September 2011 - Otis Regrets... or not

Copywriting 101: Saratoga Chips

A local company is marketing a boutique potato chip in Saratoga Springs, NY, where that salty snack was invented in 1853. The chips are made with high quality potatoes and taste delicious. They are charmingly packaged in a replica of the “takeaway” box from the 1870s. The company is well regarded and family owned. And as a bonus, they are one of the largest clients of Saratoga Bridges, a not-for-profit that finds meaningful work for mentally disabled adults.

Okay, copywriters. Think you can create some kind of a marketing campaign from that?

Oh, there’s one thing I haven’t mentioned. For whatever reason, Saratoga Chips has chosen to sell at a per-ounce price about the same as Lays. I’m not in love with that decision because price competition is the mark of a commoditized product and this is anything but. In fact, there’s a huge potential audience of tourists who come for the track, the spa and the waters who would love to take something back to friends and family in Jersey or Florida.

Unfortunately, the marketing department of Saratoga Chips is not you nor I. Avoiding history, warmth and local color, their copywriter came up with the Walmart-style headline: “Buy local… why pay more for the national brands?” Doing the copywriter one better, the art director mistrusted the visual appeal of the product and the antique box and subjugated them to a fake newspaper page (“Crum Cruncher” refers to George Crum, the inventor of the chip, but of course the reader doesn’t know this) superimposed on a fake wood background as if, I guess, the fake newspaper has been plopped down on a fake table.

Purely on the basis of missed opportunity, Saratoga Chips is hereby fast-tracked into the Badvertising Hall of Shame.

Goodbye, Groupon?

You, a freelance creative, buy a plane ticket to go and see a client. You rebill the ticket at cost and your client pays you back. So, if you need to state a number when you’re applying for a credit line or some such, should you include the value of that ticket in your revenues?

Of course not. That pass through expense has nothing to do with your business; it’s just money that appears on your balance sheet on its way from one place to another. Or to quote the wonderful though wonky Grumpy Old Accountants website, “SEC Staff Accounting Bulletin 101 on Revenue Recognition, Question 10 specifically, is congruent with EITF 99-19. The SEC stated that firms should report revenues on a net basis if they did not take title to the products, did not have the risk and rewards of ownership, and acted as an agent or broker.”

Groupon did not get the memo. They have been booking the full value of their coupon sales as revenue, not accounting for the fact that a large percentage of what they are collecting is going to go into the pockets of retailers and they are just a conduit. As a result, yesterday Groupon had to restate its revenues and reduce them by 50%, while incidentally announcing their recently hired CEO is on her way back to Google.

So much for that IPO. And perhaps much of that money that Groupon collected on the premise that its copywriters are worth $6 billion will have to be returned, since it was based on the misstated revenues. As I mentioned in that earlier post, retailers like the results that they get with Groupon but resent the charges which are higher than with other social couponing sites. It would be a lot of fun to be a LivingSocial or BlackBoardEats rep calling on your prospects next week, would it not?

I hope Groupon does not go down in flames because I think the quality of its creative expression (along with excellent, rock-solid marketing) has been the decider. You may have noticed that the Groupon “Voice” now extends no further than the opening sentence or two of most offers; after that it is straightforward, though good, marketing copy. But this is offset by the wonderful temporary insanity of the “Groupon Says” feature at the bottom of the offer page.

Google copywriters: if you guys get laid off, give otisregrets a call and let’s talk about some mutual opportunities.

Copywriter slugfest at DMA2011… coming soon!

DMA2011, the annual conference of the Direct Marketing Association, starts in Boston the first weekend in October… that’s soon! I am on a panel with colleagues Nancy Wahl, Alan Rosenspan and Carol Worthington Levy at 3 pm Monday afternoon, October 4. The topic is “Mundane, Inane and Boring Creative” and evidently we are going to try and outdo one another by seeing who can put the audience to sleep fastest with campaigns that never should have seen the light of day or, if they did, succeeded in spite of themselves.

I just got a preview of my fellow panelists’ slide decks and there is some pretty outrageous stuff there. At the end of the hour the audience will be invited to vote on who was the most mundane, inane or boring and the winner will be doused in the chill waters of Boston Harbor just outside the convention center. It’s an experience not to be missed!

If you haven’t yet registered for the DMA, you can still do so here. Try entering “friends and family” code AN614 which will hopefully give you a discount on your conference price. See you there.

Is Reed Hastings a Quickster?

Since I’m still a Netflix customer (at least until 9/24 when the new pricing kicks in per my billing date) I was a recipient of the soon-to-become-infamous email from Reed Hastings in my in-box this morning, which opens “I messed up. I owe you an explanation.”

I would have liked “apology” which would indicate a price rollback but “explanation” carries no such connotation and indeed regarding the pricing, Hastings informs us “we’re done with that!” The explanation is of the rationale behind splitting the streaming and DVD-delivery services; the mess-up was in not explaining it properly to consumers, which he now does in the email and more extensively in his own blog.

The streaming video service is now Netflix and the DVDs are about to become “Quikster”, a new orphan brand, suggesting that the “familiar red envelope” is about to become the equivalent of “AOL dial-up”, an analogy Hastings uses in his message though not exactly in that way.

I am fascinated by this turn of events. It’s like that story of the backpacker who cuts off his own arm to escape and save his life. It’s like watching Wil. E. Coyote standing his ground as the roadrunner approaches at full speed. And I am especially fascinated by evidence the decision was not made with full benefit of research and reflection by one of the world’s most recognizable brands. Do a web search for “quickster” and “quikster” (results will be roughly the same) and right now the top two hits are for an Amway-related scandal involving a like-sounding product, and a rather risqué definition on urbandictionary.com. Look up quikster.com on the internet registries and you’ll find the registration changed just a couple of weeks ago and as of this morning quikster.net and quikster.org were still available for purchase, suggesting haste and confusion in the name-changing.

I plan to stay tuned…. Though perhaps not as a Quikster customer.

UPDATE: just a few hours later, those web search results have changed quite a bit… I hope you will take my word as to what they looked like about 7 am Eastern this morning. Also with more reflection, I want to point out a huge failing of Quikster as a brand identity: it does nothing to say what this product or service actually does, other than the fact that it’s fast. I’m guessing that QuickFlix and QuikFlix were taken?

P.S. I love you

There is plenty of research to suggest that, after the opening, the P.S. is the most-read element of a direct mail letter. Similarly, MarketingSherpa did an analysis of links within emails and that found that the number of clicks goes down with each successive link after the first one in the message—until the link at the very end, which is the second most-clicked link of them all.

We marketers have only ourselves to thank for this phenomenon: we’ve trained our readers to know that the end of the letter will have a recap of the offer and a direct call to action. If they don’t feel like reading, they can cut to the chase by going to the P.S. That’s why you should use the P.S. appropriately to give people what they are looking for.

The classic use of the P.S. is to recap the entire marketing proposition in a paragraph. St. Jude Hospital did that by adding this P.S. which, according to Herschell Gordon Lewis, produced a 19% increase in response with absolutely no other changes in the letter:

P.S. I hope that your own family never suffers the tragedy of losing a child to an incurable disease. At St. Jude, we’re fighting to conquer these killers, and one day someone in your own family may live because we succeeded.

You can also use the P.S. to:

Tease the reader back into the letter, with a phrase that harkens back to something you said previously that of course they didn’t read: “Remember that limited time offer I told you about earlier? Well, here’s one more reason you shouldn’t let this opportunity get away…” Works well if you have a very rich, multi-part offer that you want to reveal in stages.

Bring in one fresh benefit which is so powerful that it deserves its own showcase. Richard Potter did this in a way I love for a letter for AAA. It says something like: “I almost forgot! Respond now and you’ll get a FREE United States Map Book in addition to the member savings I mentioned earlier.”

Fire your twin guns of “act now before it’s too late” and “with our no-risk guarantee there’s no reason not to say yes”. Putting these strong closing statements in the P.S. serves a double purpose: they seal the deal with somebody who has stayed with you throughout the letter, and they make a compelling argument to someone who has just started reading.

Are there letters that shouldn’t have a P.S.? Perhaps. “Real” business letters don’t have them, of course, and if verisimilitude is important then maybe you want to close with the signature. Also, a very short letter has less reason for a P.S. But the P.S. is powerful. Don’t give it up without serious consideration.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

“But all I need is a brochure.”

There’s been a nice thread on LinkedIn recently called “The (surprisingly) best time to quote your price.” Apart from that copywriter-ish tease, the discussion has been about whether you should immediately provide an estimate when you speak with a client, or wait till you’ve discussed the project and put forth a few ideas to demonstrate your expertise.

Copywriter Michael Gorga mentioned a red flag to watch for: the prospective client who says “but I just need a brochure [or site map, response form, landing page, fill in the blanks].” As if all your research and prep can be dispensed with because the client just needs this one specific element.

When people ask me to quote price, I always tell them I am going to do 10-15 hours of prep before I can even begin to give them a deliverable. And that’s the truth. Someone who would generate copy without a fundamental understanding of the product, the market and the competitive environment is not a copywriter, but a typist.

Michael Gorga had another red flag: the client who has never worked with a copywriter before, and would write it themselves except they’re ” too busy”. If they don’t understand the value you provide, they’re unlikely to pay your rate.

The complete thread is available here. It’s within the “Claude C. Hopkins Copywriter” group, so you may need to join the group to see it.

CES tightens screws on bloggers, lookie-loos.

I just finished registering for the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES) as an “industry attendee” vs a blogger. They’ve eliminated the blogger designation as part of a “stricter credentialing process” and, still waiting to see whether they consider Otis Regrets a legitimate source of industry information who will qualify as a member of the working press, I bought some insurance through a standard registration to get under the early bird deadline.

I’m been pretty diligent about logging a couple of stories a day at shows like this in return for my blogger credential; now maybe it frees me up to do fewer and deeper articles. If I don’t get a press credential, what I miss out on is a box lunch (whose main virtue is that it’s on premises, so you don’t have to take time out to eat lunch) and a tote bag. I will be okay.

CES also wants to tighten registration on attendees in general: “Due to the investment made by our exhibitors, International CES show management wants to ensure that its attendees are members of the trade.” CES is not a very tchotchke-rich show and I am guessing fairly few rapscallions fly across the country to spend several days padding around enormous rooms of strange machines; the main threat would seem to come from local lookie-loos, either retired or underemployed, and I’m sure they will find a way to get in.

See you at the buffet.