The Rise and Fall of the Copy Point

Abstract

The extent to which advertisers choose to make more or less use of “informative copy”, or “copy points”, as a communicative and persuasive technique, represents a model of how an advertisement will work. With changing media technology, changing popular culture, and changing advertising fashions, it might be expected that models of effective advertising would change over time. Such changes would be reflected in the use of “copy points” in advertisements. Using a variant on the methodology developed by Resnik and Stern, extends research on the information content of advertising copy through a study of magazine advertisements over a period of 40 years. The number of copy points contained in an advertisement rose steadily from 1953 until the late 1970s. In the 1980s this trend was reversed, with the number of copy points falling sharply to below the 1953 level. While the observed fall in copy point level in the 1980s was expected, the long prior period of increase was not and may go some way to explain why the 1980s fall occurred.

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