Emotional Reversal FTW: Advertising Wishes It Were This Good

Nouveau happiness. Unlike nouveau riche—because, damn if it doesn’t all spend the same—it’s just not as good.

A lot of brands want to make us happy, not only with their products, but also with their advertising. P&G honestly made me happy to be a mother with their Thank You, Mom campaign by Wieden + Kennedy. Volkswagen made me not only happy to drive a Jetta but also just happy to be watching their Smiles commercial. Mattel even made me happy to have entered an incorrect URL with their awesome error 404 page.

The poem “By the Front Door,” by W.S. Merwin, is three lines long. It takes less time to read it than to sneeze. Yet, it conveys a kind of deep, ancient happiness that none of this marketing—that no marketing I’ve ever seen—can begin to touch. The poem sets the context and the reason for this happiness so perfectly that, at the end of the last line, after only 16 words, the reader herself is extremely happy.

This emotional connection is made through contrast and empathy, and our own reaction is part of the delight.

The poem starts with a feeling of inertia and sadness: "Rain through the morning." In the second line, "long" brings to mind "longing." Toads, ugly, moist creatures with a (probably unfounded) reputation for spreading warts, are not known for generating warm-fuzzies. And who ever thinks of a toad as a singer?

So by the time we're two-thirds of the way through the poem, a melancholy feeling has seeped in. But in the last line, where "singing" connects to "happiness," there's a reversal. As soon as we understand that the toad is singing because of the rain, because he's in the long pool, we understand. The reader can actually empathize with that toad, can be happy for him. The toad’s delighted to be in this environment, and in its delight it is singing an ancient happiness. Not only are we happy for the toad, but we’re surprised that we’re happy, and that the poem turned out happy. This sense of relief adds to what we ourselves feel.

In three lines, “By the Front Door” puts the reader through a small but real about-face of emotions and leaves us with a smile.

In an ad that could never be aired in the U.S. because we are a culture of whiners, Subaru attempts this same kind of reversal, hoping to leave us relieved and happy. It does work, but it’s heavy-handed. In its heart, this ad wishes it had even half the deep, elegant resonance of Merwin’s poem.

Can any ad? If you can think of one, let me know.







With thanks to The Writer's Almanac, @writersalmanac, for making "By the Front Door" today's poem and to Creative Market, @creativemarket, for The Best 404 Pages on the Internet.

4 Copywriting Lessons from "Elegy for a Walnut Tree"

W.S. Merwin's lovely, understated poem (read it here) has lessons for everyone, even copywriters.

1. Set up the feeling immediately.

Many great ads, as well as marketing copywriting, rely on emotion. Merwin's poem demonstrates the effect of setting that emotional stage immediately so that the feeling pervades the entire piece. At the end of the first line we're already in it:  sadness and nostalgia and loss. "Now there is no one alive" opens a wasteland of grief.

While grief is probably not our emotion of choice for marketing and advertising, the concept's the same. Proctor & Gamble set up the feeling immediately in their best "Thank You, Mom" commercials, opening on a note of tenderness with the first few images and notes of background music. Both the voice itself and the script set the stage immediately in this surprisingly touching Walmart commercial: "When I was born, the doctors said…" 

Harley Davidson did it differently in this print ad: 

2. It's all relative.

We don't need to know how old the poem's speaker is to understand how long ago he first saw the tree. "Most of my life ago" is a sweetly clever way to demonstrate the period of time in question without resorting to clichéd phrasing such as "when I was a boy" or an awkward and unfitting numeral. It's also a gorgeous turn of phrase, with a nice rhythm and both alliteration and assonance.

3. Show, don't tell: use evocative words rather than naming that which you're discussing.

The speaker of the poem never says he's sad; the words "death" and "grief" don't appear in the poem. Yet the feeling and the subject matter are tangible. Instead of coming right out and saying it, Merwin instead sprinkles in other words that evoke his meaning. For example:

• "dry grass" implies "dead grass"
• "your shade," the double meaning of which conveys "your ghost" as well as "your shadow"
• "wars"
• "silence"
• "parting"
• "absence"

In addition to clearly conveying a general emotion, these words serve to connect the

reader with his or her own specific memories or feelings.

4. Leave off the last line.

This is a hard lesson to learn, but it can make good writing great. It's hard to learn to trust yourself, and the reader, enough to stop bludgeoning the reader over the head with your point. Let it be divined.

Merwin doesn't say, "and now you're gone and I'll never see anything the same way again."* He doesn't have to. The use of past tense, especially in the last line, drives it home, but we know from the title of the poem that the tree is dead or gone—an elegy is a funeral song or poem written for the dead.

A lot of great ad writers know this trick, like this one from Adobe, but it's equally important whether you're writing the next Clio winner or copy for a grocery mailer. Telling people they should "buy now" is never as effective as making them think it themselves.

* Although, if he had, it would certainly be more poetic than that.

Walnut tree on the green. Colin Grice. Licensed under the Creative Commons license, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.