advertisement ran to 6,540 words, seven columns, tiny type and no pictures. Ten thousand people requested a booklet mentioned near the end. Apparently the human attention span survived long enough to find the response mechanism without a dancing arrow or a thirty-second countdown.
Length was never the unit that mattered. Attention is exchanged for relevance. A pension decision, unfamiliar service or expensive purchase can justify pages because the reader has questions with money, risk or identity attached. A six-word slogan can feel interminable when none of those words earns its place.
This annoys both camps. Fans of brevity want a universal rule they can apply with scissors. Fans of long copy use “people will read if interested” as cover for throat-clearing, repetition and the founder’s childhood. The reader owes neither side ideological consistency.
The real insult is padding or starving an argument to fit a fashionable container. Cut proof and the offer becomes slippery. Add irrelevant history and the useful point disappears beneath the author’s need to demonstrate effort. Some decisions require 6,540 words. Most status updates do not require six slides.
Long copy changes the sequence of persuasion as well. One reader begins with the price, another with the evidence, another with the objection halfway down. The page can hold several entry points and still build a cumulative case. Compression often preserves the author’s preferred route and deletes the reader’s actual one.
There is a reason the response mechanism sat near the end. By then the advertisement had earned the next action through detail. Moving the booklet request to the headline might have made it more visible and less credible.
The response mechanism sat near the end of the page. Ten thousand booklet requests arrived.