A “swipe” file is a collection of promotions you have collected from other marketers.

“A good swipe file is better than a college education,” says my old direct marketing professor, master copywriter Milt Piece.

The swipe file provides inspiration and ideas from successful marketing campaigns you may be able to use in your promotion.

By doing so, it can help overcome writer’s block. With ideas from a swipe file, you can write copy better and faster.

Lots of copywriters today keep swipe files of promotions in their industry, particularly health and financial writers.

Milt, however, preferred to get his inspiration and ideas from promotions for products different than the one he was writing about.

When a client who is selling insurance asked Milt to create a direct mail package, he would avoid looking in his insurance swipe file. Instead, he looked in his swipe files for totally unrelated products. Why? The reason is simple. “If you create an insurance package that looks like every other insurance package, you’re just being a copycat,” said Milt. “However, if you check through other types of packages, you’re more likely to come up with an original approach to the insurance package.”

A good example is a recent print ad I saw for the Stauer Titanium watch.

The ad shows a large photo of the watch.

The headline above it reads: “We Apologize that It Loses 1 Second Every 20 Million Years.”

The style and approach seem, to me anyway, to be inspired by the classic David Ogilvy Rolls Royce ad.

The headline for Ogilvy’s ad for Rolls Royce was: “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”

If Stauer’s ad was for a car, it would seem derivative of the Ogilvy ad—not very original.

But Stauer has created a compelling ad by adapting Ogilvy’s straightforward, fact-based copy approach to a watch.

It’s an approach not typically used in this category…so it supports Milt’s claim that applying ideas used in one industry to another can result in an interesting and effective promotion.

The best results I’ve seen from using swipe files have come not from creatively plagiarizing promotions within the same industry.

They’ve come from cross-pollination of ideas between different industries.

For instance, I was looking at my swipe file for options trading promotions to come up with ideas for a DM package to sell trading software.

Nothing. So I flipped through my other swipe files. In my health swipe file, I came across a promotion for a vision supplement. The headline: “Why bilberry and luetine don’t work.”

I knocked off the headline in my trading software promotion—and tripled the control.

My headline: “Why most trading software doesn’t work…and never will.”

In a breakthrough fundraising direct mail package, the non-profit sent a free paperback book to potential donors.

The slim “book” was actually a promotion written to solicit donations, and the package did gangbusters.

A major financial publisher copied the format—now known as a “bookalog”—to promote an investment newsletter.

The book they wrote and sent prospects, titled “The Plague of the Black Debt”, was one of their most successful promotions of all time.

One interesting footnote to the Stauer watch swipe from the Rolls Royce ad…

David Ogilvy has been accused of stealing the headline for his most famous ad from another copywriter.

It was always believed that Ogilvy came up with this brilliant way of communicating Rolls Royce quality on his own—perhaps by driving his own Rolls.

I have also heard that he found the fact about the Rolls Royce clock in an article published in an automotive trade journal.

But now others are saying he took it from another car ad, for Pierce-Arrows.

And their headline, which was published years before Ogilvy’s Rolls ad, indeed is remarkably similar: “The only sound one can hear in the new Pierce-Arrows is the ticking of the electric clock.”

I don’t know whether Ogilvy had a swipe file and deliberately swiped the idea from Pierce-Arrows.

Today their ad is forgotten but his is one of the classic ads of all time.

Why?

I think the addition of “at 60 mph” makes the Rolls ad much stronger.

Back then, big cars were noisier than they are today, and a car that quiet at high-speed was a much more credible demonstration of quality than a car going 20 mph.

When you swipe from another industry instead of your own, you steer clear of copycatting and plagiarism charges—and are credited as brilliantly original when your swiped ad works.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.

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