Call out the audience four ways

1. Where the call-out sits

A paid advertisement has three elements, in order:

Element	What it does
The call-out	Gets their attention
The value	Keeps them, and makes them trust and like you enough to take the next step
The call to action	Tells them what the next step is

Those are hook, retain and reward said in different words. The different words are deliberate: the concept is what matters, and not the naming. Hook, retain and reward as a structure for a piece of content is on SOP 20; this page is the paid-advertising version of the first of the three.

The call-out is the part that decides everything after it, and how much effort to put into it is on SOP 34.

2. The four call-outs

These are the four most common ones — or, as stated, at least the ones found to work best.

2.1 Labels

A label is a word or a set of words that puts people into a group. It can use features, traits, titles, places or any other descriptor.

Label	The group it collects
Gym owners	By title
Remote workers	By how they work
Moms in one named county	By place and role
I am looking for five residents of one named town	By place, with a number attached

The last one is a local-advertising move worth naming on its own: putting the town in the first line is itself a label.

The condition on all of them. A label is most effective when your ideal customers identify with that label. A label they would not use about themselves collects nobody.

2.2 Yes questions

A yes question is one the right person answers in their head with yes, that's me. The longest worked example below asks them as a run.

Subject	The run
Sleep	Do you sweat at night? Do you toss and turn? Do you snore? Do you sleep with your mouth open? Do you wake with a dry mouth in the middle of the night? Do you always have water beside the bed?
Wakefulness	Do you wake up more than once a night?
Weight	Is tying your shoes a struggle?
Assets	Do you have a home worth more than $400,000?

A run of them builds recognition, one yes after another.

The property question, and how this page reads it. One form of the property question reads as a home "over $400,000 a year," which is not a claim about a home. The same question also appears, differently, as a home worth more than $400,000, and that is the reading the surrounding text supports, so it is the one carried here.

2.3 If-then statements

If they meet your condition, then something follows that they have to make a decision about.

If	Then
If you spend over $10,000 a month on advertising	I can save you 20 percent or more
If you were born between two named years, in a named place	You may qualify for a claim
If you want a named outcome	Pay attention

The middle row is a legal-claim advertisement rather than a business one, and it is carried because the structure is what is being taught: the condition qualifies the audience and the consequence is what makes them read on.

A birth-year range, flagged and not repaired. One of the birth-year ranges has an end year earlier than its start year, which cannot be the intended range. The page does not guess at the intended range. This page gives no figure for that range.

2.4 Ridiculous results

Bizarre, rare, out-of-the-ordinary outcomes, stated flatly.

• A gym opens, is overfilled on its first day, and has to refund customers because it cannot fit them all in.
• A massage studio is booked out two years in advance, and clients are furious about it.
• Somebody lost 50 pounds eating pizza and fired her trainer.
• The government is handing out $1,000 checks to anybody who can answer three questions.

If you are the sort of person the result concerns — a gym owner reading the first one — you are interested, and you might read on. That is the entire mechanism: the result is strange enough to be worth a second of your attention, and specific enough that only the right person spends it.

3. Where to get the words

The words for a label are not invented. They are collected.

Look at what other advertisers in your category actually say, and note which term they use for the same person: gym owners, health club owners, micro gyms, fitness professionals, trainers, personal trainers, PTs. Usually the term that works is the term that group uses to identify itself — and that is the one you want to be using back at them.

Doing this also tells you which audience each advertiser is going after, which tells you which one you want more of and which one you do not.

4. The action step

Stop muting advertisements and stop pressing skip. Look at the call-out instead, and become a student of it. The stated goal is a permanent change of habit: for the rest of your life, when an advertisement starts, you turn the volume up.

Step	What you do
1	Watch, read and listen to advertisements in your category instead of skipping them
2	Write down the call-out, and which of the four kinds it is
3	Write down the exact words that name the audience
4	Build your own call-outs from the four kinds, in your audience's own vocabulary

5. The checklist

Question	The answer
Who runs this	You, or whoever writes the ads
What a call-out is for	Getting the right person to notice, and the wrong person to pass
The four kinds	Labels, yes questions, if-then statements, ridiculous results
What a label is made from	Features, traits, titles, places, other descriptors
What makes a label work	The ideal customer identifies with it
How yes questions are used	Singly or in a run; the longest worked example is a run
What an if-then does	Qualifies, then gives a consequence worth reading on for
What a ridiculous result does	Buys a second of attention with strangeness, and spends it on the right person
Where the words come from	The language the audience uses about itself, collected from other advertisers
How many call-outs to write	Not established on this page — the hook-volume figures are on SOP 34
Which of the four performs best	Not established on this page

6. What this page does not cover

Call-outs made of images, sounds and settings rather than words are on SOP 33. How much of your effort belongs in the opening seconds, and how many variants to make, are on SOP 34. Choosing the platform the advertisement runs on is on SOP 35, and getting it in front of the right people is on SOP 36. Where they land after they act is on SOP 37. The reading level all of it is written at is on SOP 31.

What the advertisement says once the call-out has landed is on SOP 39, and how to word the call to action clearly is on SOP 31.