Category: Copywriting 101

What we can learn from voters’ expectations versus their intentions

Ask me who I’m going to vote for in the Presidential election and you’ll get one data point, which might be a lie. Ask me who I think is going to win and you’ll get a far more reliable predictor. First, because I’m no longer on the spot for answering about my own vote. Second, because my answer will encompass my conversation with friends about how they’re voting, plus what I’ve heard and read and seen in the media and on people’s bumpers and in their yards. In essence, I’m speaking as a social network of one.

The above isn’t a hypothesis. The New York Times cites an academic paper by David Rothschild and Justin Wolfers that compares the predictive power of voters’ intentions (how they will vote) and their expectations (who they think will win). In the majority of presidential elections since 1952, expectations were the winner. According to Wolfers, a professor of economics at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, that’s because the expectations question taps into additional knowledge beyond the personal voting question, and of course “more information produces better results.”

In fact, the authors estimate that each expectation answer is equivalent to ten “how will you vote” answers, thus solving a problem that I didn’t realize existed: people today are much less responsive to polls. A few years ago, 40% of people polled would respond. Today it’s down to 10%, according to Andrew Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center. Think about the number of polling calls you’ve likely received during this election and you can guess why that is. We’re oversaturated with polls.

As a marketer, I’ve often used polls as an involvement device. You can gather valuable useful audience information and then offer the finished poll to participants as an incentive to answer. As copywriters, we would never ask personal questions that make readers uncomfortable; rather we’ll be looking for ways to make them interested and eager to respond. We’ll automatically go for the “expectation” vs “intention” question, in other words.

You can also use polls to get people thinking about the benefits of your product by asking questions that show it in the best possible light. For example, one of my favorite controls is a package I wrote for Intuit for a new tax preparation product that wasn’t quite ready for prime time. I asked people what they’d like to see in a tax prep product, with multiple-choice answers that touched on existing and planned product features. The involvement made them invested in the product’s development and they were more likely to buy it as a result; this package remained the control during the entire lifecycle of the product.

But back to presidential polling, you’re probably wondering who is picked to win next Tuesday according to the “expectation” method. Read the Times article for that answer. Then come back at midnight on November 6 to see if they were right.

UPDATE: They were right.

“Zombie Mouth” promo shows, rather than eats, brains

Zombie Mouth!

Here’s a great promo we can all learn from: The American Dental Association has joined forces with PopCap games to offer a coupon good for a free download of “Plants vs. Zombies” as a Halloween giveaway. Just go to the ZombieMouth landing page and click the link at the top, and you can download a PDF of clip-out coupons that can be redeemed online between October 30 and November 10.

The game is available for PC or Mac, and retails for $19.95 so hopefully kids won’t mind getting the giveaway coupon in their trick-or-treat bags along with their candy. There’s no limit on how many you can print and give away. The quick redemption phase guarantees that it will go viral, and I can see “ew… you’ve got zombie mouth!” as a new meme over at Lake Ave Elementary that will encourage kids to brush their teeth.

This campaign has so many things right. The redemption is seamless. The theme is in lock step with the message that kids should brush more often. And the execution is catchy and memorable. After all the undead examples of badvertising I like to cite, it’s a pleasure to dig up an effort that has some real brains behind it.

For all you long-copy haters out there…

Screen grab from Stansberry's 77 minute online ad
Screen grab from Stansberry’s 77 minute online ad

Direct marketing watchdog Denny Hatch had his knickers in a twist about the online ad shown here. And with good reason. It’s simply a long copy direct mail letter turned into a PowerPoint video and it runs 77 minutes (I am taking that part on faith since I lasted about 4 minutes) with no pause button and no call to action until the very end. The sell is for an investment newsletter which allegedly has 241,700 active subscribers, which I presume are the same as the 241,700 people currently viewing Otisregrets.

Stansberry's "don't leave" interrupter screen
Stansberry’s “don’t leave” interrupter screen

Hatch waited all the way to the end; I didn’t and clicked the close button, bringing up the frantic “WAIT!” alert usually reserved for adult content sites. I clicked the “stay on page” button … and was rewarded with the opportunity to read the same copy, but in its original mega-letter format. (And badly reproduced, too. Hope that Stansberry picks up a few subscribers so he can afford a new imaging drum for his scanner.) Even so there is no call to action until the very, very end of the letter where we find a single “subscribe” button.

Stansberry's letter
Stansberry’s letter

Of course this is NOT evidence that long copy is a bad idea. Rather, it’s a great way to experience good direct marketing by its absence. When asked how long a man’s legs should be, Lincoln allegedly replied “long enough to reach the ground.” It’s the same with sales letters. They can be one page, or 32 pages (my personal record), or hundreds of pages like the Stansberry effort… just as long as the copy is permeated with calls to action so the reader can stop reading and give you the order as soon as they are convinced.

Hatch’s article had a great quote from old school copywriter Claude Hopkins, which talks about “print” but applies equally well to electronic media:

“People are hurried. The average person worth cultivating has too much to read. They skip three-fourths of the reading matter, which they pay to get. They are not going to read your business talk unless you make it worth their while and let the headline show it.

People will not be bored in print. They may listen politely at a dinner table to boasts and personalities, life history etc. But in print they choose their own companions, their own subjects. They want to be amused or benefited. They want economy, beauty, labor savings, good things to eat and wear.”

Getting back to the format of Stansberry’s online ad, Hatch closes (as will I) with this zinger from “Visual Display of Quantitative Information” author Edward Tufte: “Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

 

The Writer’s Diet

Pompous, stilted and jargon-esque prose may be popular in corporate marcom departments and annual reports, but it turns readers off and causes copywriters to lose their jobs because we’re putting people to sleep. That’s why we need to stay ever-vigilant against that dark inner voice that keeps whispering, if we aren’t saying anything or don’t know what we are talking about, we better sound smart.

Along with the beloved we-we calculator that tells us if our copy is too me-centric, we have a useful new tool in the Writer’s Diet from Kiwi pedagogist Helen Sword. Cut-and-paste an entry from 100 to 1000 words and her program will score you from “Fit and Trim” to “Heart Attack Waiting to Happen” for readability based on your choice of various parts of speech.

A snippet of my direct marketing copy was labeled “fit and trim” with a recommendation to tone up some abstract nouns. (I was writing about an abstract concept.) My intro to a fiction piece was labeled “needs toning” based on a “flabby” score for my verbs in which a passive observer is commenting on what he sees around him. Busted. This sucker seems to work pretty well.

I had originally encountered Dr. Sword through her article “Zombie Nouns” in the opinion pages of the New York Times. These are “nominated” words in which a verb or adverb is transformed into a noun: participation, perception, observation, nominalization. A few of these are fine, but when they are overused they suck the life out of the text as in this example from a social sciences book:

The partial participation of newcomers is by no means “disconnected” from the practice of interest. Furthermore, it is also a dynamic concept. In this sense, peripherality, when it is enabled, suggests an opening, a way of gaining access to sources for understanding through growing involvement. The ambiguity inherent in peripheral participation must then be connected to issues of legitimacy, of the social organization of and control over resources, if it is to gain its full analytical potential.

For those of us who work with technology companies, this is new yet oddly familiar—companies in this space (another word to hate BTW) tend to turn verbs into nouns (verbalization?) that have the ring of authenticity without really meaning anything; cf. “impact” (how will this initiative impact our bottom line?).

In both cases, the construction of active, well-structured sentences using simple yet evocative words will awaken our readers and, hopefully, keep the zombies at bay.

Advice for RIMM: make BlackBerry a prepaid phone

Last week brought yet another dose of terrible news from Research in Motion Limited, the company that makes BlackBerry, and I kicked myself for not going short on RIMM a few weeks back when the stock was more than twice as high as it is now. The handwriting is on the wall for BlackBerry just as for Betamax and HD-TV before them, and the shovels are busy in the boneyard of failed technologies.

BlackBerry, however, has something most other zombie technologies lack: an established user base that is, or was, enthusiastic about the platform. So here’s my plan to save the company: turn BlackBerry into a prepaid phone. This solves the problem of users abandoning BlackBerry for iPhone or Android because they don’t have to; they can continue using their BlackBerries as a backup. Many BB users already have multiple phones (remember Obama on the 2008 campaign trail?) so this concept will be an easy one for them to accept. And a package of text messaging can be sold at an attractive yet profitable price that will allow those thumb virtuosos to continue their real-time updates even while in the air. (I never was able to figure out why this is OK.)

The prepaid texting will be offered at a discount for in-network messages, encouraging current users to continue their text relationships with one another. And RIMM can keep its rock-solid network but, since far less bandwidth will be required with a reduced user footprint and no expectation of rich media, sell or rent off the capacity it doesn’t need.

I’ve never had a BlackBerry myself but have had plenty of prepaid phones. They are useful little gadgets with lots of applications. They’re great for kids who tend to leave them in their pockets when doing laundry, for example. And I am about to buy a TracPhone for a guest house where we’re required to have a phone for some weekend guests; it fits the contract and offers a number for them to give out, yet it’s miles cheaper than installing a landline or VoIP modem. Make the prepaid BlackBerry attractive with an initial offer and I would probably try one. Give me or my kids or guests a taste of that thumb power and we just might get hooked and go for an expanded package. There’s a reason they used to call it “CrackBerry” after all.

Should you ever turn down business as a copywriter?

When I started freelancing, a couple decades ago, a wise old art director counseled me: never turn down work. Even if you’re super busy, stay up all night to get it done or offload it to a fellow creative and hopefully mark up their work. After all, you never know which new client might become your bread and butter or, conversely, if your current bread-and-butter client might go belly up tomorrow.

And I do try to stay hungry. But recently I’ve been turning down a bit of work. Part of this is a hunch we are headed for good times. Freelance creative are the canaries in the coal mine, first to get laid off in a recession but also first to know when companies think they better get cracking to stay competitive. And that’s what seems to be happening right now. Buy U.S. equities, dear reader. Buy Facebook like I did last week. (Though not at the IPO price obviously.)

And, another part of my reasoning is quality of life. I’m trying to get some traction on a fiction project, which uses the same brain cells as my copywriting. At the end of the day, when I’m trying to get the attention of David Ogilvy at that great water cooler in the sky, do I want to admit I didn’t get my novel finished because I decided to take on yet another few hundred $$ project? Not to mention my kid’s in the Little League playoffs and we are looking pretty good over here.

Both my turn down projects this week had to do with budget contractions. When times are good, prices start rising all over the place (the $3.47 deck pieces I wanted at Home Depot rose to $5.94 in the space of a month, for example), and it’s natural to get aggressively defensive.

One client wanted to redefine a project to pay less for work we’ve already agreed to. There’s a line item for A, and a line item for B, but the assumption is you’ll get both and I do research and prep with that in mind before I ever type a word. Now this client wants to only pay for the “A” portion which makes it a loser for me since the prep work is the same, so I’m outta here. Have to finish current projects but asking to be excused from future ones.

The second contested budget was much, much larger… an entire website. This is always a leap of faith because you don’t know how the pages will shake out when you estimate and hopefully pick a per-page number that averages out (same with catalogs by the way). With a new client, you also don’t know how finicky they will be and how complex the revisions. So I added something I thought was pretty generous, which was an offer to write 10 pages of the client’s choice at the per-page rate, charge nothing for my startup research time, then after that we could decide if it make sense for both of us.

Client instead wants a deal of some kind, which I can’t offer because my deal was my deal. This could have occupied me late into the night for much of the summer. Instead I’ll be baking baguettes, following the capers of my protagonist (a 19th century Quaker with a terrible problem) and maybe watching Logistics One finally get the best of Staffing in the Saratoga American Little League. Maybe I’m crazy, but maybe not.

Are you a “Buckeye” copywriter? You should be.

My colleague Russell Kern sent back some copy with the request that it be made more “Buckeye”. Which, on investigation, means more plain spoken, middle American… you know, Buckeye. As in Ohio State Buckeyes. And he flattered me by saying that “of course Otis is a Buckeye copywriter.”

Well, guess I wasn’t, at least in this instance, but I try to be. It is rarely a good idea to use anything but plain language in your copywriting. Remember that anything that trips the reader up is likely to send them toward the delete button or recycling bin, not the reference desk. Don’t use words a sixth grader wouldn’t understand. And don’t use complex sentences and grammatical constructions and expect the reader to parse them for you, because they won’t. They’re too busy getting past your unwanted promotional message to the next thing in their lives.

The late John Caples used to keep a Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog on his desk, just in case he ran across a product that was unfamiliar to him. Those catalog copywriters were Buckeyes for sure. They were selling to Midwestern (often immigrant) readers ordering items sight unseen, and their clear descriptions were what built these companies.

There are exceptions, as always. Selling luxury goods, which people want but don’t need, seems to benefit from a few unctuous words they can roll around to make themselves feel special. Health advice can be bolstered by a bit of sternness and a professorial tone. And financial writing often requires an extra level of formality. But even in these instances, it’s never a bad idea to be plain spoken in your core message.

If you’re a copywriter reading this, you almost certainly came from some other discipline like a study of English literature. You’re probably a very good writer and would love to sell a story to the New Yorker or get your screenplay produced. But your reader doesn’t give a crap about any of that or about you in general. They just want to buy products and services that will make them feel better or make their life easier, and your job is to describe those benefits without letting your college degree get in the way.

Be a Buckeye. (But not Woody Hayes.)

Specifics sell… provided they’re the RIGHT specifics.

We talked recently about the importance of being specific in your selling copy. Now here’s more. 381 words more, to be specific.

I found an interesting example of specific selling on the Marketing Experiments Blog… the same folks who brought us the fascinating subject line contest. A marketer changed this line on an ecommerce page:

Simple Fix for Blown Head Gaskets

to this one:

Repair Blown Head Gaskets in Just One Hour

The result? Combine with some other redos, the second headline brought a 58.1% (no, not “nearly 60%”) increase in conversions. Of course you want to know what those other redos are and in fact there was a considerable redesign. But the most important thing about the page didn’t change: a decision to show the actual product, which is obviously a liquid in a bottle.

If you have ever done work on internal combustion engines, you know that a permanent solution for blown head gaskets does not come in a bottle. You have to take the heads off and replace the gaskets which is a time consuming, dirty job. Presumably this liquid is some kind of magic sealant which will ooze into the cracks or warped areas and plug them up, thus reducing the loss of compression which is why blown head gaskets are a problem. But it sounds kind of too good to be true, right?

So if I see “a simple fix” and then a bottle, I’m going to reject it before going further. But if I see “repairs in one hour” then I might consider it; that’s not a big commitment and I will also notice the page offers a money-back guarantee. The ad is engaging with me in a context where I will find its selling proposition acceptable.

This case history (which is presented in an online class that lasts nearly an hour, so it’s great value for the bargain price of free) demonstrates the importance of the RIGHT specifics in your marketing proposition. “Simple fix” is actually a pretty good phrase… two powerful selling words in there. But it’s the wrong message to this audience about this product. “Repairs in one hour” is more specific but more important it’s credible. Good job to the copywriter and the rest of the team for doing their homework.

47 reasons that specifics sell in copy

Herschell Gordon Lewis has a great example about the value of specifics in copywriting. It’s a fundraising headline to the effect of “about 200,000 children will die of starvation in Africa without your help.” The word “about” sucks the urgency and empathy out of the statement like a needle puncturing a balloon. If the copywriter didn’t care enough to find out a more accurate number, why should you care?

Specific numbers and statements help prospects visualize what they’re actually going to get when they respond to your advertising. Specifics are more believable and smell less like puffery. Specifics are also a kind of rite of passage for a copywriter… they show your bosses, your clients and ultimately the recipient that you’ve done your homework.

Which is more credible? 100% pure, or 99.44% pure? The latter, obviously. It’s also better than 99.99% (a number you frequently see applied to IT system uptime and other quality-controlled processes) because it’s so random it could only have been arrived at through careful research. (Bonus question: what is the product, and when was the slogan first used? You probably know the first answer but I’ll bet you’ll be surprised at the second. Proves that good copywriters have known this strategy for a very long time.)

Which is more credible? 30 days to a better figure, or lose weight fast? The first one, and 29 or 31 days would have been even better because of the apparent randomness as noted above.

Bad: many reasons to buy now. Better: 10 reasons to buy now. Best: 9 reasons to buy now. If there really are only 9 reasons, why pad it to get to a nice round number?

I realize I’m far short of 47 reasons, but I think I’ve made my point. And by the way, have you ever noticed how often the number 47 appears in narratives, especially science fiction narratives? One reason is that it appears to be the ultimate random number. But actually, it isn’t.

 

Are you still surprised?

Viewers of this year’s NCAA March Madness On Demand see two commercials over and over again: a Buick ad where Peter Frampton sits in for the missing guitarist in the bar band, and a Coke Zero where a guy about to be executed by firing squad gets his last wish “and … ?”

Both are great spots the first time you see them because they rely on the unexpected, and they continue to be enjoyable the next few times as the message sinks in… then they become really, really irritating. The fault is not so much with the creative as the media buy: who knew they would be played to the point of exhaustion? Well, somebody did, but they didn’t bother to inform the creatives.

But actually there is something wrong with the creative: in both cases it has nothing to do with the product being sold. I bet you didn’t know that was a Buick ad till I reminded you (I had thought it was Hyundai, till I went back and checked). A desire for “more” could be applied to any of life’s positive experiences. These ads never go beneath the surface which is one reason they get tiresome so quickly.

If you’re creating campaigns and messages, think about the implications. Is there a way to make your message evergreen so people continue to be receptive after multiple viewings or readings? Think of a book or movie you like that becomes more interesting the second time through. What is it that keeps you involved… a story twist you didn’t notice the first time? Maybe a subtle graphic detail? And the plot itself is probably deeply satisfying, like the stories that ancient peoples told over and over till they became part of their identity.

Is there a way to make your ad that good? It’s worth trying, at least.