The Legend of Joseph Sugarman’s Headlines

“All the elements in an advertisement are primarily designed to get you to do one thing and one thing: get you to read the first sentence of the copy.” – Joseph Sugarman

Joseph Sugarman was a masterful copywriter.

He wrote The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, which was pivotal to my understanding of copywriting. This book shares Sugarman’s approach to short and powerful headlines. Joseph Sugarman’s headlines are some of the best techniques when it comes to hooking the reader.

His headline approach he called the Slipper Slide Effect.

Sugarman’s Slippery Slide Effect was simple: Hook the reader. Keep them sliding so they can’t stop reading. 

Here’s an example of how Sugarman used this on a $79 Magic Stat -a 1981 thermostat.

Remember,  there was no Amazon (one-click purchases). Only mail orders. As such, the copywriting had to be even more powerful to reach audiences because it required the customer to choose one of the options:

  1. Place a phone call and order
  2. Write and mail a check

How Joseph Sugarman wrote a headline for the $79 Magic Thermostat

Sugarman created the slippery slide effect – the purpose of the first sentence is to get prospects to read the second sentence. In other words, readers keep sliding down the page.

This was the headline he came up with for the $79 Magic Thermostat: Magic Baloney

The headline made you curious, what’s magic baloney? I want to keep reading. 

this was the sub-headline he came up with: You’ll love the way we hated the Magic Stat thermostat until an amazing thing happened. 

Sugarman’s subheadline makes you curious. You want to find out why they hated the Magic Stat and then loved it.

Sugarman creates a curiosity gap. He’s making you curious without giving you all the information.

If you want to write headlines like Joseph Sugarman, do these 3 things:

  1. Create a short, powerful headline
  2. Make people curious to read more with a curiosity gap
  3. Start with a big idea in the headline and explain it more in the subheadline

Here’s the original ad that Sugarman wrote.

– Ben

Inspiration from Adweek Copywriting Handbook.

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