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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.

Copywriters! Learn how to write your own creative brief!

Blurbage in an email from Writer’s Digest, selling a copywriting course from their partner AWAI:

“Learn how to generate a professional Creative Brief, write headlines and tag lines that sell, apply emotional techniques to persuade an audience, find and secure work as a copywriter, and more in the Breaking Into Copywriting writing course.”

As readers of this blog know, writing a creative brief is one thing a copywriter should NEVER do, except for your own benefit in the privacy of your home or cubbie. Fortunately, the promise is repeated nowhere in the linked course description so it looks like the email is simply the work of an overeager account person who hopes to lure a few copywriters over to the dark side…. RESIST! DON’T DO IT! GO TO THE LIGHT!

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!

Then and now: Planned Giving with the Salvation Army

Planned Giving letters (front) — Front page of the two planned giving letters, side by side (click the image to enlarge to a readable size)

25 years ago I wrote a planned giving direct mail program for the Salvation Army. I recently received the current rendition of the same ask, and it was fascinating to see what has changed and what hasn’t. I’ve reproduced the letters from the two packages, which contain the key message, and you can read them by clicking on the images.

backs of planned giving letters — *Back side of the two letters (click the image to enlarge to a readable size)*

In both cases, the program appeals to high value donors and asks them to make a small regular contribution to fund community kitchens and shelters on a year-round basis. The vast majority of the Salvation Army’s donations come in fourth quarter, partly because of tax planning but also because holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas) are a time when Christian donors are particularly sensitive to the needs of people less fortunate than themselves. The letters are sent in first quarter to people who made generous donations over the holidays.

Soup & Shelter complete — Soup & Shelter package, complete

My pitch was called the “Soup and Shelter Brigade”. It thanks the reader for their generosity and paints a word picture of “a Christmas they’ll never forget” which they made possible. It goes on to present the year round need and provides two vignettes of people like the ones you’ll be helping—good people who have fallen on hard times, usually through no fault of their own.

The vignettes are important because we’re going to send you more vignettes each month as part of the program—here’s who you are helping this month. The monthly mailing is a reminder and a request for the pledged donation, since this was before the days when automatic credit card billing was an accepted practice.

Bed & Bread complete — Bed & Bread package, complete

The new package is from the “Bed & Bread Club” and has a hard edge that surprised me—not to say it’s not successful. “Not everybody wants a remedy, nor even wants to change. Being homeless is sometimes easier than doing the hard work required to change their circumstances… We’re sure you, like most of us, would prefer to help someone who wants to be helped who is ready for change.” And the letter goes on to promise that your gift will be used to support this cohort.

So this is appealing to a donor who is fed up with the ineffectiveness of social programs…. Possibly because “while politicians continue to argue how to best care for them, few solutions have been found that actually work.” It’s an exhortation to take things into your own hands that leans as much on frustration as Christian charity.

I’ve also attached photos of the complete packages (minus the return envelopes, which were blank in both packages). Mine includes a calendar with a theme for each month to illustrate the ongoing need “Bed & Bed Club” has TWO remit forms, one a standard ask and the other an authorization for automatic credit card billing. This makes me think the auto billing is a test which will be rolled into the main form if it works.

If it still works as in my day, local Salvation Army corps have access to several direct marketing agencies who offer them prepared promotions to choose from and then localize (mine isn’t localized because it’s an agency sample). “Bed & Bed Club” was the choice of the Capital District corps, and that’s really all I know about it. I hope it’s working, but I also hope (and believe) people still give out of compassion as much as frustration.

Standing up to the Department of No

NRDC Bees appeal — The “some of” is the result of an overzealous legal department; they were concerned that not all species of bees are dying at the fastest rate ever. But as we copywriters know, adding the qualifier waters down the teaser and weakens its appeal so that less money will be raised to save bees.

Not to get overly sentimental, but as a marketer you’re one of the good guys. By selling more products or services, you help create and maintain jobs. To the extent that they are of good quality, you may even be changing lives for the better by introducing people to your offerings.

Suppose there was a department in your company that kept you from selling as effectively as you could, and watered down strong marketing statements so they were less effective and sold less products and services and generated fewer jobs and changed fewer lives. That would be a terrible thing, right?

Yet there is such a department in almost every organization. It’s called “legal”. And in the name of protecting the brand, trademarks or whatever, they may be sabotaging your best efforts. You need to push back.

Here are some of the most egregious issues:

1. Being overprotective of your trademarks. You are asked to put an ™ after the first occurrence of a trademarked phrase (or, worse, after every mention which is completely unnecessary to protect your ownership_, or to only refer to a product by its full official name even though it’s too much a mouthful to say or remember. Legal feels this is protecting you, but it’s reducing response because people are distracted by all the foliage or simply can’t make sense of it. (As we’ve often pointed out in this blog, there is a certain percentage of your prospect audience that will bolt at the slightest excuse, and this exactly what they’re looking for.)

2. Being protective of OTHER brands. I never understood this one. You think Apple might sue you, so you’re sure to put a trademark after every mention of the Apple product compatible with your doohickey. It’s true that Apple is a very brand-centric and litigious company but if you look at all the advertising mentioning Apple you’ll see that most people violate their guidelines on a regular basis (by, among other things, giving away Apple products in promotions, which Apple says is absolutely verboten). Why should you be the one to kowtow, before being asked to?

3. Rewriting copy because of legal paranoia. You, the copywriter, have done your research or relied on solid background from the product team. If you say something, it’s true and can be supported. But legal is concerned about a hypothetical objection and makes you water it down. This is death.

4. Rewriting copy for reasons that have nothing to do with legal. This is a Lord of the Flies outcome, but it happens more than I would like to admit. Once all power is ceded to the legal department they think of themselves as the final arbiter of brand and they make you change things just because they can. If things have devolved to the point this is happening, it may be time to look for a new job.

But I said push back. What does that mean? First, don’t anticipate those legal objections by putting in all those qualifiers and curlicues before you’re asked to. Write the strongest marketing copy you can. Put a stake in the ground. Then water it down if you must. At least you’ll have the original draft to show your boss.

Second, when the legal changes come through fight back. If it seems like the requests are overreaching say so, or just ignore them. Make the nitpickers escalate it and see if their supervisors are more interested in jobs and sales than ®s and ©s. You just may win, at least once in a while.

P.S. This article is legally protected under Creative Commons. You are absolutely welcome to quote or misquote in any way you chose.

The age of the scary brand manager is upon us

Freelance creatives are familiar with the sales/marketing conflict at their client organizations: sales needs to generate business, while marketing needs to generate the maximum number of leads at the lowest possible cost. When good leads can be produced cost effectively, everybody wins. It’s an example of creative tension that produces a positive result.

But now there’s a new force to be reckoned with at many client companies: the brand guardian, who might be a product manager, an in-house creative director or some kind of special off-to-the-side position on the org chart reporting directly to the marketing VP. Unlike the sales and marketing folks, the brand manager is often not required to show measurable results. And their interference can do serious damage to your best work.

Companies have long been aware of the importance of a consistent identity, but social media has caused them to be ultra-vigilant. If you go off-brand in a way that’s tacky or politically incorrect or just counter to what your customers expect, you risk being excoriated like Gap with its new logo and Starbucks with its #RaceTogether campaign. The brand manager would appear to be a sort of flack jacket, taking a daily activist role to keep this embarrassment from happening.

The bad stuff occurs when setting and enforcing brand standards becomes a subjective process. These standards grew out of style guides and copywriting rule books, which were specific enough that they were easy to follow. You knew what colors you could and could not use, and you knew not to sound like J.C. Penney when you were writing for Neiman-Marcus.

But now, weighed down by “voice of the customer” screeds and “personas” for the various pilgrims you meet along the “buyer’s journey”, brand enforcement has gotten much broader and at the same time more arbitrary at many companies. (NOT all and certainly none of my clients—see below!) The only way you know for sure is when your hand is slapped for going off-message. And because they want to avoid this experience, many marketing managers are over cautious and will preemptively kibosh good creative because they think brand won’t like it.

Historically, good lead generation has had little to do with brand. If you want to start a conversation at a party, you don’t begin with your elevator pitch but with a statement you think will be of interest to the other person. If you’re DirectTV, a satellite provider with a huge brand investment, you trick people into opening your envelope by making it look like a personal invitation. Now that AT&T has acquired them, the difference is an AT&T logo on the back of the envelope. Brand can wait. Right now they just want to get leads.

Don’t take this the wrong way. Brand is good. I love brands. One of my favorite clients is an agency that specializes in helping companies define their brands. The damage is done when brand is apparently in conflict with good creative—something that should never happen because brand should not be “this is who we are” but “this is what we can do for you” or “this is how you feel when you use our brand”.

Brand is still about benefits, about you and not about me. But many brand managers don’t trust this. They’ll dial back powerful selling statements in favor of stilted, stuffy language that is somehow “brand-y”. This hurts your chance to win for your client by generating more customers and revenue through powerful copy. Same thing happens with graphics if you are shoehorned into a template that looks great but doesn’t follow principles of good eyeflow and doesn’t allow enough content to deliver a compelling message.

So what can you do? If possible, get an audience with the brand manager as part of your assignment. Ask them to explain why the standards are the way they are. Then, when you present the work, play back those explanations in the same way you quote from the creative brief. This gives the brand manager some skin in the game and may even win them over.

But that’s an ideal situation. At some companies the brand manager may refuse to even talk to you. They may argue there’s no need because the brand standards are already laid out. It’s obvious they’re being defensive—but the very reason you need to talk about standards is to be sure you interpret them correctly.

A brand needs to listen to its customers. It needs to evolve. Marketing is a key part of that conversation. As my sales training client Roy Chitwood says, “nothing happens till somebody sells something”. When a brand manager shuts you out of that conversation, everybody loses.

This post was inspired by conversations at my “Devilish Details” Ignite Session at the 2015 DMA conference, where over 100 creatives shared examples of good ideas gone bad. It has no bearing on any of my own clients, past, present or future.

Get a free copy of my book at DMA2015 &then

Update: DMA &then website has now been updated with full schedule information. Go to http://dma15.org/schedule/ to read all about it. BE SURE TO USE THIS LINK; the “build your schedule” menu on the home page of dma2015.org still produces the old placeholder content.

Here’s the session I am leading on Monday, October 4, from 4:45-5:30 at the DMA’s revamped &then conference in Boston:

Devilish Details: Looking for an Advantage in Your Copy and Design
An interactive sequel to one of last year’s most popular sessions, “The Devil’s in the Detail”. Share clever tweaks and clumsy misfires that made a big difference in creative execution and bottom line results—good or bad. Veteran copywriter Otis Maxwell will kick things off with examples of a few gems and gaffes, then you join the fun. Fabulous prizes for the best ideas!

This is an “Ignition” session which is designed for attendees to interact in a town-hall environment. I’ll share some examples of copy and design decisions that had a negative impact on campaigns, then make suggestions for how to improve them. After a few examples I’ll open things up to the floor and ask folks to share their own experiences which can be a/creative home runs and pratfalls they’ve experienced in their own work and what they’ve learned from them, or b/third party examples similar to my own.

While copies last, everybody who makes a meaningful contribution gets a free copy of my copywriting book, Copywriting that Gets Results!

Note: As of September 27, there is still placeholder copy on the DMA15.org website. This is the session in the slot called “Concentrating on the Detail: Copy & Color Choice”. That’s the placeholder title; what I’ve described above is the real deal.