0:06 Harry Dry um is probably the most
0:10 maverick human I know. Um over a very
0:12 very short amount of time with his
0:14 website marketing examples, he went from
0:18 zero to 150,000 email subscribers in
0:21 like three years. Truly phenomenal. And
0:25 like he did it largely by himself. I've
0:26 seen people describe Harry as the best
0:30 copywriter in the entire world. and uh
0:34 today he is with us. So with all that
0:37 being said uh please give Harry Dry a
0:38 huge round of applause. [Applause]
0:41 [Applause] [Music]
0:47 [Music] [Applause]
0:48 [Applause] [Music]
0:53 [Music]
0:56 You really [Music]
1:05 homepages, storytelling,
1:09 positioning, offers, ads,
1:11 hooks, social media,
1:19 sales. Wait, it's all copyrightiting. [Music]
1:22 [Music]
1:32 been. I did not think I'd start as a
1:34 spaceman. Uh
1:37 neither did I think I would
1:40 uh start with a book I read when I was
1:50 Label. Then Toad began to bang his head
1:51 against the wall.
1:53 Why are you banging your head against
1:55 the wall? asked frog. I hope that if I
1:57 bang my head against the wall hard
1:58 enough, it will help me to think of a
2:02 story, said Toad. Now, I've never uh had
2:05 a conversation with with Toad. But if I
2:07 did, I'd say Toad, keep banging your
2:10 your head. If you think um writing's
2:12 hard, it's because you're trying to do
2:15 it well. Uh I recently moved house in
2:16 London. I've been trying to find a place
2:20 to rent, which means traversing um lots
2:22 and lots of tube lines. And in
2:24 preparation for this talk, I thought on
2:26 the side of the tube, I would take some
2:28 some pictures to show you the problem, I
2:30 think, with with advertising or or
2:33 copyrighting or marketing. Um so, at 8
2:35 a.m. um a few weeks ago, I got off the
2:39 tube at Barbin and I was greeted by a
2:40 jointist telling me to live life to the
2:44 max. I got off at uh Farington and I saw
2:48 destination nuclear be a force for good. Sainsburries
2:50 Sainsburries
2:54 um think that the best way of uh
2:55 demonstrating the relationship the
2:58 relationship they have with farmers is
3:03 flat imaginary cardboard carrots.
3:05 At this point I was in West Henszington
3:07 I believe or maybe it was South South
3:10 Hamstead and I saw Zlatan Ibrahimovic
3:12 where your money works. For those of you
3:13 who don't know Zlatan Ibrahimovic and
3:15 XTB that's like Wayne Rooney giving you stock
3:21 tips. I got off onto the Lisbuff line
3:23 now. I think maybe maybe Liverpool
3:24 Street is the place for me to start my
3:28 new my new life. And I see freedom pay
3:30 well pay unleash the power of pay. I
3:32 didn't know we had a a problem paying
3:40 point. At this point, I I visited a
3:41 couple of places. They weren't for me,
3:43 and I was very, very hungry. So, I found
3:46 myself a chocolate bar, dairy, milk, and
3:48 more because nothing screams conviction
3:50 quite like and
3:54 more. Selling so well, it's reduced to
3:57 clear. Liverpool Street was not the the
3:59 place for me. there's too much hustle
4:01 and there's too much bustle. So, I took
4:03 the uh the the the Weaver line to Stoke
4:05 Newton. Now, anybody who who has the
4:07 Weaver line would know that you have
4:10 Wi-Fi on that line. I did not know this.
4:12 Um so, I get out my phone and I open up
4:13 Twitter and Durham University is
4:17 promising uh programs which will equip
4:21 you with the essential skills to excel.
4:22 And I'd like to ask Durham, what do you
4:24 mean by essential skills? it genuinely,
4:26 not sarcastically. And what do you mean
4:28 by Excel?
4:32 Um, data do promised me a 360 view of my
4:34 business. You get that. You get the
4:37 picture. Okay, this is um the problem.
4:38 So, I arrive in Stoke Newington where
4:39 I'm going to stay for the night and see
4:40 if I like the neighborhood. And it turns
4:42 out I do. I now live in in Stoke
4:45 Newington. And I upload these uh
4:47 pictures of the day to convert them to
4:50 JPEGs from my phone. And I see SEMrush
4:52 promising to beat your competitors in
4:55 less time. Okay. Okay. There's one ad I
4:57 like that day. I saw 57 and I I quite
4:59 like this one from the ordinary.
5:00 Designed to clarify that not tested on
5:03 animals is already industry standard,
5:06 not not a product benefit. Um what's the
5:08 problem? Like I feel like it's very easy
5:09 to stand up on a stage and and like
5:11 pontificate and and criticize. It's much
5:14 harder to do. Um but I still think we
5:15 should try and understand like what's
5:16 going wrong. And George Orwell writing
5:19 in 1946 summarizes the problem much
5:21 better than I
5:25 can. As I have tried to show, modern
5:28 writing at its worst does not consist in
5:31 picking out words for the sake of their
5:34 meaning and inventing images in order to
5:36 make the meaning clearer. It consists in
5:37 gumming together long strips of words
5:39 which have already been set in order by
5:42 somebody else. The attraction of writing
5:51 easy. So, so what's going wrong? Okay,
5:52 what's going wrong? That's what I think
5:53 is going wrong. Now, I'm going to give
5:55 you three little ideas so you can you
5:56 can spot it in your own work because I
5:58 do this and I'm sure a few of you do.
6:00 The first one is is how do you stop
6:02 dumbing together words set in order by
6:04 somebody else? Well, it's a very obvious
6:06 answer. You can search them on Google
6:07 with curly quotes. Now, if you put
6:09 something in curly quotes in Google, it
6:12 it's a direct match. So, you can see how
6:13 many people have wrote the same thing
6:16 before. So, if we remember um Freedom
6:18 Pay, take unleash the power of pay. I
6:20 click their website, I see take your
6:21 payments to the next
6:25 level. There's genuinely hundreds of
6:27 companies who are describing their their
6:28 payment provider as take your payments
6:30 to the next level. The words have been
6:33 killed. They've lost all their meaning.
6:34 I'll give you one more. Read read it
6:36 aloud what you write in a phony American
6:38 accent. That's not original.
6:40 Unfortunately, it's in the copy book and
6:42 I forgot who who first said it. Um let's
6:49 Semrush. Hi, I'm Troy Mccclure. You
6:52 might remember me from such adverts as
6:54 beat your competitors in less
6:57 time. If we try that with the ordinary,
6:58 it doesn't quite work as well. Hi, I'm
7:00 Troy Mccclure. You might remember me
7:03 from such adverts as designed to clarify
7:05 that not tested on animals is already
7:06 industry standard, not a product
7:09 benefit. It doesn't work because um this
7:13 ad is quite sincere. It's a It's a fact.
7:15 It's honest. You can't parody. You can't
7:18 cliche honesty. Finally, could a
7:21 competitor uh sign this advert off? Jim
7:24 Dury once wrote um never write an ad a
7:26 competitor can sign. So, Durham
7:28 University, Essential Skills to Excel.
7:30 Plymouth University could write exactly
7:32 the same ad. Our marketing program will
7:34 equip you with the essential skills to
7:38 excel. University of
7:40 Plymouth. Keel University. Nobody's
7:42 perfect. number one in England for
7:45 overall student satisfaction. 2014 Keel
7:51 2015 Keel 2016 Keel 2017 2018 Keel
7:54 Plymouth can't do that ad. Neither can
7:57 Durham. I think in one word the problem
7:59 I'm getting at here is
8:02 abstraction. Thinking is is hard. Before
8:04 there were computers, there were
8:07 ideas. So we we we hide away. We pull
8:10 back away from concrete reality and we
8:12 we talk use words which you have on your
8:14 little pads here which I I gave you a
8:16 little abstract word bingo. You talk
8:18 about um cutting edge. You talk about
8:20 take. You talk about whatever whatever
8:22 whatever it looks like this. This is
8:24 what this is what most websites look
8:26 like. It's pre-fabricated words tacked
8:28 together like sections of a
8:30 pre-fabricated hen
8:32 house. Now I don't think AI is
8:34 particularly good at solving this
8:36 problem but it's not bad at spotting it.
8:39 So, a little prompt I found useful is um
8:40 copy and paste your homepage, your
8:43 advert, your your company statement,
8:46 whatever into chatbt and and ask read
8:47 the following copy. Can you
8:50 highlight every word or sentence which
8:52 contains abstract verbs, abstract nouns,
8:54 abstract adjectives, abstract adverbs,
8:56 and cliches? And you'll, if you're not,
8:58 you know, at the top of your game, you
8:59 will get back a long list of things to
9:01 change. On the way home tonight, have a
9:03 go with abstract word bingo with your
9:05 own your own homepages. You spot one
9:07 word, that's a shot of pickle juice. You
9:09 get five in a row, that's the whole bottle.
9:10 bottle.
9:13 Um, I think there's two problems here.
9:15 Why, why do we abstract? Why do we hide?
9:17 Why do we carry away? I think firstly,
9:18 most companies have little to say. And
9:20 secondly, they're not too good at saying
9:22 it. So, what do they do? They imitate.
9:24 It's easy to imitate. We feel very safe
9:26 when we're just when we imitate. So, in
9:28 the last 10 minutes of this talk, I'm
9:30 going to give you a little solution. Not
9:32 a big solution, a little solution. I'm
9:33 going to try and help you work out how
9:35 do you have something to say and
9:36 secondly we're going to try and work out
9:38 how to say it well. All right, part two
9:41 having something to say. Robbley, switch
9:43 to Robbley email marketing for
9:45 everybody. Now, would anyone in the
9:46 audience, it's a very difficult
9:48 question, would anyone in the audience
9:50 have an idea of of how to improve
10:00 Who's it for? Louie says, "Who's it
10:02 for?" And he's right. The problem with
10:04 Robbley is you could give that to the
10:06 best writer in the
10:08 world, copywriter in the world,
10:10 whatever. And they couldn't do anything
10:11 with it because they have nothing to
10:12 say. They got nothing to say in the
10:15 first place. It's email marketing for
10:17 everybody. There's 365 email marketing
10:19 companies. Mailchimp is is the biggest.
10:21 They're also email marketing for
10:22 everybody. So why would anybody ever
10:24 choose Robly?
10:26 This is when we when we think about
10:30 copywriting, it's it's a mistake, a big
10:32 mistake to think it's just writing words
10:34 or write words which sell. I was once in
10:36 a meeting and they said they said,
10:38 "Harry, come up with a
10:40 line." You need to have something to say
10:42 in the first place. Below the iceberg,
10:43 we have what are you competing against?
10:46 Why are you? Who's it for? When's it
10:48 for? What is it? What are you not? Wh
10:50 why did you start the product in the
10:51 first place? What's your point of view?
10:53 Why do you exist? When you have these
10:55 elements in place, summarized by perhaps
10:57 story and positioning, it's really easy
11:00 to write words which sell. Okay, that
11:01 was an awful lot to cover. So, we're
11:03 going to talk about two of them. What
11:05 are you up against? And why
11:08 you? I like to lay this out um very
11:10 simply with left and right. What am I up
11:11 against? What What am I competing
11:13 against on the left side and why you on
11:16 the right hand side? You get this right.
11:19 Um it's pretty easy to write words which
11:20 sells. So, here's a bacon company,
11:23 Baker's Delight. We're for real. What is
11:25 bake the baking company competing
11:28 against? Factory-made bread. Why you?
11:30 Well, it's baked in bakeries. Bread in
11:33 bakeries takes better. So, you have real
11:34 bread isn't made in factories. It's
11:37 baked in bakeries. And I have an example
11:39 for you to to work out yourself. Um, I
11:41 was born near Southampton in Portsmouth. And
11:43 And
11:45 in you're bottom of the league.
11:47 league.
11:50 Um in in Southampton there is there is
11:51 eight swimming schools for children all
11:53 very closely pro proximitated in in
11:55 that's not a word but within a within a
11:58 5 uh kilometer radius 500 meter radius I
12:00 should say. Now they will say the same
12:01 thing swimming lessons Southampton
12:03 welcome to Southampton based quality
12:05 lessons affordable prices learn to swim
12:07 at West Swim School. They will say we do
12:09 swim lessons. So I want you to think
12:10 you're now in charge of setting up a
12:13 swim school in Southampton for children.
12:14 How would you position it? How would you
12:16 think about it? I'm going to give you
12:18 one minute with the person next to you,
12:19 but I will give you one little clue of
12:21 how I might approach this. I would start
12:23 with the left hand side. Most swim
12:26 schools. Uh there's busy classes.
12:27 There's they don't really teach much.
12:29 There's supervised play which happens
12:31 there. People splash around and there's
12:33 no clear goal. It's just like have a
12:35 swim for an hour and enjoy. So, how
12:37 might how might you think about position
12:40 in a swim school? One minute now with your
12:40 your
12:43 partner. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay, ladies
12:46 and gentlemen. Okay. Would anyone like
12:53 One more suggestion from this side of
12:56 the room. Enjoy the sun. Pardon? Parents
12:59 enjoy the sun. I like it. I like it.
13:02 These are positions. Okay. I how how I
13:03 would approach this is we have busy
13:05 classes. So what about if our swim
13:07 school is just three kids to one class?
13:08 Supervised play. What's the opposite of
13:10 supervised play? Well, we actually teach
13:12 your kids to swim. We don't just splash
13:14 around. There's no clear goal. Okay,
13:16 what about if the swim school is
13:18 positioned as ditching armbands within
13:21 six weeks? Okay, you end up with Nitro
13:24 Swim School. Others do lessons. We teach
13:25 swimming. It's the same idea. When you
13:27 have something to say, you can get out
13:29 of the way. You don't have to be clever.
13:32 You don't have to be be technical. You
13:33 should all be a little bit less
13:35 technical. Um I'm going to skip through
13:38 this one. Uh part three, saying it
13:40 saying it well. Okay, this is the the
13:42 conclusion of the the talk. I I was
13:44 thinking you know there's so much to
13:46 talk about here and I was going to give
13:48 you three things which I have helped me
13:50 most in my career and none of them are
13:52 from me. Um we're going to start off with
13:53 with
13:57 uh a book by Claude Hopkins uh in 1926
14:01 page 22 actually. Um the chapter is
14:04 called just salesmanship and he writes
14:06 there is one simple and right way to
14:09 answer many advertising questions. Ask
14:12 yourself, would this help a salesman
14:15 sell the goods? Would it help me sell if
14:17 I met the buyer in
14:19 person? Whenever I write something, I I
14:21 think about these words. So, let me let
14:22 me give you an
14:24 example. You are a saleserson. Whenever
14:25 you're writing something, you want to
14:27 imagine yourself with the product in
14:29 your hand walking to a front door.
14:31 You're about to knock on the door. What
14:32 are you going to say to the person when
14:35 when they open the door? Okay, so we're
14:38 selling Wi-Fi. We're selling Starlink.
14:39 You knock on the door, you're not going
14:41 to say, "Hey, I got this new Wi-Fi. It's
14:43 effortless setup and it's got instant
14:45 connectivity for your household." You're
14:47 a salesperson. What would a salesperson
14:49 do? They'd get out the the the Starlink
14:52 in their hands and they would stick it
14:54 on the ground and and they'd say,
14:56 "Pointed at the sky, plug it in.
14:58 Directions work in either order." That's
15:00 how simple it is. That's your Wi-Fi.
15:04 Okay, you might get a sale. MacBook
15:06 Air. You're trying to sell the MacBook
15:08 Air. If you're not a salesperson, you
15:09 might say, "Oh, it's 40 millimeters
15:11 thin." What would a salesperson do? What
15:14 would they write? And you have you have
15:15 Steve Jobs
15:18 who puts the MacBook Air into a yellow
15:20 manila envelope to show how thin it is.
15:23 That's the act of a saleserson. I have I
15:26 have one or two more actually. Uh this
15:28 one is found in the copy book by Richard
15:31 Forester and and he says, "Yeah, you
15:32 want to turn a matter of fact into a
15:34 matter of opinion into a matter of
15:36 fact." Okay,
15:39 so here we have seven lines. Built for
15:42 the love of the drive style. It's hard
15:44 to define, but easy to recognize. There are
15:45 are
15:48 3,389 men at our Wolfsburg factory with
15:50 one job. Make your entrance in the
15:52 allnew M2 coupe. There's more leg room
15:54 up front than you'd get in a limousine.
15:56 Uncompromising power and dynamics are in
15:58 your hands. A symphony of high
15:59 performance, aesthetics, and attitude.
16:02 Two of them are matter of fact, five a
16:04 matter of opinion.
16:06 Wolfsburg factory and there's more leg
16:07 room in in in up front than in a
16:09 limousine. When England got knocked out
16:12 of the Euros um newspapers wrote their
16:13 headlines. This was actually not when
16:14 they got knocked out. This is when they
16:16 were vying for Southgate's head when we
16:18 drew nil nil to
16:23 Slovenia and um the sun sack Southgate.
16:24 The team aren't clicking. This is all
16:26 matter of opinion. You want to write
16:28 matter of fact. So the times I I got the
16:29 newspaper at the time and I thought it
16:31 was brilliant. When will the stars align?
16:33 align?
16:38 682 passes against Slovenia. One pass
16:41 between Kain and Bellingham. That's how
16:42 you turn matter of opinion. The team
16:44 aren't clicking into a matter of fact,
16:46 and that's what you want to do in your
16:49 in your writing. Here's Yum. Woof. Uh,
16:52 tasty ingredients. Leading chef packed
16:54 with chicken. This is all matter of
16:56 opinion. We want to turn this into a
16:58 matter of fact. Instead of a leading
17:00 chef, it could be a New York City chef.
17:02 Instead of packed with chicken, you
17:04 could say the number one ingredient is
17:06 fresh chicken. Matter of fact, tasty
17:08 ingredients. How could you turn that
17:10 into from a matter of opinion into a
17:13 matter of fact? Any guesses?
17:17 Pardon? Fresh. Fresh. Yeah. Or you or
17:19 you could remember that you're a
17:22 saleserson and you'd pick up the dog
17:23 food and you'd eat it. All ingredients
17:26 you would eat. That's that's fact. I
17:27 will eat the chicken. I will eat the dog food.
17:28 food.
17:32 Um last lastly I have two minutes and
17:33 I'm going to tell you that this is from
17:36 Eugene Schwarz breakthrough advertising
17:37 all writing is just a search for
17:40 juxosition. Now this sounds weird and
17:42 technical but honestly I've made a
17:45 career from from this line. Um you can
17:49 japose words big small 22,000 and 2,000.
17:51 That's how I I wrote this advert.
17:53 Marketers you will spend 22,000 hours of
17:56 your career writing. Spend two learning
17:59 how to do it well. 22 and the two. Okay.
18:01 But you can also juxtapose
18:04 ideas. These are words everything
18:06 nothing. Okay. Simple ideas is a little
18:09 bit more technical. Um I wrote an ad for
18:11 for RAMP uh the finance company in
18:13 America uh last year and I was given
18:16 this idea that 99% of companies were
18:18 satisfied with ramp in 2024. There's no
18:19 justosition here. Why do I care about
18:21 justosition? It's because we only know
18:23 the hot water because of the cold water.
18:25 We only know it's sunny today because
18:27 it's been freezing for 2
18:30 weeks. So I think how can I how can I
18:32 create a little story from this? How can
18:33 I pull out juxtaposition? And the answer
18:35 isn't too complicated. Here we go. Till
18:37 death do his part. This is the idea. But
18:38 the first line is what I want you to
18:41 look at. Eight. That is how many
18:43 businesses tried Ramp's corporate card
18:46 in 2024 and decided it was not for them.
18:49 That's the cold tap right there. Now 8
18:51 looks like an awfully small number when
18:52 you compare it to
18:55 12,059. That's how many businesses tried
18:57 our beloved corporate card in 2024 and
18:59 decided it was the perfect fit. That's
19:00 how you take a number like
19:03 99.9 and you you I don't know what you
19:04 do but you make it a bit more
19:06 interesting. Um I'm writing an essay
19:08 tomorrow which I've finished. I'm going
19:10 to publish it tomorrow. And my idea was
19:12 that big ideas come from
19:14 conviction. Big ideas come from
19:16 conviction. There's no hot tap. There's
19:18 no cold tap. So I wrote big ideas have
19:20 much less to do with creativity than you
19:22 think and much more to do with
19:24 conviction. You have the two. You have
19:27 point A, point B, the cold and the hot.
19:29 There's no big ending. I just say thank
19:30 you very much for so many people here.
19:33 It's really a privilege to talk. And um
19:35 Ran's on next and he's great. Over and out.
