One evening, while flipping through one of my favorite design books, All-American Ads: 60s, I found myself reflecting on how All-American Ads: 2020s would pale in comparison. The shrinking attention span of today's audience has impacted every facet of marketing, especially copy. Even into the 1990s, a well-designed ad in a magazine, newspaper, or website could integrate a full paragraph of text into the overall composition. Today, best practices demand brevity: 4-5 word headlines, 8-10 word subheadings. In digital marketing, survival of the fittest means saying the most important thing in the fewest words.

But survival of the fittest also means standing out in a noisy, saturated market. With short copy and quick, choppy videos dominating the space, I wondered if an old-school wall of text—instead of being a turnoff—could actually grab attention. We’d experimented with long-form copy in captions, but never within the image itself, reminiscent of vintage print ads. Though I knew it wouldn’t work long-term, I was curious if it could work at all. The team was on board to give it a shot.

I took some long-form copy from an avatar/persona exercise we had done and whittled it down to the 7 most impactful sentences. Wrapping the text around a KetoKrate felt natural: The "text-wrapped product" design was a common element in the late century ads that inspired me. Not only that, but I knew anything more than a clean product shot would be too much clutter, since the text and a CTA was already pushing it.

As I set the type, I realized that the most impactful phrases created a nice visual rhythm throughout the paragraph, so I highlighted them. Reading just the pink words formed a sort of TL;DR, neatly summarizing the product and its value proposition without disrupting the balance of the image.

Unfortunately, while my hunch in the video case study above was spot-on, this one flopped (but keep reading!) When we took the ad down, we held a post-mortem trying to pinpoint where it fell short, but generally chalked it up to the long copy. Then, a coworker suggested adding quotation marks and an attribution—thinking that if people realized they were reading a "review," they might be more likely to stick with it.

I popped in some quotes and a name, and we put it back out into the wild for A/B testing. To our surprise, after several weeks, the quoted version garnered 3x the clicks! While the CPA still wasn’t enough to keep it running, the experiment yielded valuable insights into where and why our audience engages with longer copy.

KetoKrate has always leaned into social proof across all channels—ads, landing pages, emails—but this test pushed us to double down on extended testimonials, especially in email, and we've seen measurable results from those changes.