Ivory Soap – Conversion 1920′s Style

Check out this ad (found via Duke University‘s excellent resource) and see how many influencers you can spot.. it’s way over the top and perfectly brilliant:

Subtle way of saying cheap: “Oh I’m not in the running when you talk about these high prices, I use Ivory!”

Social proof: “You’re behind the times, it’s in most of the hotel bathrooms I’ve been in in the last six months!”

Authority: “Let this well know physician…”, “Dr Verity told me I couldn’t get a better complexion soap” (great mixup of words there too – “couldn’t get a better complexion [soap]“)

Differentiators: “99 44/100% pure”, “It floats”

People Like You: “When our Julia walks abroad in one of her mistress’s last year’s blouses..” (includes subtle hint of a better life with ‘abroad’)

There are a bunch more in there too beautifully crammed to bursting. It’s like someone gave the copyeditor a list of must-have-conversion triggers and bet him he couldn’t squeeze them all in.

These old ads have much to teach us – after all, this is a frikkin’ bar of utterly generic soap with a single differentiator of “It floats!”, half the copy even suggests soap’s unnecessary at all…

Worked so well they still use the same diff today.. stick that in your pipe and smoke it Interwebs…