Category: Uncategorized

Are copywriters the last storytellers?

Every copywriter should read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey and following that, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey. The first describes the classic myth structure which has existed across many civilizations and millennia: the hero emerges from humble beginnings, deals with adversity and learns from it, battles for cause and identity, suffers a major setback and enters a dark period, then draws on everything he’s learned to rally and prevail in a final battle. The Writer’s Journey is the same story, but told through the lens of Star Wars, one of the most popular films of all time.

I go to movies often with my teenage son, and it is painful to me that so many of today’s films are CGI spectacles devoid of plot or character development that could have been improved by a rote interpretation of the above sequence. I wonder what the budget meetings were like when they decided to put in yet another car crash or exploding head instead of spending a few bucks on a junior screenwriter.

If you’re a copywriter, you can’t afford to be sloppy like the Hollywood studios with your plots. You’re telling a story in which your prospect is the hero (thanks to your product) or in peril (but your service will save her). It needs to be credible and complete or you will be shown the door. Always remember that the marketer is an uninvited guest at the hearth of life. Your fellow travelers may be willing to listen politely for a moment but, if you can’t hold their attention you’re out in the snow. And, unlike failed Hollywood blockblusters, there’s no foreign distribution to redeem bad copy.

Yesterday in the car, I was listening to our recent Nobel laureate in literature for the first time in a while. “The drunken organ grinder cries…. I want you.” Parse those words and you’ll see there’s more drama and pathos in two lines than in most recent movies. The organ grinder is a street performer, someone who’s not particularly valued though he may amuse us. This one, though, has troubles. He is lovesick and that is probably what led him to drink. We want to know more.

Write copy that good and you’ll be a success, even a hero. Unlike yours truly, you may even sell a screenplay some day.

Sixfold: A crowd sourced literary competition

Are you a copywriter who has dreams of publishing legitimate (i.e. non-marketing) prose or poetry? Then take a look at Sixfold.org. This outfit puts on regular literary competitions you can enter for the very reasonable fee of $5, plus a commitment to read and critique 18 fellow competitors’ work.

Entries are submitted via the web, and each is assigned to a panel of judges (there are controls in place so you don’t critique your own work). You receive six stories in each of three rounds with no author identification. As a critic, you rank the stories from 1 (best) to 6 (least-best) and write a brief explanation of your vote. I found this a challenging and stimulating assignment.

In the first round, it was pretty easy to identify stories that would rank toward the bottom but harder to determine the order toward the top. But you have to take this seriously because only the top two move on to the next round, and the writer of the story will have access to your critique and know how you voted. It’s a (mostly) transparent process, like Yelp for writers.

Again in the second round, you read, critique and rank six stories and the top two move on to a third round. In the third round, the highest-ranking work gets a $1000 award and the top 15 get publication in the quarterly Sixfold Journal. At this level the writing is very, very good for the most part and I felt challenged to be very clear in my critique. I needed to have a reason for placing the work where I had, and I had to explain the reason in a way that was useful to the author.

After the competition ends, you have access to a complete list of the entries ranked in judging order. You can read the stories, and click through to whatever bio info the author has provided. More important, you have (password protected) access to the votes and critiques on your own entry and the more rounds you made it through the more critiques there will be. I was fortunate to get to the third round (I placed #20, just out of the running for publication, among 265 entries overall) so there were lots of critiques and some were very useful. Specifically, there were enough criticisms of the way I chose to end my story that I’m going to go back and fiddle with it.

The one thing I didn’t like, though I understand the reason for it, is that participants have the opportunity to be as anonymous as they wish both in their critiques and their entries. You can hide your work, or your name, or both, in the publicly available results. This allows a writer to submit a work to gauge acceptance without publishing it. It also allows an established writer to submit anonymously. 5 of the top 15 stories are currently listed on the results page as “Document [number]” and aren’t available to be read. Most of the lower ranked stories are anonymous in the results, suggesting that a new author was simply looking for feedback which is entirely legitimate.

As a contestant, I’d like to know the identity of my reviewer so I can read their work and understand any inherent bias or perspective. It’s frustrating that User 2707 gave me a 1 (which, confusing, is the worst ranking for tabulating score, meaning I was 6 out of 6 in his rating) and said simply, “Thanks for letting us all read your story! I enjoyed it.” Would he/she have been so dismissive without the protection of anonymity? There were also some reviewers whose critiques were not available; I got a ranking but not an explanation. It’s a glitch in the system, I assume

All in all, the positives far outweigh my concerns, and I’m a big fan of sixfold.org. Already thinking about what to enter for the July competition.

Bad news for Southwest Airlines frequent flyers

This morning I discovered that the new SWA reservation system automatically cancels you if you book two flights out of the same city on the same day. For example, I’m going to be on the west coast in July but don’t know whether I am coming home directly or continuing on to SNA. So I booked flights for both and now SWA has cancelled my return to ALB because it was the more expensive ticket. After 30 minutes on the phone with customer relations, the SFO-ALB leg has been reinstated and the SFO-SNA cancelled. I will now book the latter on another airline.

I was notified of the cancellation by an automated email, no explanation, which arrived in the middle of the night with a new mystery confirmation number. The long conversation and time on hold has produced the above information, which the rep says has always been in the contract but is only now being enforced. She says the people most affected are “tiered” passengers (frequent flyers) who often make multiple reservations and later cancel one. Exactly.

This flexibility is the precise reason I have been flying SWA. I am paying for the ticket and I understand if I forget to cancel the money is gone. It seems like a fair and straight up business transaction. I pointed out to the agent that I am one of the lucky ones because I took the trouble to research this; a lot of folks are going to show up at the airport and discover they don’t have a ticket because they thought the automated email was an error, they didn’t see the email, or they didn’t make the reservation on the web.

Any recommendations on a carrier with lots of coast-to-coast itineraries out of ALB?

Does ScoreIt teach you to write like Stephen King?

Food for thought: I recently received an email from Bowker, a service that provides ISBN numbers to self-published authors. They have a new product that allows you to compare your prose to that of successful published writers and find out who has a style and genre close to yours. The software is ScoreIt, and it has a hefty price tag of $99. If they’d let me do one match for free I might have tried it but as it is I will just opine about something I know nothing about.

Let’s say ScoreIt tells me I write like Stephen King, and that my story of teenage mishaps is closest to his horror works. What am I supposed to do with that information? I suppose I could advertise my work with phrases such as “if you liked Carrie, you’ll love Teen Troubles!” And certainly I can use it for the elevator pitch to prospective agents in which you tell them your writing is like Stephen King crossed with Herman Melville (for argument’s sake I’m presuming that’s a secondary match). Is either of these worth $99?

What I’m worried about is that ScoreIt is going to make writers try to train themselves to write more like Stephen King. They’ll pore over his books (and the reports from ScoreIt which I presume have granular detail on shared vocabulary, sentence structure etc). And it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of developing their own voice, they will indeed write more and more like someone else.

Of course, I used Stephen King as my straw man for a very good reason. He has a completely different voice from book to book, depending on topic and presumed audience. And he explains his craft and technique quite fully in On Writing, a standard textbook in college writing courses. The $10 or so that costs you on Amazon would be a better investment, methinks.

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.

A love letter to the CVS app development team

CVS barcode
Thanks for the bar code, CVS! Now, what do I do with it?

Okay, CVS, let me make sure I got this right. You have a new service called Curbside Pickup, which means I can pull into a special parking spot outside the store and an associate will use Location Services to know when I’ve arrived and bring the goods right to my car. Sweet!

So, let’s put together an order. Whoops, only a very limited selection is available for Curbside Pickup including almost none of the sale items in your weekly ad. What’s up with that? Well, I have a code good for $10 off my first $15 order so I’ll shop from what’s available. Combs are good. Let’s buy some. Order done!

Whoops, turns out the combs I ordered aren’t actually stocked in my local store so they’re cancelled from the order after I complete it. And now I’m below the minimum to apply the coupon. I am asked to add replacement items but can only choose items from the same manufacturer (no opportunity to search) and whoops, those other items are not available either.

I do try a second order just to see if we can consolidate the two. Nope. Soon I’m getting a flurry of text messages and am off to the store to pick up my two orders, sans discount. Well, not to worry, says the very nice sales associate who brings it out to the car. The discount code never appeared on your order for some reason.

Next I pull into a regular parking spot because there’s a prescription to pick up. That’s right, prescriptions are not available through Curbside Pickup. The CVS non-drug business has been completely separated from the drug business which seems like a bad idea; historically, drug stores started carrying non-medical items as an add-on to build customer loyalty. Now I can get my Curbside Pickup at CVS and move on to Walgreens for my meds, why not?

But wait, there’s something special about my prescription at CVS… they provided me a barcode! Does this bring relief from the very long line of sufferers waiting for their meds? No, it just gives me the opportunity to “share” the barcode instead of stating my name and birthdate when I finally get to the front of the line. How about a separate express line for folks who went the trouble to complete their order in advance?

Before I leave this love letter I will comment on the smart-looking CVS mobile app, which is necessary to finish most of the above transactions. Said app requires me to frequently log in even though I am responding to a text which includes all my data. Also, many functions are available on the web but not through the app, including the ability to apply that Curbside Pickup discount code. Hmm… I thought mobile apps were supposed to improve on the web experience, not make you revert to it.

I do know what’s going on here, dear CVS app development team. You’ve got some great resume fodder going. But the apps you have built have very little to do with the actual shopping experience. Be warned, your next employer may be less dewy-eyed.

How to transcribe speech from a web page

[UPDATE: Unfortunately, Google has disabled the ability described below to transcribe audio from a web page. Now you get an alert to attach a microphone and record from that. Playing audio over your computer, or playing a recorded message from your phone, doesn’t work. Unclear if this is a deliberate move to limit the program or just a glitch. Anyway, I’d like to know if anyone is using anther transcription tool successfully.]

As a copywriter, I often need to capture speech to text from a web page. My traditional method has been to play the video and start and stop it while I type what I hear into Word. Very tedious. Faced with a new project, I decided to find out if there is a better way. And it turns out there is, but it’s not as easy to find as you might think.

Google “capture speech to text” and most of the results will be for the opposite, text-to-speech, an important accessibility feature but not what I was looking for. Word for Mac still has a dictation feature built in (it’s gone from Word for Windows) but it’s only for YOUR dictation; toggle to another application, like a web browser, and the capture stops.

Finally, I found this page for Google’s beta of its Cloud Speech API. You can sign up for a trial of the Google Cloud Platform (they require your credit card, but won’t charge it without your permission) or simply use the widget on the page to translate in 15-second increments. The interface said my video was captured with 94% confidence of accuracy, which I’d say was about right. The transcript required a bit of cleanup, but the process was certainly faster than typing it all. Check it out.

Choice Hotels loses a customer

It was Parents Weekend in Amherst, MA where our son is going to school. We were late in finding a hotel and did not realize when we reserved for that the Quality Inn in Chicopee was over 30 minutes away on a dark, winding,  back road. We arrived intact and politely told the desk clerk that we’d be checking out in the morning. He told us no, we’d reserved for two nights and we would be charged for two nights. And that’s how Choice Hotels loses a customer.

En route to Amherst the next morning, after paying for 2 nights but staying 1, I spent time on the phone with Choice customer service. They told me they this was an extremely unusual policy but because I had agreed to it–by initialing that document they give you when you arrive at 11 pm–the hotel was standing its ground. Meanwhile, my wife found a totally pleasant accommodation at Holiday Inn Express in Hadley, 2 miles from the campus.

The Chicopee Quality Inn was a little shabby, but not outright dangerous. The Holiday Inn Express was a definite step up and well worth paying $100 more. I have an upcoming business trip and have already joined the Holiday Inn loyalty program and identified their location near my client and will likely stay there. And will stay there again and again on future trips.

Now here’s the takeaway. I’ve probably stayed at Choice properties 50 times, usually for multiple nights, because they’re near a business meeting and I don’t care to pay for frills. They’re a franchise operation: independent owners who are members of a group. And this one particularly avaricious owner in Chicopee, MA has likely brought an end to my long association with the Choice brand.

This is how you lose a customer: not the only way, but certainly a very effective way. Let individual franchisees push customers away, since most folks won’t realize they are dealing with a jerk whose actions don’t extend across the company. Thus one bad apple spoils the entire brand. If you are interested in driving your business into the ground, I highly recommend this model.

If you care to short Choice hotels, their ticker is CHH. They’re currently rated 6.2  (a little above average) by Starmine but I predict that number is going down.

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!