Marketing Archives - Page 18 of 22 - Otis Regrets... or not

Words that hurt: the “we we” chronicles.

A well-intentioned nonprofit falls into the we-we trap. — A well-intentioned nonprofit falls into a puddle of we-we.

In an earlier post we talked about the problem of “we weing all over yourself”, letting a plural corporate voice take over your advertising to the exclusion of reader empathy and common sense. The billboard at left is a great example.

Here we have a public service campaign which has been running for awhile in California. The original headline for this was “My kitchen, my rules.” (Quite often rendered in other languages.) That is good and makes sense: a feisty mom stands her ground and insists on healthy choices in food for her family.

But now we have “our neighborhood, our rules.” Same picture but now she’s the spokesperson for an amorphous entity which might be vigilantes or a street gang. (The billboard was photographed near one of San Francisco’s more troubled housing projects.) A single mom is endearing, a mob is scary. Except that it’s not credible. I don’t buy for an instant the notion of these angry homemakers insisting that I will bow under their demands for healthy habits, or else.

The change in tense to the first person plural is, unaided, what causes the damage. It’s not the typical corporate chest pounding but more likely an aging campaign that got relegated to the creative farm team. But the effect is the same. Don’t we we on your own marketing like this.

Confessions from an advertising “Suit”

Early in my career, I was lured to advertising’s “dark side”. I stopped in to see a department store client and was told that, while there were presently no freelance copy assignments, the direct marketing manager had just quit and I was welcome to apply for the job. Thus began a five year journey that culminated in a position as account supervisor at a national agency before I ran screaming into the sunlight on Wilshire Blvd. and ceremonially buried my suit in my back yard.

Creative colleagues kid me about my poor judgment (in taking the job, not losing the suit) to this day. But this experience actually provided valuable lessons that have sustained me throughout my freelance career.

The first lesson was the relationship between what I wrote and the financial success of the company. Previously, I’d written more or less for my own amusement and maybe to impress the girls in the office. My perspective changed when my boss at Broadway Department Stores, Marketing VP Jan Wetzel, took me for a store tour on the first day of a big sale so I could see people lined up to products which up to now had been copyblocks and production art. Now, I realized they were buying at least in part because of the creative presentation.

My learning was reinforced when I later had a job as ad director at a company that sold tools on the phone; prospects called an 800 number in response to a mailer I would send out. When there was an excess of incoming calls, they would overflow to the receptionist at the front desk. I soon learned that when she was too busy to say good morning, we had a successful mailer on our hands. Aha, creative presentation makes a marketing difference (along with some list testing I got to play with)!

Another lesson was a corollary of this one. I discovered, because the creatives now working for me did not always do it, how important it was to honor schedule and budget commitments and to treat the “suits” with mutual courtesy. I can still see a TV art director at a large Detroit-based agency looking me in the eye and explaining away a mediocre script for a :30 retail supermarket spot because “Otis, there are only so many good ideas.” And when I returned to the creative side I initially found it hard to find work because creative directors figured if I had done account work, my writing couldn’t possibly be any good.

Pay attention to P&L. Honor schedules and budgets. Treat your client with respect. This is stuff they don’t teach in cub copywriter school. I’m glad I have the opportunity to learn it.

Computing advice for freelance creatives

My venerable MacBook died today. (No condolences necessary, it wasn’t Black.*) Which brings to mind the issue of how freelancers should deal with technical glitches when talking to clients.

Should I have called my clients and said “my computer died, so I won’t be able to read any emails you send me till I get a new one”? Um, no. I have webmail for my email so I can check it from any public computer with web access by going to http://webmail.otismaxwell.com . Halfway through 2009, not being able to exchange email with your clients is simply not OK.

Should I have warned those same clients that “since I’ll have to check email on my iPhone till I get a new computer, I won’t be able to download your attachments like the marked up deck or PDF”? Unless they have iPhones themselves, your clients will think this excuse is ridiculous which actually it is. (Steve, are you listening?)

This is why you need a backup account on gmail or yahoo. If you can’t get attachments at your primary email, ask them to forward to your alternate. Awkward, but better than blowing a deadline… or losing a client.

* With the new generation of Mac laptops we seem to have bid farewell to the Black Mac, a laptop which cost $300 more primarily because it had a matte black finish. I only know one person who bought one, a consultant to publishers in South America. He called on a VIP who said, “S__, you say you respect me yet you show up with a white MacBook!” The next visit, S__ had a black one.

5 words that hurt (your marketing results)

Free! You! Now! We’ve all head about magic words that help your copy sell more effectively. But what about words that push readership and response in the opposite direction? Here is a starter list of five words (and word categories) to watch out for…. additional submissions appreciated.

1. “I”. Nobody cares about you, except your mother. Readers want to read about themselves. That’s why the presence of “I” in a classic marketing message is a clear indicator you are wandering into dangerous territory. (Social media is an exception, along with scenarios in which you expect to create a first-person story the reader will identify with.)

2. Even worse, “we”. Still in the first person, but now we’re talking about a corporate presence. “We” is a favorite word of posturing messages that are meant mainly to be read in the boardroom. Writing such messages is called “we weing all over yourself”. Try the We We Calculator to see if you are guilty of too much wee-ism in your copy.

3. “It”. Unless they’re already engrossed in your copy, when you use “it” the reader is going to have to refer back in the message to find out what the meaning of “it” is. They’re not likely to take the trouble.

4. Words that can be read more than one way. “Read” (present tense) and “read” (past tense) is one example. As is “lead” (make people follow) or “lead” (the metal). Anytime readers get confused because they have misunderstood your meaning, they’re likely to just stop reading.

5. Words that look similar enough to be misinterpreted by a hurrying reader. Example: “through/thorough/though”. If you depend on them to get your message across, you’re toast.

And, a bonus phrase:

6. “As I just mentioned”. Using this expression is what I call “as-backwards” copywriting because the reader probably doesn’t remember what you’ve just mentioned. You’re expecting them to reverse direction to find out when, more likely, they’ll just hit the delete button.

This is one of a series of excerpts from my DMA class, “Copywriting that Gets Results”. Visit the Copywriting 101 category to see them all.

How to work a weak trade show

My Yelp friend Sandor has a habit of only reviewing closed or failing restaurants… after an analysis he always concludes with “and so it goes”. When I walked into the once-proud New York DM Days yesterday, I felt like I should start doing the same thing for trade shows. Attendance was sparse, far down from peaks of a few years back, a problem made more noticeable by the cavernous reaches of the Javits Convention Center.

Empty seats at Wednesday's DM Days keynote

There wasn’t a lot of business to do, so I started asking exhibitors what they thought of the show and how they were coping. Many predict better times when it moves back to the NY Hilton next year. This is a hard-core direct mail show (vs web) and the Hilton is close enough to 6th Ave. that publishers can stroll over on their lunch hour.

My colleague Dick Goldsmith points out that with fewer attendees, he has a better opportunity to work each one of them. His company now has a service called Per-Keys that allows mobile text messages to be personalized for higher response rates. The Per-Key is a unique code used to access the system, so he sent a Per-Key to every preregistered attendee so they can check it out. With slow traffic, he also has the opportunity to issue codes at the booth and do a more elaborate demo.

Other exhibitors abandoned their booths at lunchtime to man a “lunch with the experts” area where they and attendees could discuss topics of mutual interest. Better than staring off into space or just folding the tent and leaving, as several of the exhibitors had done.

Since the show was slow, I strolled over to the wonderful ad hoc "park" in Tmes Square.

In other news, I did not see any “suitcasing” at the show—a relief, I guess, but also sort of a disappointment. I had a side project to find cheap eats in the garment district which was unsuccessful because most of my recommended places were closed (“and so it goes”) but did stumble into Lunch Box, a clean and brightly lit spot right around the corner from Penn Station. Five Chinese dishes for $5, or an assortment of sweet and savory pastries from 95 cents to a couple of bucks. Better than $10 sandwiches at Javits.

The role of predictability in advertising

Doorknob or handle: which would you choose?

The picture at left shows the inside of the men’s room door in the building where I used to rent a studio, in San Francisco. The knob is the way you get out of the room; the much more prominent grab bar is a useless appendage. During the 18 months I rented this space I used the bathroom certainly 100+ times… and at least 50 of those times I grabbed the bar because my sense memories “knew” that was the right thing to do.

People expect things to work a certain way. And this can have important implications when you’re marketing to them. Ads that play against expectations, especially in web video and TV, can surprise and delight and get through to a dulled viewer. But direct marketing pitches that veer in an unexpected direction—introducing a surprise element in the middle of a sales letter, for example—can turn off a reader and cause them to pitch your message in the recycling bin.

The difference with these scenarios: in the first, the prospect is on the outside, tacitly agreeing to let you try to entice them into your world. In the second, you’ve already created agreement and now you’re violating the contract. That’s why so many paragraphs in classic direct mail letters begin “that’s why”—to let the reader know you’ve established your point and are transitioning to another. And why many direct marketing pitches (including web pages and email, as well as print) will include what my clients at Rodale used to call “head nodders”—statements you know your audience will agree with, used to establish that you are on the same page and your message is reasonable and relevant.

It’s OK to be unpredictable… just as long as you know when to use and not use this strategy. If you’re doing intrusive advertising—which would include most examples of direct marketing—then it’s best to stay within expectations and avoid surprising your prospect except with the wonderful news of your offer and its benefits.

This is one of a series of excerpts from my DMA class, “Copywriting that Gets Results”. Visit the Copywriting 101 category to see them all.

“Suitcasing” your way to a viral trade show.

My first DM Days in NYC is coming up since I moved to NY, and I’m debating whether to attend. (Crikey, it’s expensive, and I missed the early bird deadline!) I find that I am at least as fascinated by the sponsors’ warning against “suitcasing” as by the program itself.

Now, if you have young children in the house, please do NOT look that term up on Google. Stay here with me while we read on the DM Days registration page that “Anyone observed to be soliciting in the aisles, lunch tables or other public areas, or in an exhibitor’s booth will be asked to leave immediately.”

Now I guess it’s fair enough that a vendor who decides to stand in the aisle and distribute their brochures from a suitcase (I’d actually recommend an open carton on a luggage carrier, so you don’t have to constantly zip it open and shut as you would with a suitcase, but I digress) is stealing good money from this show which like others is probably financially strapped. But I’m worried that I, a freelance copywriter, might pull an article out of my pocket or use my iPhone to show a colleague a web page I’ve written—and be 86ed as a “suitcaser” who not only gets ejected, but is publicly branded in a very embarrassing way. (You did look it up, didn’t you? Then you know what I mean.)

I also think there’s a place for think-outside-the-booth trade show marketing of the type that Foodzie did at the recent South by Southwest Interactive conference. Foodzie is an up and coming mail order company “like Etsy, but food”—they find farmers and artisanal makers who are too small to have their own ecommerce site and they sell their food on the web. Their four partners were everywhere there was a line at the show, handing out samples of their vendors’ wares. Maybe they should have paid something for a both at the trade show at SXSW (which was extremely lame) but this is where they belonged, making their pitch to a captive audience of slightly buzzed developers and venture capitalists standing in line for free booze at some party.

Suitcasing? Perhaps. But also effective marketing.

P.S. After the colorful definitions at the top of my “suitcasing” Google results, I scrolled down and found that the International Association of Events and Events offering various anti-suitcasing tools including this poster which you can download here.

More thoughts on “cheap” creative

If you’re a manager who hires creatives, here’s some friendly advice: pay them on time, Or, even better, surprise them with a check well in advance of the due date. Most writers and designers are not the best money managers and this simple gesture will earn you Pavlovian gratitude as well as better, prompter work in return.

On the other hand, if you have an accounting staff that uses the “slow pay” scheme to manage cash flow, fight like hell to get your creatives excluded from the extended payment schedule. When they are distracted by worrying about paying their utility bill or putting food on the table, how can they give you their best work? When you don’t honor your commitment to them, how can you expect them to be conscientious about your own deadlines?

I forgot to mention the above in my earlier post on pricing and getting paid during a recession. Meanwhile, my own experiences with clients coping with tough times continue. I engaged in extensive dialog and estimating with a prospect and she finally told me her budget was $300-500 for a new website and collateral. It’s hard to imagine what you can get for that except maybe installing a pet door.

Meanwhile, just started working with a new agency client which said my rate is fine, I can track my own hours, and they’re sending the paperwork in the morning. I was so pleased to be back in a grown-up relationship that I immediately spent a couple hours researching the project, on my own nickel.

What’s the value of “cheap” creative?

A long time consultant client, concerned about the recession, asked me to cut creative pricing to the bone on a couple of recent jobs then came back and asked me to cut again. I agreed because I was well, concerned about the recession.

An interesting thing happened on both these jobs. Instead of being happy they were getting fantastic value, both clients tinkered with revisions long past the point of reasonableness. In one case, I think the client tinkered to the point that he did his message serious harm.

I caution my students against doing spec work because free is worth what you pay for it; the spec work will be lightly regarded and clients will either not read it or will be butchers with the edit pencil. This is a similar situation, I think. The price is so low that subconsciously, the client thinks the creative can’t be very good. So no worry messing with it.

In general I’ve avoided cutting prices the past year because of experiences like this. If a client balks at an estimate, I ask what they are concerned about. If they have a number in mind, I try to deliver quality for that without compromising.

Hourly rates have been a particular concern. My rate isn’t the lowest. So if a client asks what my rate is and says “I can’t pay that” I say let’s throw out the hourly rate and look at an overall budget. They are happy, but I still end up charging my rate or close to it.

It will be good when times are better again and we can concentrate on doing great work that builds our clients’ businesses and pays for itself in measurable response.

The “CEO Letter”

A client and I got into a wrangle recently when he asked me to write a “CEO letter” to other top execs who would be joining him at an event, and the result was not what he expected. Here’s what I responded by way of explanation:

There’s been a fair amount of discussion and research on this topic in the DM community, as you might expect, and I’ve myself written a number of “C level” or “CEO” letters over the years. I think there is universal agreement the most important characteristic is BREVITY. An efficient CEO is not going to get down in the weeds of an issue because of an unsolicited letter. What you need to do is instantly establish relevance, describe an action which is quick and easy to take—eg NOT “I am going to take time to research this company because they have provided me with some interesting stats and education” but rather “I am going to ask my marketing director to include this company on his short list to check out”—and then get out.

As for tonality, the most important element is showing the reader you respect his or her time as a fellow CEO and makes clear the offer of a personal demo. The tonality consists in being brief, terse and to the point much as if you would be talking to him or her in person.

Do you write letters to high level executives in your own marketing? What works best—brief and to the point, or laced with personal elements? (That’s what my client was expecting, I think.) Inquiring minds (mine, anyway) want to know!