On Headlines: The Most Expensive Sentence You Will Ever Write
Why five out of six readers never get past the first line — and what that means for your career.
I have spent more hours writing headlines than I care to confess. Entire afternoons lost to seven words. Whole evenings surrendered to the search for a phrase that might stop a stranger mid-turn of a page. And yet I would not trade a single one of those hours, because the headline is the price of admission. Without it, everything that follows — the body copy, the strategy, the months of research — is wasted breath. David Ogilvy said it plainly: on average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar. He was not exaggerating. If anything, he was being generous.
I learned this the hard way, as most of us do. In my second year at the agency, I was assigned a campaign for a mid-market watch brand. Nothing glamorous. The watches were competent — Swiss movement, sapphire crystal, the usual reassurances — but they were not Rolex, and they knew it. My creative director at the time, a man named Peter Hargreaves who had come up through the Collett Dickerson Pearce school, handed back my first three attempts without comment. On the fourth, he circled the headline and wrote in red ink: "Would you stop for this?" I had not. I had written something clever — something that played on words and amused me — but I had not written something that would make a man in a hurry pause. There is a difference between cleverness and persuasion, and it took me years to fully understand it.
The great headlines in advertising history share a quality that is difficult to name but impossible to miss. They are specific. They are unexpected. And they make a promise that the reader wants kept. Consider the most celebrated headline in the history of the automobile industry: "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock." Ogilvy did not invent this fact. He found it buried in a technical report. But he understood that a single, concrete, surprising detail is worth more than a hundred adjectives. The headline does not say the car is quiet. It does not say the car is luxurious. It demonstrates both, in a single sentence, and it does so in a way that makes you want to know more.
I have kept a notebook of headlines for nearly thirty years. Not a digital file — an actual notebook, leather-bound, the kind you can hold in your hand. In it I have recorded every headline that stopped me, whether in a newspaper, on a billboard, or in a piece of direct mail that arrived unbidden at my door. The notebook is now on its seventh volume, and I consult it regularly, not to copy but to remember what excellence feels like. When you have been writing for decades, it is easy to settle into competence. The notebook is my defence against that particular complacency.
There is a school of thought that says the headline should be short. I understand the impulse, but I distrust the rule. Some of the finest headlines in the history of the craft have been long. Claude Hopkins, who understood selling better than anyone before or since, regularly wrote headlines that ran to fifteen or twenty words. He was not being indulgent. He was being precise. A short headline that says nothing is not superior to a long headline that says exactly the right thing. The discipline is not in the word count. The discipline is in the selection.
The Three Tests
Over the years, I have developed three tests that I apply to every headline I write. They are not original — they are distilled from the accumulated wisdom of people far more talented than I am — but they have served me well, and I offer them here for whatever they are worth.
The first test is the stranger test. I imagine a person who has no interest in my product, no loyalty to my brand, and no reason to give me even a moment of their attention. Will this headline stop them? Not interest them, not intrigue them — stop them. There is a physical quality to a good headline. It interrupts. It creates a small collision between the reader's expectations and the words on the page. If my headline cannot achieve that collision, it fails the first test, and nothing else matters.
The second test is the promise test. Every effective headline makes a promise, whether explicit or implied. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" promises a specific, desirable outcome. "They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano — But When I Started to Play!" promises a story of vindication. The promise need not be grand. It need not even be entirely believable. But it must be present, and it must be something the reader wants. A headline without a promise is a door without a handle.
The third test is the specificity test. Vague headlines are invisible headlines. They slide past the eye like water over glass. I once worked on a campaign for a financial services firm whose previous agency had run advertisements with headlines like "Investing in Your Future" and "Building Wealth Together." These are not headlines. They are placeholders. They could apply to any firm in any country in any decade. They contain no information, no surprise, no reason to read further. When we replaced them with headlines that cited specific performance figures, specific strategies, and specific client outcomes, response rates increased by a factor of four. This did not surprise me. Specificity always wins, because specificity is the language of truth.
The Craft of Rewriting
I want to say something about rewriting, because it is where the real work happens and it is the part that no one sees. I typically write between forty and sixty headlines for any given advertisement before I arrive at one that satisfies me. This is not inefficiency. This is the process. The first ten headlines are the obvious ones — the ones that any competent writer would produce. The next twenty are the variations — the attempts to approach the subject from a different angle, to find a different emphasis, a different rhythm. The last twenty are where the breakthroughs occur, because by that point you have exhausted the conventional possibilities and you are forced into genuinely original territory.
I remember a campaign I worked on in the late nineties for a chain of hotels. The brief was simple enough: communicate that the hotels were comfortable without being pretentious. My first headlines were predictable. "Luxury Without the Attitude." "The Hotel That Doesn't Try Too Hard." Competent, forgettable, interchangeable. It was on headline number forty-three that I found what I was looking for. I will not reproduce it here — the client has long since moved on to other agencies and other campaigns — but I can tell you that it came from a conversation I overheard in the lobby of one of their properties. A guest was describing the bed to his wife on the telephone. He said something offhand, something specific, something true. And that became the headline. The best headlines are often found, not invented.
This is something that the young writers in our industry need to understand. The headline is not a creative exercise. It is not an opportunity for self-expression. It is a commercial instrument with a specific job to do, and that job is to persuade the maximum number of the right people to read the next sentence. Everything else — the wit, the elegance, the wordplay — is secondary to that purpose. When the wit serves the purpose, it is welcome. When it competes with the purpose, it must be cut.
What Has Changed, and What Has Not
People ask me whether the principles of headline writing have changed in the digital age. The short answer is no. The long answer is that the context has changed enormously — we are now writing for screens, for social feeds, for email subject lines — but the fundamental psychology has not changed at all. People still scan. People still decide in a fraction of a second whether to give you their attention. People still respond to specificity, to surprise, to the promise of something valuable.
What has changed is the volume of competition. When Ogilvy wrote his Rolls-Royce headline, it appeared in a print advertisement in a newspaper. The reader might see twenty or thirty advertisements in a single sitting. Today, a person scrolling through a social media feed encounters hundreds of competing messages in the same span of time. This does not make the headline less important. It makes it more important. The standards have not relaxed. They have intensified.
I am sometimes told that nobody reads anymore, that attention spans have collapsed, that the written word is dying. I find this unconvincing. What is dying is mediocrity. What is dying is the headline that asks nothing of itself and offers nothing to the reader. The headlines that work — that stop people, that get clicked, that get shared — are as powerful as they ever were. Perhaps more so, because they now stand out against a background of relentless noise.
Bill Bernbach once observed that properly practised creativity can make one ad do the work of ten. He was talking about the whole advertisement, of course, but the principle applies with particular force to the headline. A great headline is not a luxury. It is not a nice-to-have. It is the single most efficient tool in the advertiser's arsenal, and anyone who treats it as an afterthought is wasting their client's money and their own talent.
I have written perhaps ten thousand headlines in my career. Of those, I am genuinely proud of perhaps fifty. This is not false modesty. This is the arithmetic of the craft. The ratio of attempts to successes is punishing, and it does not improve with experience. What improves is your ability to recognise when you have failed, and your willingness to keep going until you have not.
The headline is the most expensive sentence you will ever write. Treat it accordingly.