Two ads. Same product. Same nutrition facts. Same target customer. One ran in Prevention magazine, paid for by Abbott. The other one I built to keep learning copywriting.
Ad 1: What Abbott Ran
Look at it as a reader. Not as a marketer. What is this ad asking you to do?
It's asking you to feel something about Ensure. That's it. The bottle is the hero. The chocolate splash is the hero. The word "Delish" is what Abbott thinks of the product. Nowhere in the ad is the reader.
Walk through the elements:
Headline: "Delish" * One word. With a footnote. This is the most expensive piece of real estate on the page and Abbott spent it on an adjective the brand uses to describe itself. Ogilvy said you spend eighty cents of every advertising dollar on the headline.
Subhead: "Taste buds approved. Muscles fed for up to 7 hours." The "7 hours" is a real claim that could anchor the whole ad. It's buried under "taste buds approved," which means what?
The three stats: 42g protein, 23 vitamins, 2g sugar All listed vertically. No comparison. No frame. Just numbers floating in chocolate. 42g of protein is impressive only if you know what 42g of protein normally costs and tastes like. The reader doesn't.
The image Bottle and chocolate splash. Professional photography. Tells you the product looks tasty. Doesn't tell you why you should buy it instead of something else.
The offer: $4 coupon, QR code Discount-led. The ad never made the case for buying in the first place, so it jumps to discounting.
The tagline: "Ensure yourself" Brand wordplay. Doesn't sell anything.
Add it up. The ad is a brand statement. It assumes the reader already wants Ensure and just needs a coupon to convert. For the small slice of Prevention readers already shopping for protein drinks, it works fine. For everyone else, it's wallpaper.
Ad 2: What I Built
Now look at this one. Same product. What is this ad asking the reader to do?
It's asking the reader to make a specific decision in a specific moment. You're hungry. You're about to grab something. You can grab this, or you can grab a candy bar. Here's what each one does to your body.
Walk through the elements:
Headline: "LOOK… YOU'RE GOING TO GRAB SOMETHING ANYWAY." Direct address. Names the reader's actual behavior. Caples had four rules for headlines that work: self-interest, news, curiosity, or a quick easy way. This hits self-interest by the third word. The "Look…" is conversational, like a friend stopping you at the vending machine.
Subhead: "So let's make it the RIGHT thing." Pivots the headline into a choice. The reader is now inside the decision, with the brand standing next to them instead of pitching at them.
The comparison: Candy Bar vs. Ensure Max Protein This is the engine of the entire ad. Same three Ensure stats Abbott used, plus the candy bar's numbers Abbott would never put on a page. Anchored against a competitor every reader already understands.
Human brains don't process absolute values well. They process relative values without thinking about it. "42g of protein" is a fact. "10x the protein of a candy bar with 100 fewer calories" is a decision.
The middle callout: "100 FEWER CALORIES AND 10X THE PROTEIN. THAT'S A DIFFERENT OUTCOME." Translates the table into a single sentence that names what the reader actually wants. Not more protein, not fewer calories. A different outcome.
The loss frame: "Hungry again in an hour." Four words. Kahneman documented that humans hate losing about twice as much as they enjoy gaining. Abbott's ad listed gains. This one shows the loss the reader walks into if they pick the candy bar. Same data, opposite psychology.
The verdict: "That candy bar isn't helping you. It's just buying you another craving in an hour. This? This actually feeds you." Plain speech. Reads like someone who already ate the candy bar and regretted it. Halbert lived in this voice. Hopkins called it "salesmanship in print."
The three benefits at the bottom High protein, low sugar, smart swap. Compressed reason-why. The reader has already been persuaded by the comparison. These are stamps confirming the decision.
The close: "NEXT TIME YOUR HAND REACHES OUT… MAKE SURE IT GRABS THE RIGHT THING." Plants the ad in the reader's next moment of hunger, after they put the magazine down. Most ads die when the reader turns the page. This one keeps working in the kitchen later that afternoon.
Same product. Same nutrition. Every element doing different work.
What Changed, Mechanically
Five things moved between the two ads. The headline change is obvious.
1. The headline did actual work. Abbott spent the eighty cents on a brand adjective. The rewrite spent it on a sentence that meets the reader inside a behavior they're already performing. Everything downstream follows from this.
2. The numbers got an anchor. 42g of protein is a fact about the product. 10x the protein of a candy bar with 100 fewer calories is a fact about the reader's life.
3. The comparison forced a choice. Abbott's ad has no competitor in it. The rewrite puts the candy bar on the page and makes the reader pick. Hopkins called this comparison advertising in 1923. Asking a reader to compare two things triggers a different mental process than asking them to evaluate one thing alone. The first one ends in a decision. The second one ends in a shrug.
4. Loss aversion got engaged. "Hungry again in an hour" is the most quietly effective line in the rewrite. Abbott listed everything Ensure gives you. The rewrite listed what the candy bar takes from you. Behavioral economics says the second one hits about twice as hard.
5. The reader was named and this is the deepest change. Abbott's ad has no reader in it, just a bottle. The rewrite has a reader reaching for something to eat, with the brand standing next to them helping them choose. Schwartz called this matching the awareness level of your prospect. He argued prospects exist at five stages, from completely unaware of the problem all the way up to most-aware and ready to buy. The Abbott ad assumes most-aware. It speaks to someone already shopping for protein drinks, already convinced they need 42g, already comparing brands. That's a tiny slice of the magazine's audience. The rewrite drops down a level. It speaks to someone who is problem-aware (I'm hungry and I'm about to eat something) but not solution-aware (I had no idea a protein shake could replace this candy bar). That's a bigger audience and a more persuadable one. This is the change most owners miss when they look at why their ads underperform. They write to the customer who's already ready to buy and ignore the much larger group who hasn't gotten there yet.
Notice what didn't move. The product. The nutrition. The price. The brand. Every input is identical. The copy did all the work.
Where I'd Pause my on the Rewrite
A piece this opinionated needs to admit what it trades off.
Abbott is protecting brand equity across thousands of products. Their ad won't ever say "candy bar" out loud because they don't want to anchor Ensure in junk food territory. The rewrite does the opposite. It uses the candy bar to make Ensure look superior, which is mechanically right for response, but it pins Ensure to a comparison Abbott's brand team most likely would never approve.
Tradeoff: response now vs. brand position over time. For a national consumer brand, this matters. For 95% of businesses reading this, it doesn't. You're not protecting brand equity across a thousand SKUs. You're trying to get a phone to ring.
The other thing worth calling out. The rewrite is one creative. One headline, one frame, one comparison. The right way to do this is to build five or ten variations and test them against each other. Different headlines. Different comparisons. Different photos. Run the winner against five more variations. Keep grinding.
The Bigger Point
Copywriting is the most underused leverage point in almost every business I look at.
Most owners I talk to want more leads, more conversions, more revenue. They're already spending money on something. Direct mail. Facebook ads. LinkedIn content. A website few convert on. Email campaigns with a 1.8% click rate.
The instinct is to spend more. Hire another agency. Buy more impressions. Run more campaigns.
The math says to do the opposite. Caples documented one ad outselling another by 19.5x with the same product and the same media spend. The only difference was the copy. You don't have to believe that exact number. Even a 2x lift, applied to spend you're already making, dwarfs the return on adding more budget to the same bad copy. Most owners I meet have a copy problem dressed up as a budget problem, and they spend the next twelve months making it worse.
AI was supposed to fix this. The cost of generating copy collapsed to near zero. Anyone with a laptop can produce a thousand headlines an hour. And yet the copy I see on websites, ads, Facebook, Meta, LinkedIn. Almost all of it is worse than ever. More polished, less effective. Slicker words wrapped around no argument.
The reason is simple. People are using AI to copy their competitors faster. Same headlines and same offers, the same trusted-partner language, the same stock photos of people in business suits shaking hands. Polishing the same mediocre ad your competitor ran last year doesn't generate sales. It generates a slightly better-looking mediocre ad.
AI is a tool. It doesn't excuse you from learning the rules. Caples published Tested Advertising Methods in 1932 and the rules still apply. Hopkins, Schwartz, and Halbert covered the rest. If you're prompting AI without knowing what those four taught, you're getting average output dressed up in confident language.
The owners who will win in the next ten years are the ones who learn the craft first and then use AI to accelerate it. The ones using AI to skip the craft will produce more output, faster, and watch their response rates keep dropping.
What This Means If You're Running Ads
Three things to take from this comparison.
Spend most of your time on the headline. If you have an hour to make an ad better, give forty-five minutes to the headline and the rest to everything else combined. Ogilvy wrote 37 headlines for a single Sears Roebuck assignment and only thought three were worth submitting. That's the discipline.
Anchor your numbers against something the reader already knows. "10x the protein" lands harder than "42 grams" because the comparison is doing the persuading, not the number.
And then test in volume. One ad against one ad is the wrong unit. Five against five, then run the winners against five more. Caples didn't get to 19.5x by being a genius. He got there by testing harder than the next guy.
The Abbott ad will run. It will sell some Ensure. Abbott has enough distribution and brand recognition that even average copy generates revenue.
You probably don't have that cushion. You have to actually persuade somebody, and the cheapest way to do it is sit down, learn how to write copy that does the work, build five or six variations of every important piece, and put them against each other in a disciplined test. The skill compounds. Bad copywriters who keep producing bad copy faster don't catch up.