There are many ways of writing ads.Simply stating that your product is good.Giving evidence that it's good.Or making people feel that it's good.Ai could spit out versions of the first two pretty quickly, but it’d struggle on the third.The third requires a bit of psychology, observation and understanding of what makes people tick.Bill Bernbach put it this way “It took millions of years for man’s instincts to develop. It will take millions more for them to even vary. It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man, with his obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of his own.”So if, for example, you’re Porsche, you could state that your cars are terrific, you could make people aware that every new 911 now comes with a 12-speaker sound system as standard, but saying ‘It’s like children, you can't understand until you've had one' makes them seem so much more desirable.John Stingley wrote that one, plus another bunch just as good.A lot of his work doesn’t get into the nuts and bolts of a product, it steps back from the detail and talks about how it relates to you, like Windsor Canadian Whisky – ‘Fortunately, every day comes with an evening’.I caught up with John recently to pick his brain on this stuff, hope you enjoy it.

MARTIN/WILLIAMS.3m.

FALLON McELLIGOTT.

Princes Spaghetti Sauce.

ITT.

Monitor.

WFAN.

Canadian Windsor.

Scotts.

Porsche.

Lee.

Fed-Ex.

The Children's Defense Fund.

Marine Midland.

Advertising.

CHIAT/DAY.Infiniti.

AMIRATTI & PURIS.U.P.S.

OGILVY & MATHER.IBM.OBSERVATORY.New York-Presbyterian.

Bayer.

Bessemer Trust.

John on writing...