@Forestofenchantment @PurpCat @SPCmovienight @coolboymew @get The difference between old, long-form copywriting and the kind of marketing you see today has a lot more to do with the legacy of television advertising vs. the legacy of mail-order advertising. Back in the day mail-order ads had coupons you would cut out and send in. A copywriter knew exactly how well his advertisement was doing based on how many people wrote back. Pic related was one of the most successful print ads of all time. From this, the formula for print copywriting became practically scientific and the same techniques were applied even for non mail-order print advertising. And a lot of it was also based on emotions, as advertising has always been - with logical reasoning thrown in to justify an emotional purchase in the mind of the reader. Read Joseph Sugarman and David Ogilvy if you want to know more about that. Old timey copywriters would shit on television advertisers because the latter had no way of knowing how well their ad was doing. This is why TV ads had a habit of just being fucking weird instead of actively selling the product, because TV advertisers could only rely on how much their ad was talked about to gauge effectiveness instead of how many people actually made a purchase decision based on it. Classic example is this nissan ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGMI_mWmb7g . It won commercial of the year, people loved it as entertainment, meanwhile dealerships were complaining of reduced Nissan sales. TV ads were also limited by time-slots which produced the modern advertising myth that an ad has to deliver its information in a very short amount of time in order to be successful, with magazine ads moving away from the mail-order legacy and copying the low-information, high-impact advertising developed by television. Remember marketing firms weren't just selling to the consumers, they also had to sell what they were doing to the companies whose products they were making ads for. It's like making a simple, non-bloat website for a client who wants javascript bloat because it looks flashy and that's what the competition's doing.