FAQ: "A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words. What's All This Copy Stuff For?"

Let's use the world famous photograph of Eddie Adams. When it was released, it created world-wide outcry against unnecessary cruelty. The photo also won a Pulitzer Prize for Adams.

The photo shows a man executing a seemingly innocent boy.

And this is where your eyes have just deceived you.

It was the afternoon of 1 February 1968, in Saigon, South Vietnam. The man on the left, with pistol in hand, is the South Vietnamese national police commander, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan.

The man on the right is Nguyen Vam Lem, the captain of a North Vietnamese death squad, who personally ordered the execution of the whole family of one of General Loan's deputy commanders.

According to South Vietnamese sources, when Vam Lem was captured, he and his people were busy shoving the bodies of 34 bound and shot South Vietnamese police officers and their families into a large ditch. Six of them were General Loan's godchildren.

So, what we see on the photo is not an execution of a boy, but justified revenge on a mass murderer for his cowardly act.

General Loan merely acted on behalf of his deputy. You have probably heard the mantra that most armed forces units operate by...

"You attack one of us, you attack all of us."

That's what we see here.

After shooting the prisoner, the General Loan walked over to a reporter and said...

"These guys kill a lot of our people, and I think Buddha will forgive me."

Anyway, when the photo was shown on TV and in various printed publications, there was a world-wide outcry about the General's cruelty.

About three months after the shooting, General Loan was wounded, and was taken to Australia for surgery and recovery. But the outcry against him was so strong that then he had to be taken to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC.

Eventually General Loan settled in Virginia and opened a pizzeria.

When Adams, the photographer visited him the last time, he saw written on a toilet wall...

"We know who you are, fucker."

And here is Adams' conclusion of the event.

"The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'"

When General Loan died of cancer in 1998, Adams praised him and sent flowers with a card that read, "I'm sorry. There are tears in my eyes."

Yes, some people judge books by their covers. Why? Because most of them simply don't have the intellectual firepower to discern what's between the covers.

And your buyers too are intelligent people with advanced degrees in business and/or technology. Do you really think they are so dumb that they spend thousands of their companies' dollars based on some fancy images?

So, you need the copy to tell the full story behind the image. It's that simple.

Yes, you're right. A picture is worth a thousand words. But which thousand?

Only the copy can tell you that.

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