Tag: copywriting

The middle manager

Early in my career I was direct marketing manager at a department store. The post office announced its first-ever presort discount (this tells you how long ago it was) but gave no instructions on how to prepare a mailing list to get the discount. An enterprising software company wrote an application to do the presort and they were willing to let me use it—for a finders fee of half the savings in postage.

I turned it down without a second thought, even though I could have still saved thousands of dollars. The prospect of looking like a sucker to my superiors far outweighed the financial gain. And of course the gain was to the company, while the looking foolish was on me personally.

I remembered this recently when a client wanted to do some email promotions. I did a bit of research and recommended several services that work with small lists. Then she came back to me with an objection that never would have occurred to me—what if somebody at the email service decides to steal their mailing list? Although highly unlikely, this was a big internal concern at the company and it stopped the email program in its tracks.

The concerns of middle managers are very different than those of higher up folks who have responsibility and maybe get a share of P&L. Managers are reviewed for being on time and on budget, with no unpleasant surprises. This is something to keep in mind in marketing, and also when dealing with them in person because often a direct marketing manager is your immediate client as a freelancer.

When writing a marketing letter to a middle manager, it’s a good idea to stress the absolute lack of negatives. Testimonials are priceless—your reader doesn’t want to be the first to take the plunge. Benefits like “make your job easier” and “stop users from complaining” are far more relevant than “help your company grow its revenue”.

And when you’re delivering your copy to the real-life middle manager, be on time!

Path of least resistance

I bought a vintage table saw last summer and almost immediately broke the vintage drive belts. Wonder of wonders, somebody had done the same thing and posted pictures of his repair online. However, my saw’s setup looked different than the photos. I spent a good 8 hours patiently jockeying the loose parts into alignment without success.  Then it dawned on me: it just can’t be this hard. I took a fresh look at my saw and realized one of the bearings had popped out of its housing. I cleaned the parts, popped it back in and was done in 20 minutes.

Another story with the same outcome: many years ago I was driving a VW bus on a very bad road in southern Mexico when a shock absorber came loose behind one of the wheels. I spent a couple hours trying to get it back on as a steadily growing audience of local indigenous men watched me. Finally one got impatient and pointed something out with sign language. The bolts that went into the top and the bottom mounts were different. And you could easily tell what was the bottom bolt because it had more road grit on it.

The lesson is, there’s usually a logical way to do things and people who are not bogged down by intellectual musings will find that way automatically by following the path of least resistance. Good designers of mechanical things know that and design accordingly (a notable exception being 1970s and 80s Detroit cars, where they’d often create special tools to make up for the fact their engine compartments were inaccessible) and ad writers should do the same.

If a reader has made the commitment to proceed through your letter or other body copy, they are fully intending to follow that path of least resistance. They know that A is followed by B, or supposed to be. Put a surprise in the road when they’re about to get to B—a special offer, or a new benefit—and it will get maximum attention. Change course without adding a benefit, and you’ll confuse and irritate and lose the reader. Keep this in mind when you’re framing out your next project.

Measure twice. Cut once.

I’ve been doing a lot of carpentry this summer, and I find myself pleased by the unforgiving nature of working with a saw. Once you make a cut you can’t take it back. Master carpenters who do the same thing over and over again develop an instinctive eye and a steady hand for sure, accurate cuts. But a tinkering hobbyist doesn’t get enough practice, so mistakes are going to happen. And it’s a milestone in the tyro’s journey when you decide you will toss away the maimed piece (perhaps an expensive piece of stock you’ve worked on for several hours) and start over rather than live with your mistake.

Copywriting used to be something like this, early in my career. I was too early for computers but too late to have access to a steno pool where my manuscript would be retyped. A copy deck was expected to look good as well as read well when submitted—no typos, strikeovers or white-out permitted. And there were moments, many of them, when you’d take the page out of your typewriter, read it over, and realized you should have used a different word or sentence order. And you’d have the choice of living with something that possibly could have been better—or typing the whole page over again.

There’s no doubt computers make for better copy. Not only can you delete your mistakes, you can try all kinds of what-ifs without penalty before hitting the “print” button. But I miss the finality…the recognition that once you type a word, there’s no going back without paying a price. In fact, that may have been what separated a good junior copywriter from a hack—the willingness to not only learn from your mistakes, but pay for them in extra time at the keyboard.

People are not all alike… here’s proof!

I spend a lot of time on the SF Chowhound board, where (just to pick a random example) “Best Bun Cha in the Bay Area” recently accumulated 37 quick posts. So when I wanted to know how the food is at the iconic Highland Park Cafeteria, recently reopened in Dallas, I naturally clicked over to the Texas CH board.

And how many posts did I find there? None. In fact, the most recent post on Highland Park Cafeteria was my own back in January, lamenting its closing, with no more recent messages to correct me. A wider search of the web found only stories about the restored portraits of the Presidents in the waiting line, and a couple of quick comments on personal blogs. This is a temple of Southern home cooking that has served some 36,000 diners since it reopened a month ago (based on published stats of 1200 meals a day) and not a single one has been moved to share their experiences in any depth.

In the Bay Area, online chatter about a restaurant event like this would have melted the copper in the DSL lines. Texas, as we see, is different. I happen to think the Bay Area has the right idea (which is why I’m here and not there, where I was born). But the purpose of this article is to note how really different groups of people can be, with this minor data point to prove it. Something to think about next time you fall into the copywriter’s trap of writing to yourself, AKA thinking everybody has the same priorities that you do.

“I want your free stuff. Please call me now.”

Would you like to put yourself in the shoes of a prospect receiving lots of marketing messages and deciding which ones to respond to? Try this: place an ad in the “free” stuff of craigslist.org.

I recently gave away a big kids’ playhouse and two perfectly good laser toner cartridges. Got over 40 responses in the playhouse (in about an hour), several each for the other item. So how did I decide who was the lucky recipient?

Some of the respondents disqualified themselves immediately with obviously automated responses that sounded like they might have been generated from some mailbot within the Russian mafia. “I want you item for my purposes. Please call my cell now 415-555-1212.” I don’t think so.

But there were lots of legitimate respondents who didn’t rise above the pack. I got a dozen or more “My kids/grandkids would love your playhouse!” so how to choose? Another issue was that I needed to know that getting rid of the item was going to be quick and easy for me. Some people said they had a van or a truck (mandatory and stated in the ad) to pick up the big playhouse; those who didn’t were automatically kicked to the curb.

The winners were a/a single mom who wanted the playhouse for her daughter who was just coming out of the hospital, and had a friend (a fireman!) who would come over right away with his truck; and b/another single mom who wanted the laser cartridge because her printer was streaking and making her kids’ homework look bad.

See the chosen motivations at work here? First they echoed the business proposition, then showed how they could uniquely meet my need to place my item in a good home. As writers, we need to be just as good at presenting our own products and services.

“It’s [still] not creative unless it sells.”


I’ve always followed David Ogilvy’s dictum, which means I never show work around if I know was not successful in the marketplace. But what if the market was wrong? Or, to put it less arrogantly, what if the lists got messed up somehow and my mailer or email went to the wrong folks? Shouldn’t you be allowed a free pass once every few decades on work YOU really like and think is good?

I was going to present the piece shown here as an example. It’s always been one of my personal favorites, though I hadn’t looked at it in a number of years. The client and I were very surprised at the time that it was not a big winner. But when I pulled it out today, I could immediately see what was wrong.

The outer envelope (upper right in the photo) is what kills this package. We’re selling a book of relaxing natural cures to women and I wanted to use a lemon to illustrate how our mind has powers to help us. (Really concentrate, think about a lemon and its taste, and your mouth starts to pucker up.) But where’s the reader benefit in this? I was also betrayed by my choice of visuals from a great designer… this stop-motion bursting lemon image is frenetic when it should be calming, and the background should be green not purple for a restful, natural cure. And yep, that reversed out type is pretty hard to read.

Inside is lots of good stuff which the recipient of this package never got to see. There are two headlines I like: “Pamper Yourself Healthy” and “Natural Cures that Feel as Good as They Work”. Either one of these might have given me a fighting chance if I’d used it on the outer.

Once again the marketplace—and David Ogilvy—are right.

Sorry, Mom. The art director did it!

I gave my mother the highly-touted new edition of the Joy of Cooking for her birthday, and bought a second copy for us to have at home. I like to leave the book open for reference when I’m cooking, and soon I noticed I was doing a lot of squinting and carrying the book into brighter light. Could it be that the type had gotten smaller?

A comparison of two identical passages shows that’s exactly what happened—20% smaller in fact. (Count the characters in the first line of the new edition, at left in the picture, and compare to the 1975 edition, at right.) I can understand why they didn’t want to make the book too unwieldy with all the new additions. But I’m too preoccupied to memorize the recipe before I cook it, and too finicky to be satisfied when I misread and put a tablespoon of salt in when the recipe calls for a teaspoon. Sorry, but the type’s too small.

This is why I advise my students and clients to double-check the work of their designers. If it looks too pretty, it probably is—something’s been sacrificed for the sake of great design. If there’s a coupon, try filling it in to be sure there’s room to write—or better yet, have your art director do it.

Best in the world UPDATE

After I wrote about how you could not find Google Adwords results for “best (x) in the world”, I went and tried the Adwords registration process myself. I found that I could not use “best” in my own ad because comparatives are not allowed unless from a third party. I COULD choose “world’s best copywriter” as a search phrase, but Google warned me my results would be so low that a CPC could not be calculated. That was around March 12.

But as of today (4/19/06), something’s changed. If you look up “best copywriter in the world” you will find lots of sidebar ads. 8 on each of the first two pages, 2 on the third page. I don’t actually think that all those people got the idea from my blog. More likely something has changed in the bowels of Google.

But I’ll stand with my original thought: nobody wants to hear you talk about how great you are, and the folks who do happen to click on these ads are not going to turn into leads. Let’s watch and see what happens over time…

The price of security

I was recently a victim of identity theft. First, my credit card company called me wondering why I had been charging so much at walmart.com. When I said I hadn’t used my walmart.com account since 2004 (which I know because I keep all my old emails), they suggested somebody had gotten hold of my credit card info and suggested I cancel my account and get a new card. Which I did.

Then, a few days later, another call. Had I changed my billing address to somewhere in Arizona? No, I hadn’t, and the ability to do so meant that somebody had hacked my online account with the bank in a major way. This set off alarm bells requiring cancellation of the new card, plus alerts to the credit reporting bureaus of which maybe the worse repercussion for me, as a marketer, is that I am automatically removed from credit card solicitation lists for the next 5 years. (No more Capital One swipe samples for me!)

I thought the whole matter was handled just about right by CitiBank. They were efficient, not accusatory, and the paperwork required (two notarized statements from me) was tedious but reasonable under the circumstances. That got me thinking about what is the right balance between companies protecting themselves and providing benefits to consumers.

A serious lack of such balance was exhibited in my first purchase recently of a “digital edition” from Amazon. It came with onerous digital rights management (DRM) protection that requires me to go through a complex registration process, where I sign in with Adobe online, simply to be able to read the document I have paid for on my computer. It simply ain’t worth it, folks. I asked for my money back. Their rights are protected but they lose a sale. Good deal? Not for me, not for the publisher, certainly not for the author who probably has no idea this is going on.

Back in my “suit” days, I had a client who asked me if it would be a good idea to sign up with a bad check protection service which would make good any bogus paper in return for a 1.5 percent commission on ALL checks received. Sounded somewhat plausible until we did the math and found that the bad check problem was actually costing considerably less than 1.5% of sales.

People who make their living trying to cheat other people and businesses will probably find a way to do so, at least some of the time. A business needs to find a balance where it makes things somewhat more difficult for the bad guys without penalizing the average customer with unreasonable security measures. This is the same logic that applies when we talk to our clients about money-back guaranteed, isn’t it?

A money back guarantee, especially on a mail order or internet purchase, answers the big objection “what if I get it and I don’t like it after I see it?” Marketers who are reluctant to make guarantees are afraid that somebody is going to take advantage of them. But the bad guys will anyway… and meanwhile they’ve scared off a lot of potential customers who were on the fence.

Best in the World

We’ve all had clients who think the way to open a sales letter is to say, “As the world leader in intelligent solutions that do xyz, Acme Systems would like you to know blah blah etc…”

There are two obvious problems with this strategy. The first is that chest-pounding self-importance tends to put people off, not endear them. Readers want to know “what’s in it for me?”, not how great you think you are. And the second is that claims of superiority are not credible unless they are a/supported by hard facts and b/proffered by someone other than the person or company being judged.

You wouldn’t want to throw it in your client’s face that their self-centric posturing (which probably comes straight from the CEO’s corner office) is going to doom their campaign before it gets started, so here’s some useful third party validation: the U.S. Olympic Ski Team, which chose as their slogan for the recently-concluded Winter Games “Best in the World”.

The slogan didn’t say anything about the team’s passion or aspirations, as something so uninspired as “Striving to Be Our Best” might have done. It’s generic, anybody could have said it, and the only way it could have been remotely acceptable would be if you actually were best in the world, which our boys and girls demonstrably weren’t. So it became an object of ridicule, until ultimately Austrian skier Herman Maier, who actually is, shouted “best in the world!” from his victory podium.

Oh, here’s another objective test you can try with your client. Look up “best [insert your client’s business description] in the world” on Google and notice how many Adwords classified ads appear on the side. There almost certainly will be no ads at all. Try it with several variations and it will be the same. Meaning that everyone who has tried marketing to the phrase has abandoned it and it’s not even worth paying 1 cent for the top position. Best in the world, indeed.