As you know, I met my client Dave at Ushuaia in Ibiza. Armin van Buuren was playing. The sun was setting over the Mediterranean. He had a will writing business. I had a laptop and some ideas about advertising.
Ten years later, I'm still running his marketing. Two hundred leads a day. Every day. For a decade.
We tested two angles for wills:
That same offer, with barely any changes to its core components, has generated hundreds of thousands of leads. It's outlasted three prime ministers, two pandemics, and the entire rise and fall of several social media platforms. The creative changes constantly. The targeting evolves. The platforms shift. But the offer at the centre of it all has stayed fundamentally the same.
The reason Dave's business still works — while competitors come and go — isn't better ads. It's a better offer. An amazing offer with a crap ad will always outperform a crap offer with an amazing ad. You can't polish a turd.
And remember — it doesn't have to be clever. It has to be instantly understandable. "Protect your loved ones and assets from £19.99." Anyone can grasp that in a heartbeat. No jargon. No complexity. No mental effort required. The best offers aren't the ones that make you sound smart. They're the ones that make your prospect think "yes, that's what I want" before they've even finished reading.
Your offer is what you're actually asking people to exchange their time, attention, and money for. It's not your product. It's not your service. It's the complete package — the thing you're promising, the price you're charging, the risk you're removing, and the reason to act now.
Most business owners skip straight to writing ads without ever properly constructing their offer. They wonder why their campaigns underperform, then blame the platform, the creative, or the agency. But the problem usually sits upstream. If your offer isn't compelling, no amount of clever copywriting will save it.
In the last chapter, we covered Here's the formula I use for turning a feature into a selling point: That's the emotional engine. This chapter is about wrapping that engine in a vehicle people actually want to get into. It's about constructing an offer so good that the ad almost doesn't matter.
Think about every purchase decision you've ever made.
At some point, you weighed up what you were getting against what you were giving up. The mental calculation happened — consciously or not. You asked yourself: is this worth it?
For wills, it's often: