Category: Words and writing

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 testimonials in your marketing

Testimonials can be a key element in your marketing copy. They help attract new customers by showing that others have had a satisfactory ordering. They help bond existing customers by demonstrating that you’re a “real” organization with real consumer relationships. And, if you’re a new or little-known company, they show that you actually have customers.

In order to work well for you, the testimonials you use should have these characteristics:

They should be specific. I remember a Land’s End testimonial in which the customer says she’s been shopping “since way back when you sold sailing equipment”. Jackson & Perkins used a detailed anecdote about the customer who put his roses through a torture test in a Texas Panhandle winter. Specifics sell. These testimonials are believable, and make interesting reading in their own right…as opposed to generic one-liners or one-worders (“outstanding”, “excellent”) which seem contrived.

They should be realistic. Never correct your customers’ grammar or edit phrases to fit the King’s English. Write like they talk. (I do, however, correct spelling errors. No reason to let your helpful customers embarrass themselves.)

Resist the temptation to crop and consolidate. Leave in the rambling, off-the- subject asides; these provide the veracity you are seeking. Use ellipses sparingly and only when absolutely necessary (for example, because the quote isn’t understandable without this editing).

They should be relevant. A business-to-business client gave me a series of “testimonials” from dealers who said they were happy to be selling the product. This is not what the customer is looking for. Testimonials should be about the buying process (how easy it is, or how a problem was solved) or about their personal experience with their purchase.

They should be signed. Testimonials followed by initials and no address appear to be faked…even where they aren’t. Whenever possible, I include a full name and city in a testimonial from a consumer; name, title and company for a professional. If you must use initials to protect the customer’s privacy, include the city and state to retain believability.

THE RIGHT WAY TO GET TESTIMONIALS: Some categories, like gardening and other hobbies, seem to generate floods of unsolicited positive comments from customers who want you to know how well they’re doing with your merchandise. If this situation applies to you, you’re lucky. Much more likely, you’ll have to ask for testimonials.

Start with a customer service survey (something you should be doing anyway). Follow up with phone calls to promising responses. When you talk to them, have a mental list of topics you’d like to touch on and gently lead the conversation into these areas. Try to elicit case histories or other specific comments and examples. Before you hang up, ask if it’s okay to use the comments in your advertising. (Don’t push it if the answer is no.)

My next step is write up a transcript of my call notes, followed by a sanitized version in which I try to make the comments more coherent and cogent without editing out the customer’s personality. At the bottom I write:

[Company name] has my permission to use the above quotation in its advertising and promotional material [ ] as is [ ] with changes.

___________________________ Signature_______________Date

In the olden days I would send this self-contained authorization form to the interviewee, via fax or by mailing with a self-addressed stamped envelope. In almost every case, I received it back right away and with no changes. Today I’d be comfortable using email and using their reply as proof of consent. I’m not sure this would stand up in court, but if the customer objects to the use of their name you’re going to withdraw the testimonial anyway, right?

And speaking of legal issues: the above approval language was written without the help of a lawyer. Your legal department might want to add some “hold harmless” verbiage. Resist. The more mumbo-jumbo your customer has to sign his or her name to, the less likely you are to get an OK.

In closing, here are two ways not to get testimonials. Don’t invent them and then sign the name of a willing friend or co-worker. It’s smarter, and not much harder, to get the real thing (assuming your company has at least one satisfied customer, that is). Second, sometimes a well-meaning customer will offer to compose a testimonial for you. Never, never accept. The customer will write what they think you want to hear—and the result will be about as hokey as you can get, but you’ll feel obligated to use it to avoid hurting the customer’s feelings.

I recently ran across several articles I wrote for Catalog Marketer, a newsletter published by the late Maxwell Sroge. I’ll be sharing them in updated form over the next few weeks in the Copywriting 101 section.

Dealing with copywriter’s block

I have been feeling very unproductive lately, looking for distractions and getting too few billable hours done in a day. Finally, today I tackled a project I had been putting off and finished it and afterward I felt like I’d dropped 10 pounds of mental fat. Though I didn’t realize it, I had been suffering from a chronic case of copywriter’s block.

Maybe it’s not as poetic as the creative seizings up of J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller and other legendarily blocked writers. But copywriter’s block is a very real problem with freelancer hacks and scribes because if you aren’t writing, you aren’t getting paid.

I had a couple of real serious blockages early in my freelance career and will share what I learned from them. The cause of most of my episodes was that I hadn’t done enough preparation before sitting down to write. I was trying to think, and nothing was coming out. A far better strategy is to do so much prep work—in terms of research and rough, non-wordsmithed notes—that giving yourself permission to actually write the thing comes as a blessed relief.

Sometimes we stumble over something in the actual process of writing…. very often, the first paragraph in a letter or article. (And yes, editors will tell you your work can almost always be improved by simply removing that first warm-up paragraph after you write it.)

I still have a multi-page printout of my tortured attempts to write the first paragraph of a letter for a TPA—that’s a particular kind of consultant that handles a company’s health plan. What on earth could I have needed to say about TPA’ing that was so difficult? I can’t remember but I know I felt like a dog chewing on itself until I had the good sense to finally step away from it. I took a walk in the sun, then came back and worked on something completely different. The next day, the TPA letter was completed without incident.

This recent writer’s block had a new set of circumstances. It was for a good client, but I found it somehow very uninteresting, yet I knew I had to do it because of our relationship. The concept of “you must” is toxic to the independent and supposedly carefree freelancer, who has signed on to the concept that you can set your own schedule and work any 24 hours in the day that you like.  But finally, writing it became more appealing than not writing it, and the deed was done. Now I’m going to celebrate by going to the library.

Are Groupon copywriters really worth $6 billion?

Groupon, which was featured in an earlier post and also in my social media presentation at the DMA in San Francisco, has recently spurned a $6 billion takeover offer from Google. Pretty cheeky…. considering that there’s nothing proprietary or patent-able about its business of delivering a daily coupon to your inbox with a big discount on a local business.

Indeed, Groupon is one of four coupon outfits I now hear from on a regular basis. BlackboardEats is doing something similar for San Francisco (except they don’t collect the money up front which is good for me but a poor profit model for them), Open Table has gotten into the act with discounts as well as reservations, and LocalSavings is giving Groupon a real run for its money here in the upstate NY area.

But Groupon’s emails are the ones I always open, and why? It’s the copywriting! Today, for example, in an offering for a Portuguese restaurant, the copywriter noticed it had small plates and delivered the following riff: “Small plates provide diners with a rare chance to act like a giant and yell “fee-fi-fo-fum!” at the waitstaff. Enjoy a make-believe growth spurt with today’s Groupon: for $20, you get $40 worth of Portuguese cuisine at Atasca in Cambridge.”

That’s the kind of extemporizing that used to get us yelled at by our bosses when we were cub copywriters… but as always it’s followed by solid research-based benefits including a description of menu items, a reference to its listing on a best-of directory, and a verbal capsule of the ambience:  “The in-house atmosphere is warm and romantic, bedecked with Portuguese art and fresh flowers, ideal for a smooch-inducing date or a platonic rendezvous with a band of surly Casanovas.” You can’t make this stuff up, at least you can’t day in and day out. I spoke to one restaurateur who was a happy Groupon client and he said yes, someone from Groupon did indeed call and interview him at length.

I have one worry for Groupon though, and that is its inability to attract quality advertisers in the hinterlands. In San Francisco and Boston, the specials are from recognizable establishments where I’d want to eat anyway. But in Dallas and Albany (all part of my quixotic geographical rotation) we tend to get tanning salons, car washes and second-tier pizza joints, the same folks who show up in Val-Pak.

If Groupon is going to grow beyond $6 billion they’re going to have to find a way to sell creative marketing to the late adopters. If Groupon should happen to implode, at least there will be a lot of good copywriters available for hire in the Chicago area (where Groupon is based).

Allstate creates Mayhem with negative ad campaign

Copywriters love to write negative ads… they’re so much more fun than bland positive messages. But early in our careers we have it drummed into us that negative doesn’t sell. The reason is that the ad itself has no credibility. Rather than absorb an unrequested negative message, the reader simply turns the page.

I had to prove this for myself with a negative direct mail package to test against my control for Long Term Life Insurance at Met Life. Your chances of needing long term care are hundreds of times greater than the possibility of a home fire. Yet everybody carries fire insurance. Similarly, you have maybe a 1 in 10 chance of getting in an auto accident but the odds of needing long term care are 1 in 2. Getting worried yet?

The package bombed. Nobody wanted to read it. And I have stayed on the sunny side ever since…. with the exception of a few forays for my financial services client.  But now comes the Mayhem campaign for Allstate… which seems to be working, based on the way the campaign has expanded and the fact they are now running a “clips” spot for the holidays.

Mayhem points out all the bad things that can happen when you don’t have insurance or enough insurance…. with humorous depictions by the entertaining actor (who plays one of the dead family members on Rescue Me) Paul Dean Winters. My favorite is “Large Expresso” in which the bigwig executive, upset about losing millions in the market, spills a large expresso on himself and slams on the brakes… causing you to run into him from behind, your fault.

So we have two shibboleths broken at once, negative advertising and humorous advertising. Thank you Allstate (and thank you agency Leo Burnett).

UPDATE: Allstate’s PR folks contacted me to correct the spelling of the star’s name and to point out that Mayhem now has his own Facebook page. You can find it lower right on this Allstate site.

Editing advice for copywriters

I am working on my first “long form” direct mail promo in quite a while. This one occupies an 8 ½ x 25 piece of paper, folding down to six 8 ½ x 11 sides. It’s a definite schlep writing this thing.

I have always used the “Michelangelo David” approach to such projects, creating a block of marble by putting everything that comes to mind into a Word document then gradually whacking away until a finished form emerges. Each day I attack the project anew and at the end I have a draft that is hopefully closer than the day before.

Yesterday was what might be thought of as my torso-carving day; I’m getting down to the point where I am not close to finished, but the final form is beginning to take shape. I worked very hard for maybe 8 hours.

Today I picked up the 11 page single spaced manuscript to review it. It was terrible. Significantly worse than the work I’d just criticized my kid for preparing for Mrs. Brooks’ third grade class. My heart sank.

But I read on, and it got better… as I should have expected. I had had a poor start the day before. My poor decision today was to review that bad introductory copy first. I should have started at a point further in the manuscript when I had a firmer footing, then doubled back to that beginning-of-the-day messiness when I kept hitting my thumb instead of the head of the chisel.

Don’t review your copy start-to-finish. Do anything but. If you are lucky enough to have a schedule that permits multiple rewrites, start your review in a different place each time. That’s my editing advice for copywriters.

Cooks Source: on the internet, everyone knows you’re a doofus

If you too are just now catching up with the Cooks Source train wreck, this LA Times blog entry is a good place to start. A small, low budget regional food publication printed a blogger’s post without permission (apparently this is the only event that is clearly documented and an uncontested fact) and when the writer protested, the editor or someone using the email of the editor of the publication wrote back and said everything on the web is public domain and the writer should be glad they were not sending her a bill for editing the piece.

I don’t have the complete chronology but apparently it was last Thursday, November 4, that all hell broke loose. Just before midnight on the 3rd, the blogger posted her account on her own very eclectic blog and by the next morning the story was everywhere including the LA Times. At some point it was discovered that Cooks Source had a Facebook page and that was when the pile-on began.

Some time during the day on November 4, the editor or someone with access to her account posted on FB, “Well, here I am with egg on my face! I did apologise to Monica via email, but aparently it wasnt enough for her. To all of you, thank you for your interest in Cooks Source and Again, to Monica, I am sorry — my bad! You did find a way to get your “pound of flesh…” we used to have 110 “friends,” we now have 1,870… wow!”

But of course, those “friends” were simply “liking” Cooks Source so they could post. The comments, assuming they are still there, are pretty funny for the most part but the whole experience certainly adds up to a public dunking or time in the stocks, which is appropriate considering that the original recipe was from a blog on medieval cooking.

After all that I got around to checking out the actual Cooks Source website, where there was an announcement that the magazine has taken down its website (sic), and shut down its Facebook page as of 6 pm on November 4. Unfortunately, the announcement continues,  the Facebook page is still there because it has been taken over by hackers. I wonder what the Cooks Source people thought they were doing and if they know it is actually pretty simple to take down your Facebook page if that is what you want to do. I hope nobody tells them because like I say, this is an entertaining read. Also, on the bottom of the non-website Cooks Source page there is an apology to the blogger which seems sincere.

This is a cautionary tale for how there really is no privacy on the web and no place to hide once you make a mistake. This particular editor (or some devious person portraying her) offended a particularly vocal segment of the population and apparently did not have the good sense to make a full and complete apology in time. Crowing about the situation on Facebook, if indeed she did this, was gasoline on the flames. If you’re wrong, or simply if you decide for your business survival to say you’re wrong, the only possible course of action is to apologize repeatedly, abjectly and without reservation to anyone who will listen. RIP Cooks Source.

Why baby carrots are evil

Maybe it’s too soon to call the campaign a runaway success, but the respected Middletown, OH Journal is reporting that at least some students at Cincinnati high schools are indeed purchasing baby carrots out of vending machines now that they have been repositioned as junk food.

Evil baby carrots in their vending machine jackets
Evil baby carrots in their vending machine jackets

The campaign was produced by Crispin Porter + Bogusky though I assume without the participation of Alex Bogusky, who pronounced he was sick of advertising and quit earlier this year.  It’s not a big media buy, $25M total, so in order to see their edgy commercials you’ll have to hit the right teen programming or just watch them on the web. The most popular seems to be a spot in which a woman fires baby carrots out of a Gatling gun at a guy who is trying to catch them in his mouth.

To me, baby carrots are kind of quease inducing to begin with. They are not actually “babies” at all but mature carrots with minor blemishes which have been tumbled and shaved until they are small and cute. (Thank goodness human babies are not made this way.) And apparently the process makes them last forever since they are typically sold without refrigeration in supermarkets and, I assume, in high school vending machines. Sometimes they get a white powdery coating with age, a kind of patina. But I guess that’s okay, right?

But what’s evil about this is the cynicism of the agency creatives, who seized upon this loophole in the creative brief: we don’t have to make kids eat them, just BUY them from the vending machine. And thus the pro bonos of the healthy school movement are satisfied even though most of the carrots are likely being used as projectiles, bookmarks, doorstops or god forbid this. (A demo of carrot warfare can be found in a fortunately timed V-8 commercial in which two kids are flicking baby carrots at each other across a table in the cafeteria but one of the kids is OK because he’s drinking a V-8… quite possibly containing some of the shavings that were a byproduct of those very baby carrots.)

Changing behavior through an ad campaign is hard, especially when it involves a pliable young audience with a shifting definition of cool. A campaign that did succeed was the “Truth” effort in Florida, aimed at reducing teen smoking by making it cool to attack adults who manipulate kids to smoke. See how many memes are encapsulated just in the description of that campaign? A villain… who may well be your own parent. A superhero… transformed from an ordinary teen. That’s your ad dollars at work.

By contrast, the Baby Carrot people took $25 million that could very well have been used to do something good and spent it on a smirk. Maybe Bogusky quit because he just didn’t want to work with these characters any more. Or maybe he just wanted to go off and be a farmer of great big, foot-long carrots.