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Brand differentiation done right, trailblazing women in advertising & copy resource of the week
Kimberly Houston
July 28, 2024
Hey, hi, howdy, and welcome to Issue #22 of The Subhead, a bi-weekly newsletter about copywriting, marketing & media, and a look at some of the women who make it great.
In today’s edition:
✨ This week in freelancing
✨ Brand differentiation done right
✨ Trailblazing Women in Advertising: Ilon Specht, Copywriter & Creative Director
✨ Copy Resource of the Week: Harry Dry’s Copywriting Examples
✨ Just for Fun
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This week in freelancing …
A few days ago, I came to the end of a client project I’ve been working on for the last 8 weeks or so, one that was taking up a fair amount of my billable hours each week … and it feels odd to have that open space in my schedule again.
It won’t last long, because I have additional work waiting to fill those hours right back up, but I did give myself a couple of days to enjoy a very light schedule and the bandwidth to work on a couple of my own creative projects.
Yay for flexibility!
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Brand differentiation done right
“The day I awoke & started dreaming …”
That’s the headline on the website home page of a luxury hotel called The Parker Palm Springs.
The rest of the copy on the home page consists of a “short memoir” that shares a day in the life of an ideal hotel stay.
So creative, and a very different experience than most hotel websites, many of which (even for the nicer hotels) feel much more transactional and utilitarian in their approach.
As I always like to say, you want to “paint a picture” for your ideal clients and customers in your brand communications, and The Parker Palm Springs does this brilliantly.
I shared this example on LinkedIn recently with similar commentary, but you can go directly to The Parker Palm Springs website if you want to check it out for yourself.
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Trailblazing Women in Advertising: Ilon Specht, Copywriter & Creative Director
Ilon Specht, who passed away in April of this year at 81, was a copywriter & creative director at several Manhattan advertising agencies, beginning in the mid-1960s when she was still a teenager.
When I saw the subhead of the obit in The New York Times a couple of months ago – “She came up with the feminist campaign, for a hair color product, when challenging the notions of men at her ad agency” – I knew I had to learn more.
That obituary began with the line, “Ilon Specht, who rebelled against her patriarchal male colleagues at an advertising agency by writing a successful television commercial for L’Oréal’s Preference hair color product that carried an enduring message of feminist empowerment, died on April 20 at her son’s home in Barrington, R.I., near Providence.”
That famous L’Oreal ad was created by Specht in 1973 while she was a copywriter at the McCann-Erickson (now McCann) agency in New York.
Here’s the back story of how the ad was developed:
Specht and some of her male colleagues were discussing what the ad should be. According to Specht, in the men’s concept of the ad, a woman was sitting by a window with the wind blowing through the curtains, and “was a complete object. I don’t even think she spoke. They just didn’t get it.”
This made Specht angry, so she went off and wrote a much-improved version of the ad in about five minutes.
You know the one, it’s one many of us grew up seeing – either the original ad, or other iterations of it, using the line, “Because I’m worth it,” “Because you’re worth it,” or “Because we’re worth it.”
As reported in The New York Times obit, two versions of the ad were shot, the one Specht wrote, and a second one preferred by her male colleagues, in which the woman’s words “were rewritten and delivered by a man as he strolls in a meadow with a woman who looks adoringly at him. She stays silent save for a giggle.”
I mean, yikes. 😬
Specht said her version of the ad was not for men, but “for women and other human beings.”
As recounted in a piece written by Malcolm Gladwell in the March 1999 issue of The New Yorker about Specht’s work on the ad:
She spoke about what it meant to be young in a business dominated by older men, and about what it felt like to write a line of copy that used the word “woman” and have someone cross it out and write “girl.”
“I was a twenty-three-year-old girl—a woman,” she said. “What would my state of mind have been? I could just see that they had this traditional view of women, and my feeling was that I'm not writing an ad about looking good for men, which is what it seems to me that they were doing. I just thought, Fuck you. I sat down and did it, in five minutes. It was very personal. I can recite to you the whole commercial, because I was so angry when I wrote it.”
When the agency tested both ads with audiences, Specht’s version “far outperformed the other version.”
Specht left McCann-Erickson in 1974 for Jordan McGrath Case & Partners, where she worked as a creative director, overseeing campaigns for Life cereal and Underalls pantyhose, among others. While at Jordan McGrath, she became executive vice president and executive creative director, but left in 2000 when the agency was acquired by Havas Advertising.
She later opened an antiques store called Hacienda, in Ojai, California.
Years later when talking about the message of the L’Oreal commercial, Specht said, “It’s about humans, it’s not about advertising. It’s about caring for people. Because we’re all worth it or no one is worth it.” 💖
You can learn more about Ilon Specht at the inline links above, and / or check out:
She came up with the feminist campaign, for a hair color product, when challenging the notions of men at her ad agency.
True Colors, by Malcolm Gladwell
Two-time Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot is the filmmaker behind The Final Copy of Ilon Specht
A landmark anniversary for the iconic signature of L'Oréal Paris
L'Oreal 'Because You're Worth It' – 1973 [26 seconds]
The iconic original L’Oreal ad
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Copy Resource of the Week: Copywriting Examples by Harry Dry
I debated sharing this resource, because it occurred to me that it might be more useful for other copywriters, rather than for the lay person writing their own copy.
But then I thought … no, this a great resource for exactly the person writing their own copy.
Created by Harry Dry, the Marketing Examples site is a collection of marketing examples and short, sweet, & simple copywriting tips.
The website is full of actual copy from businesses many will recognize, with side-by-side comparisons & before-and-after copy improvements. [👈This is the gold, right here.]
The images and illustrations take these examples to a whole ‘nother level.
I bet I could show this to a 9-year-old, and they’d come away understanding at least something about writing words that help sell. 😊
Check out the wizardry here:
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Just for Fun
Until I read this article in Garden & Gun about the North Carolina Musician Murals project, I had no idea so many well-known musical geniuses were from right here in North Carolina, where I live … including Thelonious Monk, Roberta Flack, John Coltrane, and the legendary Nina Simone, to name just a few.
Artist Scott Nurkin immortalizes Tar Heel jazz, rock, country, and punk greats in their hometowns
And in other music news …
I came across this fascinating story in Kyle Westaway’s Weekend Briefing No. 529, about an Australian organization called Pub Choir that …
“. . . brings large crowds of people together to sing popular songs in three-part harmony. Their events blend music, comedy and drinking to create a fun, euphoric experience. The founders believe that everyone can sing, even if they are just average singers. By the end of one of their events, the entire crowd of approximately 1,600 people sang Creep by Radiohead. The video highlights how Pub Choir has them joyfully singing and creating a beautiful musical moment from a mass of amateur voices.”
Check out the Pub Choir performance of Radiohead’s Creep here. (One of my favorite songs of all time, by the way!)
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Alrighty then.
That’s all for this week, my friend.
Be well. Stay curious. See you again in two weeks, on August 11.
Warmly,
Kimberly