Category: Marketing

Thank you internet! Thank you Chris and Cindy Peters for fixing my NuTone intercom!

NuTone IMA-4006 controller
My NuTone IMA-4006 Music Intercom. Not only did they rebuild the control unit, Northside Service Company cleaned it up so it looks like new.

I recently moved into a house that has a NuTone IMA-4006 Music Intercom system installed. You can press a button and be heard in another room (or from the porch if you are ringing the doorbell) and also play music throughout the home. I know that sounds quaint in these days of earbuds and instant messaging, but there is a remote unit in every room so it was pretty hard to ignore.

The most recent owners, who lived here for 15 years, had never tried the NuTone intercom system. I experimented by turning a few knobs and got nothing but hum. But at least there was power. Was it possible the system could be restored to working condition? My local NuTone service center said “we don’t know anybody who works on them anymore.” So it was off to the internet.

A search quickly put me in touch with Northside Service Company, a factory-authorized NuTone Service Center in San Ramon, CA. Their site features dozens of links to videos, manuals and articles to help you make the most of your obsolete equipment. I filled out a web request form and a few minutes later the phone rang. It was owner Chris Peters, calling to discuss my system. It turns out that the remote units rarely fail so if I would send him my control station he would rebuild it at a cost that was not cheap, but far less than buying a comparable system today or taking out all those speakers and patching the holes walls.

I disconnected the many wires following Chris and Cindy Peters’ very clear step by step video, then packed it up according to another video of instructions. A couple of weeks later, I got the unit back along with a bag of parts that had been replaced. Not only did they rebuild the unit, they replaced the doors that cover the controls and often break off (the hinges are no longer available so Northside had them custom manufactured) and at my request added an A/V jack and sent me a couple of new lighted doorbell buttons.

It took me a few days to get up the courage to re-install the unit and test it, but I did and everything works as advertised. I’m back in business, feeling very much like a wired denizen of the early digital era.

This is a story that could not have happened without the internet—which helped me find Northside Service Company, and enabled Chris and Cindy to build a site that was incredibly useful and also showed me they knew what they were doing. But the capper was the personal service. I mentioned that Chris called me immediately when I submitted a request. (It was on New Year’s Eve as I recall.) When I had a question about an extra wire during re-installation he answered me by email within an hour. This is a business model many other specialized service providers (copywriters come to mind) can learn from, and emulate.

Super Bowl FSIs (2017 edition): it’s a home run! Oh, wait…

 

Kick Off
Let’s kickoff some savings with our Super Bowl FSIs!

It’s been a full two years since we checked in on the newspaper supplement coupons that appear the Sunday before the Super Bowl, wherein advertisers contort themselves to refer to the event without using the actual name, which is licensed and which license is heavily enforced. The world has gone through painful gyrations in the past 24 months. Super Bowl FSIs? Not so much.

Looking at this year’s batch, the big news is that somebody actually paid for the right to use the term Super Bowl, as in “Super Bowl Savings Spectacular” at the top of the SmartSource FSI. Unfortunately, Dollar General immediately drops the ball by inviting us to “Kickoff the Savings!” Team, the verb is “kick off”, two words. “Kickoff” is a noun.

I like to think of FSIs as the last bastion of old-school copywriters with shaking, nicotine-stained fingers who would rather forego their morning whiskey than come up with an original thought. Hence the tired headlines like “Get Your Game Day Going” (Blue Diamond almonds) and “Stock Up for the Big Game” (Pepcid antacid). What does it actually mean to “Snack Like a Pro on Game Day” (Oikos yogurt) or “Cheer on the Crunch” (Carvel ice cream cakes) or “Blitz Your Taste Buds with Flavor” (HeluvaGood dips)?

Super Bowl Cliche Headlines
Are these headlines creative, or what?

I did see some promising rookie plays like Texas Pete’s “Go for the Game, Stay for the Drama” (I assume that is what happens when the hot sauce and fried food hits your intestines) and French’s “Spice It Up This Bowl Season” (bowls of dip, get it?) and José Olé’s “Make Your Crowd Go Wild” (taquitos and dip in stop motion as they tumble toward the floor, presumably hurled by an unruly partyer).

Rookie Super Bowl Headlines
A completed pass and a fumble by the rookie squad

However, with NFL ratings in decline it’s entirely possible this new crop of scribes has no idea about or interest in pro football or sports in general. How else can you explain Drake’s Cakes “Your Lunchbox Game is Strong” or Bush’s Beans’ “Our Lineup Completes the Gathering”? Just try serving up a bowl of beans to your beer-swilling spouse and her loutish friends and announcing, “Honey, I’ve brought some beans to complete your Super Bowl gathering.” She’ll drop kick you into the next county, and rightly so.

Lessons not learned in 2016

Brexit and Donald Trump’s election were, according to fivethirtyeight.com, well within the margin of error in polling predictions and so were shocking only because people were mentally and emotionally incapable of thinking these events would take place. This made me think of some experiences with focus groups and direct mail back in the days when both were a bigger thing than they are now.

When shown a number of creative options, focus groups would inevitably veer away from the more promotional formats, especially when those formats had big screaming headlines and prominent offers. Yet every time the formats were tested head-to-head in the mail, the promotional format won.

My point: there is no substitute for real-world, boots-on-the-ground testing so long as you have two or more worthy options to consider. People will lie when they think the wrong answer might embarrass them, but not when they’re alone with the offer and their credit card.

Search marketers know this and so do online marketers who constantly refine their landing pages through multivariate testing. But I see many traditional marketers who don’t bother to test or—maybe worse—set up an a/b split and then fail to capture the results or are too busy to analyze them.

I always like to present a more and a less conservative option for any campaign. Of course, I am disappointed when the client chooses the conservative approach and even more disappointed if they test both and the conservative one wins. But the marketplace doesn’t lie. If you ignore this truth, you better be prepared to live with the consequences as well as explain them to your boss or client.

Attend a “Creative Town Hall Meeting” in Monday afternoon Ignition Session on October 17

Are you coming to the DMA’s annual conference in Los Angeles next week? Then make plans to attend my Ignition session, “The Devil in the Details,” at 4 pm on Monday the 17th. It promises to be a repeat of a highly successful and well-attended session last year in which creatives shared their pet peeves and inspiration–a town hall meeting for copywriters, art directors and those who work with them.

The DMA took a big risk last year in doing something that’s a no no in direct response: changing your control without testing it. The 3 day conference was compressed to 2 days, and content below the keynote level was reclassified as Insight, Inspiration, Ideation and Ignition depending on the format and content. Ignition is supposed to be audience-led. A moderator facilitates, but the folks in the audience actively participate and lead the conversation. Did it work? Yes. The conference was well-attended and the sessions for the most part got positive reviews, so we’re moving forward with the same thing.

As for my session, I was asked to take over for my pal Carol Worthington Levy and Herschell Gordon Lewis, who for several years had presented a session featuring examples of good and bad creative execution, often hilarious. (Herschell passed away last month after a very full life at the age of 87. He was a major inspiration to me.) To accommodate the new format, I showed a few slides and then asked the audience to pile on with their own experiences, eg what’s the worst project you’ve ever worked on, the worst client etc and what can we learn from it.

It was a huge hit. The room was packed and creatives and account managers loved the opportunity to air their gripes about crazy clients, up-tight legal departments and the “suits”. Now that we’re back with a better idea of how the Ignition format works, I’ll be ready with some examples to prime the pump and then step back and watch the fireworks happen. (Not to mix a metaphor or anything.)

Here are a few topics as a starter list:

  • Those darn kids… why won’t millennials buy my product?
  • Can brands get away with talking like teenagers in social media?
  • My best idea was killed by the ____ [client, suits, legal department etc]
  • My biggest flop and what I learned from it.
  • Can you be funny and still sell stuff?

And there’s more! If you have topics you’d like to add, email me and we’ll get them into the list.  See you on Monday, October 17 at 4 pm!

Should you care about email marketing?

Somehow email marketing has become the red headed stepchild of promotion channels. It’s not as pervasive as Facebook, immediate as Twitter or insidious as native advertising. And it’s all too easy to take email for granted and put it on autopilot with a management tool like Eloqua or Pardot. So email gets short shrift in planning meetings and the email marketing manager is often someone who’s expected to handle production rather than make a creative and strategic impact. Am I right?

But email marketing is also the face of your company to people on your email list as well as email inquirers. And if you don’t pay attention to the channel you risk looking like you are clueless or don’t care. I’ve recently moved, which has caused a number of new interactions. Here’s an email from Thermador customer service when I asked about a part for my 25-year old range:

Good Afternoon Mr. Maxwell,

Thank you for taking the time to contact us. We here at Thermador are always more than happy to assist you with your appliance inquiries and we appreciate you allowing us to do so.

Please accept our sincere apology for the delayed response as we are currently experiencing a high volume of email correspondence.

In regards to your inquiry, unfortunately there aren’t any parts available for your unit…

See what I mean? Here’s a potential new customer reaching out to you… sell me an upgraded product! And, while you’re at it, engage with me instead of saying you’ve been too busy to answer my query.

Here’s another. The USPS partners with a company called My Move which makes a number of offers during the process of changing your address. There’s an interstitial page with check boxes for retailers you want offers from, and after you leave there is a second page with more offers. I get it, the second page is for marketers who didn’t pay enough to be on the first page, but there are some really good offers here. $50 off $500 at Amazon! 10% off my next Home Depot purchase! I want this stuff.

But when I try to submit the page, it doesn’t work. I just get the spinning ball in my browser (Safari for Mac… I suspect a compatibility issue). I find a support link for My Move and I write to them and describe the above problem in detail and ask how I can get these offers since the submit button didn’t work. The response:

Hi,

MY MOVE sends your information to the advertisers you selected during your transaction. Fulfillment of specific offers is done by those advertisers and can take anywhere from 48 hours to several weeks depending on the content. For example, a catalog you selected may not arrive for a few weeks, but a coupon that is emailed may arrive in just 2 days. If you need a more specific time frame please contact the advertiser directly. Good luck with your move, and I hope this has helped.

See what I mean? No, it hasn’t helped, since you answered a completely different question than the one I asked. Hopefully Amazon and Home Depot are on a performance contract with My Move, because they are getting exactly zero hits from anyone who is using Safari for Mac. And they can’t be happy about this indifference to a prime target because My Move can’t be bothered to clean up its email automation or pay a human a few dollars to actually read the emails.

UPDATE: Here’s an even better example. I needed a recommendation for a pool & spa service (in my hostile climate, we have to have a “closing” and drain the pipes for winter) and went to Angie’s list. I noticed that one of the reviews had an “F” which was clearly intended from the content to be an “A”. Unlike Yelp, there’s no way to flag a review or give feedback on it so I wrote an email to support using their online form. Here’s the reply; note that has nothing to do with my concern and also contains a number of grammatical errors:

Thank you for contacting Angie’s List. 
We do apologize that you were not able to use the one of the recommended services in your area. For the reviews, we rely on our members feedback. We advised them to be as accurate as they can and non biased as for the work performed by the companies enlisted with us.
Let us know if you have any other questions, or visit the 24/7 Angie’s List support site for additional help. Don’t forget, if you have any home maintenance or improvement projects coming up, you can save time and money by shopping at  AngiesList.
Thanks again. Have a great day!

See what I mean? You too, dear reader. Have a great day.

Free marketing advice from Warby Parker

The other day I was on a plane and got in a conversation with my seat mate. When she found out I worked as an advertising guy she told me her husband designed neckwear and wanted to sell his ties via the internet. What free marketing advice did I have?

My first thought was, uh oh. Fashion is a very fickle industry. I had some experience early in my career when I was an ad manager for a large department store. In that bricks-and-mortar era a men’s fashion manufacturer had to sell a network of retail buyers each season, starting with the MAGIC Show  (is it still around?) and other industry events and and once you had a few retailers signed up, manufacture and distribution was the next channel. Maybe online sales have broken down some of those barriers, but the subjectivity of the ultimate buyer probably hasn’t changed.

Then it occurred to me: Warby Parker. Here’s another niche fashion product that seems to be very successful, based on the frequency with which I see their Facebook ads. So I advised her to study Warby Parker, or another single-line internet retailer, to see what they do. If it seems successful, then consider emulating their strategy.

I don’t think this is bad advice. One of the great things about working in marketing is its transparency. It’s not like the technology industry where a company’s special sauce is kept under lock and key so competitors won’t steal it. To the contrary, retail advertising is in plain view and the more you see it the more successful it probably is.

“What advice can you give me as a marketing pro” has just been added to the topic list for my DMA Ignite session on Monday, October 17 at the DMA &Then conference. This session is evolving into a sort of town hall meeting in which creative practitioners and ad managers will share their ideas and frustrations with their peers. Come join us at 4 pm at the Los Angeles Convention Center. And in the meantime, if you have any free advice of your own, please comment below.

How not to localize direct mail

Your personalization vendor has a great idea: add variable fields to localize direct mail by mentioning the reader’s geographical location. This is especially effective if you’re a national brand and you want to connect with prospects on a grassroots level. Hence this month’s example from the Salvation Army:

Saratoga Cares
Salvation Army wants me to know Saratoga Counta Cares

The biggest problem with this effort is something that can happen to any marketer–which is why I am sharing this even though I have beat up on these poor folks and their localization in the past. I know where I live, so making a reference to that place has no meaning unless you add another attribute. For example, “last night 368 people in Saratoga County went to bed hungry. Here’s your chance to help them get a good meal”. Just saying “this is a mailer about Saratoga County” is a huge so-what because almost every piece of localized mail, whether it’s a bill or a message from a civic group, says the same thing.

A secondary problem is that “Saratoga County” is a meaningless term. Saratoga County is a gerrymandered entity and I feel no affinity for my fellow citizens down in Waterford or across the lake in Edinburg. I am a resident of Saratoga Springs, a city, so please identify me/yourself as such. If you’re going to localize, take the time to research local usages like this and avoid faux pas. (A favorite, which I searched unsuccessfully for just now, was a liquor ad localized to San Francisco from a few years back in which the tippler looking for an excuse to drink checks off “Saw a hippie at Haight”. It should be “in the Haight” of course and that boner immediately brands the marketer as a carpetbagger.)

Here’s another interesting example of personalization/localization. A Canadian ad firm drove Porsches to people’s homes, parked them in the driveway and took a picture, then drove away and mailed the prospect a picture of the car in their own driveway with the caption “it’s closer than you think”. In friendly Canada it drew accolades and  32% response rate. In the U.S. it would have drawn lawsuits. Know your local audience.

Copywriters, the end is near

I was paying my quarterly visit to a client when the online marketing manager mentioned he needed quite a few SEO articles written. I asked if I could help. No need, he said, I’ll just order them on TextBroker for ten cents a word and run them through copycheck to be sure they weren’t plagiarized.

I’ve always had a smug attitude toward the link bait that pops up when you search on a technical topic. It’s pretty obvious they’re partly machine-written and/or English is not the writer’s primary language. So to have my own client go this path was a bit unsettling. I signed up for my own TextBroker account and commissioned an article on Bengali cuisine for my food blog. The author would have to say what makes Bengali cuisine unique (specific spices and ingredients used) and provide a defining recipe as an example. All this for a maximum of $75.

2 days later, _Liz came through. She hit all the markers and the article is good enough that with a couple of tweaks I’m going to use it. The cost? $65.08, for something that would have taken me the equivalent of $500 or more at my hourly rate to research and write. By the way, why did I choose that topic? Because I assumed the writers were South Asia based and I might get lucky and find a real subject matter expert. But TextBroker tells me their writers are 100% in the USA.

Here’s the other reason we copywriters might as well trade in our keyboards for flip-flops. The Wall Street Journal, which I rely on for sports perspective for some reason, has twice reported in the last few days on organized races with declining registration. First 10Ks, now “mudder” type obstacle courses. The explanation? Those darn millennials. Studies show they don’t enjoy competition as much as previous generations, hence less interest in organized competitions.

Of course, the reason we as copywriters get paid what we do is that we convince readers they can rise above the competition—whether you define that by economics, status or ability to do a job better—with the help of our client’s product or service. If the reader no longer cares, where does that leave us?

A long weekend in New Orleans is looking mighty good right now.

DMA &Then 2016… I’ll be back

I’ve been asked to repeat my Ignition session at this year’s annual Direct Marketing Association conference, which will take place in Los Angeles. My slot is Monday October 17, 4:00-4:45 PM.

Titled (for legacy reasons too complex to go into here) “Devilish Details: Looking for an Advantage in Your Copy and Design”, it’s essentially an opportunity for creative practitioners and managers to let down their hair in a town hall setting. You know all those times you’ve seen a really good or bad example of creative and wished you could talk to somebody about it? Or that ridiculous assignment that you aced in spite of the suits? Or how your legal department maimed your dream concept? Here’s your chance to share.

I’ll come prepared with a few examples to prime the pump, and would love your suggestions either as comments or emails to me. Some of the areas I want to touch on are “Brands saying bae” (cringeworthy examples of corporations trying to be hip in social media, as featured by the @BrandsSayingBae handle or seen in the wild), infographic abuse (some are ok, but some are graphics for the sake of graphics, right?), mumblecore emails and whether they work, and fake-official direct mail that makes you wonder how stupid marketers think we really are.

Got any more ideas? Please share!

We will also have food! Not in the session (though copies of my book will be given away), but repeatedly during the conference because Los Angeles is a great food town. I’m specifically interested in great Chinese in the San Gabriel Valley and interior Mexican and am starting the research process now. Again, suggestions appreciated. This will be fun!