Category: Copywriting 101

Dealing with internal client politics

An easy client is one who just wants to make money: as long as you are successful in helping them reach their goal, all is good. But more typically, you’ll be dealing with an organization that has layers of command and that means client politics to be navigated. Here are two of the most typical organizational dynamics and how I’ve learned to deal with them.

Managers vs. Directors. A director is a person with profit & loss responsibility—that easy client I mentioned who just wants to make money. However, you’re unlikely to have direct access to a director level, especially early in the relationship, and even if you do they won’t focus on the details of individual projects. Instead you will report to some form of marketing manager—a person who is tasked with meeting deadlines, staying on budget, and especially presenting no negative surprises to upper management.

Your challenge in dealing with the manager is that your concept and your very existence are inherently risky—you represent the new and unknown, otherwise why would they bring you in to replace whatever else they were using? Your job is to convince the manager that this journey into uncharted waters will be safe and secure as a Caribbean cruise (and without the Legionnaire’s Disease).

You can sell yourself and your concept as a safe solution with a/case histories—other marketers (in recognizable or peer organizations) have done exactly the same thing successfully; b/testimonials—references from clients in those companies they can talk to; c/your personal presentation—this is the time to be buttoned up and professional, not edgy; d/a gentle reminder that one of the possible negatives is being left behind—because others aren’t afraid to innovate and they, the client, are.

Every outside contractor has had the frustration of dealing with managers who seem more focused on budgets and schedules than actual results, but keep in mind that’s what they are getting their job performance reviewed on. Be patient and reasonable, and be prepared to stop seeking work from managers whose near-term focus keeps you from doing the work you want to do or can afford to do.

One last thing: never give a manager a negative surprise. After what I’ve said above you can guess why this is. A blown deadline or budget, or work that doesn’t follow the creative brief, is going to make this person crazy and you may never get work from them (or anyone else in their company) again.

Sound like a lot to deal with? Remember that good managers are where future directors come from. Be patient, prove your reliability, and you may be surprised at how the relationship blossoms once you earn their trust.

Sales vs. Marketing. If the business model is to generate leads, then your company has both a sales and a marketing VP and the sales VP is the one with the big swinging appendage. Because, as sales trainer Roy Chitwood says, “nothing happens until somebody sells something.” The sales department is who brings in the revenues without which nobody would have a job. Right?

Your problem is that your client is the marketing department, which is either subordinate to sales or actually reports to it. And you know, as does the sales VP when he or she is alone at night, that the quality of leads generated by the marketing department is the engine that drives the sales organization.  Actually, I take that back, sales is not at all shy about crediting the importance of leads but in a backhanded manner. If they can’t make the sale, then it’s because the leads aren’t good enough.

You can be part of your marketing client’s survival plan by making sure the leads ARE good. You do this by writing your copy as the first step of the sales process and providing good information and sound reasons to want to find out more. Salespeople may still complain (because not making the sale is never their fault) but the better quality of leads will shine through on the bottom line.

A special sales/marketing problem comes up when you want to use an offer such as a freebie or entry in a drawing to boost response. Sales will complain the leads are no good because you bribed people to respond. The only way to resolve this objection is to set up a test. Have a lower-level support person field the registrations and, if it’s obvious the prospect responded only to get the freebie, don’t pass that lead onto sales. Then see if you have more qualified leads at the end of the day.

I once participated in exactly this test with an enterprise software company. By offering an entry to win a cool tech gadget, we boosted registrations by 24%.  Of these, 10% were quickly dismissed as freebie-seeking lookie-loos. But that left the client with a 14% increase in qualified leads with basically no increase in cost.

I feel like I’ve been unusually snarky in this post. I have generally had cordial, even friendly relationships with my clients and above I’m describing worst case scenarios. But the corporate marketing world is not a relaxing or non-competitive space. You need to be careful out there.

How to get paid as a freelancer

Many freelancers are squirrely about asking for money. You build a personal relationship with a client who genuinely values your creative product, and it seems crass to go back to that person with a bill and say “I hope that you’ll pay this quickly because I have nothing but Pop-Tarts® in my pantry”. Plus appearing too hungry seems non-professional—if you were a pro you’d have the financial details worked out or would simply be above them.

The solution to this one is simple: you shouldn’t be submitting bills to your primary client in the first place. Invoices should go direct to the Accounts Payable Department which is where they’ll end up anyway after your client signs off on them. Your client has other things to do than process paperwork; the AP department doesn’t, because that’s their job. And if they get a bill they don’t recognize they’ll contact you, or their marketing department, rather than simply ignoring it. (Thanks for my friend and fellow freelancer John Wurtmann for reminding me of this strategy.)

Of course a few freelancers—very few—don’t have this problem because they insist on payment in advance. I think that’s an unrealistic expectation and you may lose a project you want because the company simply can’t cut a check in time to meet the schedule. My approach, with a new client, is to ask for 1/3 of my estimate up front, 1/3 on presentation of first round copy, and 1/3 on approval of final copy. That seems to spread risk appropriately between me and them and I’ve never had a client say it was unreasonable.

Kill fees: this is a partial payment a client agrees to give you if the work is unsatisfactory or if their needs change and the product gets stopped in its tracks. A typical arrangement is that the client will agree to pay 25% of the total, regardless of the point at which the project is stopped. A few big publishers insist on kill fees but I try to stay away from them. A stipulated kill fee introduces the scenario of possible failure into the relationship. The 1/3-1/3-1/3 arrangement I mention above protects both of us just fine.

Contracts: if you have a contract you need legal knowledge to make sure it is valid and air-tight and that means, to paraphrase an old saw, the copywriter who writes his or her own contract (or cut-and-pastes one out of a book) has a fool for a lawyer. I prefer to put as little as possible in writing. Definitely an email confirmation of project scope, schedule and price is a good idea. Beyond that I will draft a letter of agreement if the project calls for it either because it is a very large budget or (especially) a retainer arrangement. I deliberately use plain non-legalese language. I sign it when I send it and ask the client to sign a copy and return it; about 50% do.

If you are asked to sign a contract from your client, you can either show it to a lawyer (which means you are going to have to hike your fees significantly, to pay your lawyers) or make your best effort to understand it and question any sections you don’t agree with. The area that typically raises red flags for me is a non-compete clause; I can understand I can’t work for a competitor during the project, but that agreement should have a time limit. Also look at what they specify as payment arrangements and agree they are reasonable.

The big idea here is that a copy assignment is the creation and transfer of a product whose value cannot be objectively determined; if your client is out to trick you, most likely they will be successful or else you will both spend a fortune in legal fees.

Crooks, deadbeats and bankrupts: I’ve had very few bad experiences with payment in a 20-year freelance history. I once sued a client in small claims court and we settled for 50% of the total, at the expense of half a day of my time. Another client proved so difficult to deal with that I resigned the account without asking for pay. Another killed a very complex sweepstakes project many drafts in, initially said the work was off-target so he wouldn’t pay for it, finally agreed to a reasonable kill fee; I think the problem was some internal politics and he had to share the bleeding. I’ve had only one client who was an out-and-out crook who probably had no intention of paying from the get-go; I hired a national collection agency (the one you are thinking about) to go after him and they reported that the claim was “uncollectible”.

All the above problems amounted to a minuscule percentage of my total billing over the years—I would be surprised if it is 1%. If you retain a lawyer it’s probably going to cost you a lot more than that including writing and reviewing contracts and potential litigation. The sane alternative is to pick your clients carefully then work in good faith with the assumption it will be a satisfactory experience for both parties.

Having said that, I’ll close with two cautionary tales. The good: during the dot-com era I worked around the clock for one e-commerce company that wrote a $40,000 check for services rendered and went out of business the next day; miraculously the check was honored but I did not have a backup plan if it wasn’t. The bad and ugly: many freelancers I know worked for a large publisher of romance novels that suddenly went belly-up in the 1990s, not only leaving them stranded but putting an entire agency out of business.

The moral is that, as in poker or stock trading, you should never bet (in terms of uncollected receivables) more than you are prepared to lose.

How I became a copywriter

I would guess that relatively few people spring from the womb and say, “I’m going to be an ad copywriter when I grow up”. More likely you have an aptitude for writing and you discover copywriting as a way to make a living, or else you are asked to write copy as part of another job and discover you’re good at it.

I came from the first group. I went to film school to become a rich and famous screenwriter, but I turned to freelance copywriting as a way to support myself until I got my big break. I actually did apply for the proverbial “job in the mailroom at J. Walter Thompson” but I didn’t get it; my first assignments were writing sale catalogs for department stores. I liked the challenge of finding a way to say something meaningful about a product in a paragraph or two, but it never occurred to me that I was actually selling something.

After a few years of this, I went into one of my department store clients, The Broadway, to see if there were any copywriting assignments coming up. There weren’t but the direct mail advertising manager had just quit and so I was offered that job. For the first time I became accountable for my results—defined not as whether the designs were pleasing and the writing clever, but how much we sold on a per inch basis. It was a revelation, brought home to me when Jan Wetzel, the VP of marketing at our company, took me around to various stores in the chain on the first day of the sale and we watched customers waiting in line to pay for the very same products we had featured in our catalog.

I had a couple of other “suit” jobs, including one where I was the ad director of a company that sold tools by mail. The orders came in by phone so I could see when we had a hit because the switchboard would overflow to the receptionist and she’d be too busy to say hello. I found myself excited about coming into the office on the first day after a new mailing hit, to see if this would happen. Again, a link between copywriting and results. Amazing.

I could only take the suit for so long and eventually I went back to freelancing and buried it in my back yard. (I assume it’s still there, at the intersection of Occidental and Westerly Terrace in Los Angeles’ Silverlake district.) But I had learned the life lesson that successful copywriting is not about gratifying yourself and maybe winning an award or two with a clever concept or turn of a phrase. It’s all about making something happen—and the more significant your impact, the more a knowledgeable client is likely to pay you for your work. It’s copywriting that gets results.

How to present your creative work

Once upon a time, copywriters and creative directors would present their work in person. I know that concept sounds quaint, but it provided an element of control and stage management which is impossible when you simply click “send” in your Outlook. Here’s how to get it back.

1. Insist on a live meeting to “discuss” your work when it is ready for client review. Nowadays this will be via conference call, very occasionally with a visual hookup. Send over the files beforehand—to avoid technical problems from slow downloads and spam filters—but ask reviewers not to open them till the meeting.

2. In your live meeting, start by recapping the creative assignment. Often you will simply repeat elements of the creative brief which is fine because nobody but you has looked at it in some time. This sets the stage and lets people know they are about to see a product they have already “approved” because it is what they asked for.

3. Tell them what they’re going to see. Rough heads? Concept copy? Thumbnails? You can go as deep or as shallow as you like but the key thing is that everybody needs to understand what they are looking at, and what is not yet available because you haven’t created it.

4. Present the work. Presumably you have at least 3 concepts. NEVER lead with your best concept because some folks are still getting up to speed or are distracted. If one of the concepts is considerably worse than the others (maybe because it’s what the client asked for) don’t lead with that either. So inevitably the first concept is the middle-of-the-road option. After that I would gauge the reaction. If they’re really with you present your best idea next. If they are still getting up to speed present your worst now so it can be rejected. This sounds like a complicated formula but when you’re in the moment it is almost automatic.

5. Ask for feedback–but keep it brief and controlled. Get a couple of comments—it doesn’t really matter if they are minor or major—and answer them in such a level of detail that the client believes you really have thought through every possibility (you have, right?) and to keep on drilling you will keep everybody here all night.

6. Close out the meeting by describing a process by which reviewers will now go off and consider the material according to the schedule and the creative brief. If you’ve properly laid the groundwork, nobody will feel like they are entitled to come up with big objections or wild what-ifs at this point. They had plenty of chance to respond at the meeting, and to raise objections after the fact makes them look bad in front of their peers. (Of course, sometimes the “main” client doesn’t show up for the meeting and plans to answer after the fact; if this is the case with your meeting you have the choice of rescheduling the meeting [and probably getting a second no-show] or keeping your fingers crossed and hoping for the best.)

7. Go in the bathroom and throw up. Just kidding! But one of my early agency employers actually did this after every client review. I think he was insecure as to whether the work truly was any good and presented on adrenalin (and probably other mood enhancers) which ultimately did him in. If you do a good job to begin with, and know your stuff, you will experience a sense of accomplishment, not nausea.

8 secrets I wish I had known before I started freelancing

(Actually I did know some of these because I had spent time as an advertising “suit”, which required me to apologize way too often for tardy or sloppy creative.)

1. Be on time. Advertising is a business. If you are late on a deadline, it impacts other people throughout your client’s marketing operation and may cost a lot of money. Don’t do it. Exception: sometimes  being late is unavoidable. Maybe you have a personal emergency, or maybe the project turns out more complicated than you expected. Talk to the client as early as possible and see if you can get an extension. Make this the very rare exception rather than the rule.

2. Follow the brief or other instructions unless you have raised a question at the startup meeting and gotten very clear approval to go in a different direction. The creative brief, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is a contract between you and the account team. Violate it at your peril.

3. Cultivate a reputation for reliability. Do what you say you will do. Show up at meetings on time, be organized, don’t keep calling the client because you forgot to ask about something you need for your research.

TIP: if you achieve the above three things you will stand out in the client’s mind as a better choice than 95% of other creative practitioners, including people who are more talented than you but can’t escape the label of “flaky creatives”.

4. Understand how freelancers get paid. Be aware that some clients pay so fast it takes your breath away (these will become your favorites… why can’t others learn how big a difference it makes?) and others will intentionally pay you late as part of their cash management. Over time you will develop an instinct for which is which. If somebody is deliberately slow-pay your options are building in extra fees to compensate for the aggravation, finding another client, or simply living with it.

5. Remember you’re a copywriter, not a lawyer or accountant or collection agency. Don’t insist on elaborate contracts, penalties for late payment and similar practices of big companies because you can’t afford to hire real professionals to enforce these practices without raising your rates, plus your clients will just get irritated and go elsewhere. The best way to insure you won’t get screwed, or sued, is to deliver quality work that makes people value you as a business partner.

6. Bill as soon as you can, and certainly as soon as the project is done. Clients tend to pay faster when the project still has a warm glow in their hearts. Plus if a client is going to stiff you or slow-pay, the sooner you know about it the better. Note: In over 20 years of freelance I have encountered only a couple of real crooks. If you choose quality clients and deliver quality work, I predict your experience will be similar.

7. Be sensitive to potential competitive conflicts. Never work for two direct competitors at the same time because it’s a clear conflict of interest; you are trying to take business away from yourself. Never, ever go directly to an agency client’s customers asking for work, even if those customers approach you to do so. The agency will be enraged, may sue you, and at best your reputation for loyalty and integrity will suffer.

8. Never ever lie. Not about your experience, not about your research, and especially not about the originality of your work. Marketing is a surprisingly small world, and getting more so with the network effect of the internet. I once had a freelancer present to me a package I had written as part of his own portfolio. Needless to say, he did not get work from me.

We’re in the middle of a series of posts in which I cover the business aspects of copywriting as I teach them in my class for the Direct Marketing Association.

How to make a living as a copywriter

In the early days of the class I teach for the DMA, many students had their tuition paid by their employers. More recently, most are paying their own way and are specifically interested in how they can make a living as a copywriter. I describe three pathways with which I have some personal experience:

Work for an agency. This is the glamorous choice, especially when you’re looking in from the outside. Who wouldn’t want to be part of a team working on an edgy campaign that turns a new product into a household name with the help of a massive creative budget? Problem is, you have to be pretty senior and pretty well connected to have a meaningful role in the big work. If you’re new to the business you can expect to start at the bottom, work as a proofreader or copy editor first, put in long hours and not make very much money until you prove yourself.

But there are lots of personal perks to working with a major agency, which I’ve done at various times both as a contract worker and in my occasional forays into a salaried position. A good agency truly is the big time in terms of complexity and challenge of projects, and creative is genuinely respected—as opposed to just getting the job done or making the client happy. If you’re lucky you’ll learn from the best pros and if you’re good you can go far. Don’t expect job security, though…. your position is only as safe as the account roster.

Work inhouse on the client side. Many companies have a marketing communications department inhouse which is responsible for turning out marketing materials and possibly working as the liaison to an outside agency, and many big companies will have a copywriter on staff. One benefit of working inhouse is that you get to know your product or service deeply, in a way that an outside agency never could. And you may work with many different types of media—print, collateral, broadcast, digital as well as less exciting internal communications.

The drawback is the same as the benefit: you’ll be pigeonholed into your product category and it may be difficult to escape that if you want to go elsewhere. And, you may get bored eventually. But if you’re looking for job security an inhouse job is probably your best choice.

Be a freelancer. This is the only work I personally am suited for, since I get bored working on the same product for long periods of time without a break and I don’t seem to be good at being an employee. Fortunately, I’ve been able to make a living as a freelancer.

Getting started as a freelancer will almost certainly entail some financial sacrifice compared to working for agencies or inhouse, since it takes a while to build up client relationships. On the other hand, if you don’t get a great job offer right away (and you probably won’t) you may have no choice. And you may be able to get tryouts, either as a vacation fill-in or to handle overloads, while you are waiting for that perfect full time job to materialize.

Because you are a business owner as well as a creative practitioner, the financial considerations for being freelance are unforgiving. You have to be a self-starter and you have to be able to make yourself sit at the keyboard when it is beautiful outside and everybody else is going to the beach or the mountains. You also have to be able to handle cash flow irregularities, and keep left and right brains separate so you don’t get mad at a client that owes you money and compromise the quality of your work.

If you can put up with all that, the benefit of being a freelancer is that you have more variety in your assignments and to a degree you can pick what you work on and whom you work with. You can set your own schedule which doesn’t mean you avoid long hours but does allow you to choose when those hours are spent. And, once you build up a stable of clients who like you, the financial security is not bad. A recession causes all companies to cut marketing budgets and you’ll be the first to hear about it, but hopefully you are disciplined to put aside a good chunk of your proceeds for this inevitable rainy day.

How to build your copywriting “book”

The “book” is your portfolio of completed copywriting assignments, presented with a narrative from you about what the objective was for each project, how you approached it as a creative problem, and how the result performed in the marketplace. It’s hard to get copy assignments without showing a nice fat book… but without the assignments, where do the components of the book come from? Here are a few ideas to break the logjam:

1. Seek out “meat and potatoes” assignments as a vacation fill-in or rewrite person for a good agency, to learn the basics and prove yourself. You’re not trying to win awards here, just demonstrate you know the nuts and bolts and can follow creative direction intelligently.

2. Do spec (unpaid) work for SELECTED clients. It’s okay to do spec work for an agency, not okay for a small business that will look at it as free creative. (If they didn’t pay for it, they may not value it.)

3. Look for projects that pay very little but will end up as a great sample for your book. A local business or creative boutique marketer may offer these.

4. It’s not a total waste to answer help wanted ads or craigslist posts, but you should treat these mainly as a way to hone your skills writing sales letters. Many ads are placed by HR departments that don’t have the skills to evaluate a copywriter’s ability. In other cases the ad is placed by the creative department, but then they’re overwhelmed with response and have no systematic way to evaluate them.

5. A better idea: target a specific agency, company or even creative director and then create a letter writing campaign aimed at that target specifically. A classic example of this is Lee Clow’s “hire the hairy” campaign that got him a job as creative director of Chiat-Day. (Clow has a beard.)

6. Create a “master piece” like a medieval craftsman: pick a product and then write the best promotion you can to sell it.  Knock yourself out, since no client is going to edit your work and nobody will complain about potential production costs.

7. Do pro bono work for a community group or nonprofit. In addition to a sample for your book, you’ll get points for supporting a worthy cause.

The right way for marketers to say “thank you”

Two marketers contacted me to say “thank you” yesterday. The first was Starbucks, who wanted to thank me for being their customer with a free mini-dessert celebrating their 40th anniversary, if I made a purchase between 2 and 5 this afternoon. Then, the folks at Time-Life Books sent a thank you to me just for being awesome and for motivating and moving them with my “passion”. The subject line said simply, “thank you”. Nothing being sold here.

If a real person was thanking me in person, I’d find the Time-Life message much more sincere. But this is marketing. I found myself thinking, “dude, if you like me so much where’s the offer?” And the Starbuck’s message, cleverly built around getting trial for a new product at a slow time of day, was much more appealing.

Starbucks thanks you.
Starbucks thanks you.

Time Life thanks you.

That’s the reality: the only way for a marketer to say thank you, and be appreciated for the gesture, is to include a gift or offer of some kind. Maybe charities are an exception. One of my favorite outer envelope lines was on a WorldVision mailing asking for a mini-sponsorship for a Third World child. The teaser: “Gift enclosed. But not for you.”

How to use gifts, prizes and sweepstakes in your marketing

The U.S. News and World Report marketers had a formula that was used for many years. Prospective subs would receive a double postcard offering some very attractive business premium (like a desk calculator, back in the day when they were special) as a bonus for a paid subscription. It must have worked because it was repeated so long. The benefit of requiring an upfront payment helps cash flow. But it ultimately does not foster a loyal subscriber base and both the pub and this advertising concept are pretty moribund these days.

The U.S. News example demonstrates both the appeal and the danger of using product giveaways to help you get customers. A certain number of people will always pop just for the gift… and the more attractive the gift, the more questionable the quality of these freeloaders to your business. What you’re hoping is that enough otherwise qualified folks who were on the fence say “sure, why not” because they like the premium and these folks also like what they see when they receive your publication, product or service. To make this work, the giveaways needs to be closely aligned with the interests of the person who matches your core prospect. Everybody would like to win an all-expenses paid trip to Disneyland, for example, so that is not a qualifying offer. Today’s popular iPad is much better. It’s trendy, techy and business focused… all of which match the profile of certain types of readers.

The next question is what you’re going to make people do to get the gift. U.S. News requiring payment is a good example since traditionally pubs have very poor pay up from their “free issue” promos. Keep in mind that in addition to the cost of the goods you’re going to have the expense and administrative headache of fulfilling them. Most marketers farm this job out to a fulfillment shop that will ship in anonymous boxes. This is expensive and misses an opportunity to do additional marketing inside the fulfillment package.

If asked by a client, I will always recommend a sweepstakes where one person, or a few people, win as opposed to a gift for everyone who responds. The greed appeal is still there but the cost is much lower since there are only a few units to buy. Companies worry about sweepstakes liability and if this is a serious issue for you, there are companies that will write the rules, choose the winner and indemnify you for a flat sum, most recently $25,000. If you’re on a shoestring budget, I would advise you to study a number of competitive sweepstakes in your market space, download the rules (which the marketers are legally required to publish) then create your own contest structure based on what others have done before (or pass the buck and have your lawyer do it).

A final consideration is that the giveaway should not overshadow the product or service you are selling. There are two ways this can happen. The giveway can become the most exciting and prominent thing about the promo, with sales playing second fiddle. This was the case with the notorious Publishers Clearinghouse sweepstakes. Magazine subscriptions were an afterthought and the subscribers gained this way were of such questionable quality that “sweeps sold” mailing lists often were rentable at a substantial discount.

More insidious is the situation when a premium is so unusual or complicated that substantial real estate is required to present it. This is the case with many brilliant ideas that clients come up with, for oddball items they happen to love or their kid has told them about. The ink required to describe these items is parasitically siphoning attention from your main selling proposition and can only hurt your results. As a rule of thumb, if it takes more than a few sentences to describe what it is and why you want it, then it isn’t a good premium.

Whenever I go to direct marketing trade shows I look up the booths of Konik and Co. and other sellers of premiums and “advertising specialties” (the latter being something that has your logo prominently printed on it, such as a baseball hat). I ask them what’s new and what is selling best and they always have a few idea starters for me. I also get lazy and look at what marketers of products similar to my clients’ are offering. Right now it’s iPads so might as well copy them. You can never get too many chances to be a winner, right?