In the 1970s, copywriting great Gary Bencivenga co-founded an ad agency.
To get business in the door, he took out an ad that made a remarkable offer in its headline:
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“Announcing: an ad agency that guarantees to beat your best ad by at least 10 percent, or you pay us nothing.”
He then promised to return the ad spend if his version failed:
“You test us. If we don’t win, not only won’t you pay us anything, we will pay for whatever you spent to run the test. In other words, if you take out an ad in The Wall Street Journal and spend $10,000 on our half of the test—and our half loses—we’ll give you $10,000.”
It was a bold claim—an incredible claim—especially for a new agency. But Bencivenga was that confident, in part because he used an undeniably effective system for collecting feedback and refining ad copy:
The CRIT System.
I’ll explain but, first, I should warn you:
This system s-t-r-e-c-h-e-s out the writing process, making it longer, more tedious. It’s also uncomfortable, painful, scarring even because it cuts to the core of your copy issues. Bencivenga himself described it as “odious” and “sadistic” and “devastating” and “weird” and “cumbersome.”
“But when it’s finally finished,” he said, “your client will have a campaign they could run for years and out-pull virtually anything else they’ve ever run unless they were very lucky beforehand.”
By the way, “CRIT” is not an acronym. It’s short for critique.
Bencivenga explains:
“It was a system by which the writer would distribute his copy to everybody working in the ad agency,” he said. “The receptionist, the account executives, the art director—and anybody else who could be persuaded to read it. And everybody would take their best crack at ripping it apart. All the people involved in the process would do their best to rip the copy apart,” Gary said, “to point out holes in the argument.”
Critics would call out everything from grammar mistakes and spelling errors to psychological follies. They would identify readability issues, word choice issues, sentences and paragraphs without smooth transitions. Anything strange got the Red Ink.
Also, terse, biting notes were encouraged (for emphasis):
“I don’t believe this claim!”
“Get to the point…”
“I’m confused.”
“So boring…”
“But why?”
Bencivenga asked folks to “rip the copy apart” because it invited honesty and, most importantly, volume: dozens, even hundreds of notes and comments.
Volume, ultimately, is the secret.
Because volume presents overlap, which illuminates themes, patterns.
For example, if only one out of twelve people said the headline confused them, you have an outlier. But if eleven out of twelve people called the headline confusing, you’re getting close to a consensus. And while it’s painful to hear a critical consensus about your work, it’s also invaluable because now you know what to focus on, what to be thoughtful about, what to rewrite.
Now, practically speaking, Bencivenga did this fifty-odd years ago, pre-internet, when his employees were his only option. Things are different now. If you don’t work in an agency or otherwise don’t want to bother your colleagues with CRIT, you don’t have to.
You’ve options now:
You can solicit mass feedback on Reddit, on Twitter, on LinkedIn. (Remember: don’t home in on individual opinions as much as themes.) And if you want feedback from a more targeted audience, you can use a dedicated testing platform, like Wynter.
In any case, this feedback system—this approach, proven by one of our best copywriters to shine a spotlight on your ad’s problems and blindspots—has never been more accessible.
It’s not fancy. Nor is it necessarily easy or pleasant.
But it works.
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