Headline is the most crucial part of advertising. Basically, it is used to arrest attention and to create interest. It should go beyond being catchy or sloganising. It has, really, speaking a lot to contribute to the style and mood of an advertisement.

Headlines many times do target the advertisement to a select audience. They are inviting enough to motivate the reader to read the advertisement copy further. Perhaps this they are able to do by being benefit-oriented.

Headline is not to be taken too literally. It mostly occurs as the caption, but can occur anywhere in the body of the advertisement copy, even at the end. In a nutshell, self-interest is the key to successful headlines.

We would like to know what benefits the product could offer to us, or what solution the company has got for our problems. Many headlines do the positioning work – they highlight a product benefit that is most important. Many headlines are musical, whereas many are curious. Some headlines are newsy.

Quinn stresses the importance of the copywriter finding more interesting ways of presenting basically uninteresting propositions. Every headline, he cautions, should be the best you have ever written because you are only as good as your last advertisement copy.