Copywriting tips. they were all over the place.

Plastered across the walls on subway stations all over Manhattan and The Bronx.

Inside the trains themselves.

Smiling American Indian men, smiling at you from behind the glass inside bus stops.

Little Asian boys looking down at you while riding the #6 train to school.

These posters were all the brainchild of a brilliant copywriter, Judy Protas, who recently passed away.

Ms. Protas developed this campaign to expand the marketplace for a small, local rye bread company located in Brookly, called Levys.

Ms. Protas brilliant slogan, “You don’t have to be Jewish, to love Levy’s Jewish Rye,” combined with the photographs of overtly non-Jewish people, helped this campaign work like gangbusters, for over 20 years.

Besides the slogan, the ads contained pictures of conspicuously non-Jewish New Yorkers — a choirboy, an cute little Asian kid, and a Native American man, for example — biting into a slice of the rye bread. Like this:

Know why these ads worked so well?

The answer is simple: curiosity.

Everything about the ad prompted viewer curiosity.

“Hmm… what do they mean, You don’t have to be Jewish, to love Levy’s Jewish Rye?”

“What is this American Indian (choirboy, etc.) eating?”

“He’s clearly not Jewish?”

“I never heard of this rye bread.”

“This looks / sounds / feels kinda cool. I’ll have to check it out next time I go to Waldbaums.” (local NYC grocer back in the day)

Curiosity is one of THE most important emotional buy-buttons you can ever push. So keep this in mind next time you’re creating a campaign.

If you want to read more about Ms. Protas, and discover some of her other accomplishments, check out this article in the New York Times.

Comments? Leave ’em below.

Now go sell something, Craig Garber

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