surprise

Some ads use humor, some surprise you with a twist... Take a look at this ad and see if you can guess what the product is before the end. This commercial makes amazing use of surprise to startle the viewers and make a strong…

What does it take to make you happy? Not much. A classic study by psychologist Norbert Schwarz found that ten cents would do the trick. He and his cohorts repeatedly placed a dime near a copy machine where they knew it would be found.…

In Surprising the Brain, I wrote about a copywriting technique that replaces an expected word with an unexpected one to grab the listener's or reader's attention: Advertising copywriters have for years used a similar technique to jar the…