Saratoga Archives - Otis Regrets... or not

Salvation Army shows the perils of localized donor mail

Front page of Shield letter — *Where’s my town in this localized letter?*

I gave a fair-sized gift to my local Salvation Army this past holiday season, and was happy to do so. (I wanted a particularly enthusiastic bell ringer to get credit, so I found out his name, wrote it on the check, and dropped it off at the local center.) Inevitably, this has spawned a series of large donor mailings asking me to repeat with similar amounts.

I mentioned one of these mailings in an earlier post because the art direction on the outer envelope wasn’t particularly adept. But later I got a second mailing that caused me to dig deeper and I found some object lessons in what not to do if you’re a national not-for-profit and you want to customize mail for individual locations.

Why should you go to the trouble of localizing your appeal? Because local donors to a cause like the Salvation Army want to know their contribution is put to use in their community. Some years ago I did a localized campaign for the American Red Cross. It had an insert on emergency preparedness, which was variable. We didn’t talk about hurricanes in the Midwest, or rivers flooding in the Northeast. (With climate change, maybe we’ll soon have the same disasters everywhere and non-profits can save the money.) And there were statistics which were localized by county of number of people helped, first aid courses taught and so on. Even thought it was a national mailing, folks in Milwaukee would feel like it was about their local Red Cross.

Localization on page 2 — *Here it is… on the second page.*

I expect the Salvation Army did some similar database research, but they don’t use it well in the copy. My own community of Saratoga Springs is not mentioned till the second page of the “if this shield could talk” letter. Who are the 125 hungry families and 70 people who eat breakfast? Is that in Saratoga? (To read this and other copy details, click on the images to enlarge them.) I suspect this is just a flub: the numbers are appropriate for a town our size, but somebody forgot to plug in the name of the town. As a copywriter I’m well aware that the story of Sophia and Anthony is not local, but blending in local statistics would have blurred that line and made for a more compelling narrative.

Processing Center — *Institutional “processing center” language turns off donors.*

I’m also not easy with the qualifying statement (on the letter and the response form) that “In order to save on administrative costs, all mail is returned to a centralized processing center. Please be assured your donation is being used in your local community.” Well, first of all, that processing center (bad word—as a generous donor I don’t want to be “processed”) is in Albany, the nearest big city, so I don’t have a problem with it. Second, why don’t you say “in Saratoga Springs” or “in Saratoga County” instead of “your local community”? I have a very strong hunch that including this statement, thus raising an objection where one might not have existed, results in fewer donations that a mailing without that statement.

Salvation Army Camp Mailing — *Second Salvation Army local mailer*

Then the second mailing arrived, which is about sending kids to Long Point Camp in the Finger Lakes. I’ve previously written about the difficulty of “send a kid to camp” programs—that’s a very hard sell compared to feeding a homeless family and you really have to paint a picture of the kid’s desperate situation. So now we have this outer with the message “Please Open!” (I think they could have come up with a better teaser, no?) and two white kids in a tire swing. Is this a variable picture? It’s true that my community is pretty lily-white so maybe so. But why a tire swing? Can’t they afford real play equipment at this camp, which probably isn’t very safe if they’re using discarded tires?

Salvation Army Long Point — *Send a kid to Long Point Camp.. why?*

Moreover, why are we sending them away to camp in western New York when Saratoga County is chock-a-block with camps and rustic destinations? Or to Lake George, next county up the Northway? I feel like this effort is probably designed for donors who live in a big city, so when you mail to a resort area it really exhibits a tin ear.

I don’t have it in for the Salvation Army. I love these guys. I wrote fundraising campaigns for them many years through the Grizzard Agency, and contributed a pro bono effort to get donations after the Los Angeles riots of the early 1990s. But they have offered up a picture perfect example of what can go wrong with a localized campaign, and I’m sharing it as a bit of advice as well as others who think about localizing their national campaigns.

Why Words Matter… in bank marketing

We work hard to make banking easy. — How about…”We work hard to make banking easy”?

A regional bank has invested in an image campaign, and the results are visible in the window of their local branch. Unfortunately, the copywriter has a tin ear. Let’s take a look at three sequential pieces of signage to see what I mean.

“We strive to make banking simple.” Making something simple is a benefit, but strive is a word that implies difficulty. It’s also a little bit above the average person’s everyday vocabulary. “We work hard to make banking easy” would have been better, especially because hard/easy balance each other in a way that strive/simple don’t.

We'll give your money a good home — “We’ll give your money a good home”?

“Feel good about your finances.” Another five dollar word. “Finances” is not a word in the average person’s vocabulary or, if it is, it’s not something you feel good about. “Feel good about your money” would be better but it doesn’t really tie back to the bank. (Neither does the original line, of course.) How about “We’ll give your money a good home”?

“The convenience you want, with the security you need”?

“The convenience you need with the expertise you trust.” The copywriter was running on empty when s/he got to this one. Convenience isn’t something you need. Want, crave but not need. Expertise is another of those high falutin’ words. What’s wrong with “experience”? Again, we have two concepts strung together so thought should be given to how they balance. Is it news that you can have expertise/experience AND convenience? Not really because they’re two unrelated benefits.

For that matter “need” and “trust” aren’t very well balanced either, are they? Let’s choose something you wouldn’t really expect to get with convenience, and use verbs of equal weight. “The convenience you want, with the security you need.” Because usually the more secure things are the, less convenient, right?

So there we are. Didn’t take that long, did it? But I have the feeling the copywriter’s not wholly at fault. I say that because of what’s written over the ATM entrance. “Vestibule”? How about “lobby”? The client probably got the big words because that’s what the client demanded. It reminds me of David Ogilvy’s maxim, “don’t keep a dog and bark yourself.”

Serotta Bicycles and the “quality of time”

BenSerotta — *Ben Serotta explains the “quality of time”*

Last month I got a tour of Serotta Bicycles, a world-renowned high-end facility located in my little town of Saratoga Springs, New York. These bikes cost from $4800 to over $28,000—and that’s just the frame. But the painstaking details make it seem worthwhile—from a machining process that can take a stock titanium tube and give it 3 different diameters and three different thicknesses, so it has light weight along with the perfect balance of strength and flex at every point along its length. The total process from beginning to end takes about 40 hours to produce a finished frame; the shop turns out an average of 3 per day.

All the other visitors were current owners who’d come to see the mother lode, and there were esoteric questions about discontinued models and “why don’t you use steel anymore?” (Google that one with Serotta in the search box.) Finally I had to ask the question, why does it take 40 hours instead of 39 or 41? How do you know when it’s done?

Founder and President Ben Serotta said it’s about the “quality of time”. He wouldn’t amplify on that and when I asked a local bike evangelist and Serotta enthusiast to explain it to me, he was silent. So there’s a bit of mysticism afoot here and I will make a couple of educated guesses.

SerottaAlighing — *Frames are aligned after every assembly stage, making this the most important machine in the shop*

First, quality of time means diminishing returns. As nearly perfect as these bikes are, the finish will never be completely immaculate. (Even though in the final polishing step they use 2500 grit sandpaper, which feels as smooth as a baby’s bottom.) There’s got to be a point when an hour produces so much less benefit than the hour preceding it that you’re spending your own money or raising the price for no good reason, so you stop. Second, bicyclists spend a lot of time in the saddle. If incredibly subtle details can make for a more productive or efficient or competitive ride and so improve their quality of time, they’re worth doing.

Both these hypotheses have application in copywriting. As a creative practitioner, I charge several times what a junior copywriter would charge and there are people who charge several times more than me. Here the time you are paying for is experience—the knowledge and instinct based on past work that a particular message and way of presenting that message will work better than all others. It’s probably not necessary to hire a senior copywriter to write a coupon for your dry cleaning establishment; someone who can follow basic common sense marketing rules (and mayn can’t) will be fine. But if you’re planning to mail millions of people or launch an elaborate website, then the cost of the creative becomes a relatively minor one and it pays to pay more for the best.

SerottaFinish — Final step: polishing with 2500 grit sandpaper

The other way to look at “quality of time” is in the experience of the user—the prospect or retail customer who is the recipient of your message. The more time you spend understanding that person’s preferences and motivations—whether through research or hunches—the better their experience is going to be when they receive your message and the more likely they will respond positively.

I may never be able to afford a Serotta bike but it’s something to aspire to—especially because the way to making the money to buy one lies in maximizing my own quality of time.

What happens when your viral video doesn’t go viral?

You put your heart and soul and best marketing smarts into a YouTube video campaign expecting it will go viral and quickly spread across the globe. And… not all that much happens. That’s disheartening but a useful object lesson.

In my little town of Saratoga Springs, NY, the Chamber of Commerce decided to make a promotional video in which thousands of local citizens are captured by a roving camera as they lip sync to a medley of songs from the pop group Train. (Local connection: Train’s drummer hails from Saratoga.) The C of C was up front about the fact that they wanted to emulate the success of a similar video from the city of Grand Rapids, MI which has gotten over 10 million hits.

The Saratoga video is now live, and in the first week, it’s gotten about 36,000 hits. That’s about what you might expect if each of the people in the video sent the link to a few of their friends. By comparison, surveillance videos of a couple of drunks knocking over a statue of a horse (Saratoga is a horse racing town) have gotten over 100,000 hits. Of course, things could change but as local blog All Over Albany points out, most of the traffic to the horse video happened in the first few days after the video went live.

A comparison of the Saratoga and Grand Rapids videos yields some ideas of what works in viral and what may not so work so well.

First of all, the Saratoga piece is obviously a promotional effort. It opens with the producer’s logo, and the first few seconds are archival footage of a thoroughbred race. Many of the participants throughout are waving signs or wearing logos to promote their own organizations. That’s fine for civic pride, but maybe less so for attracting interest from those who don’t already know you. Second, the Train music is just not that good or that catchy; critics have complained that many participants don’t appear to be lip syncing but the songs aren’t really sync-able.

By comparison, the Grand Rapids video has a “wow” factor both in the choice of scenes (including pillow fighters, zombies, an outrageously hamming mayor and a quick pan to what looks like the entire police and fire departments driving down the street waving in unison) and the “how did they do that?” production which looks like a single take. (It isn’t; you can get details in “The Making of the Grand Rapids Lip Dub” which itself has over 112,000 hits.)

It also has great music which ties into a heart-tugging storyline. The video was made to dispel the image of Grand Rapids as just another dying smokestack city, and the music fits in perfectly: a 10 minute concert version of Don McLean’s elegiac “Bye Bye Miss American Pie.” Which, ironically, was penned as McLean was sitting in a bar right here in Saratoga.

I’m a member of the Saratoga Springs Chamber of Commerce myself and would like this video to become successful. My first suggestion is to remove the producer credit and stock footage and to start with Sam the Bugler strutting toward us. Second, now that everybody’s had their moment in the sun try some creative editing of some “best of” clips like local celebrity Garland Nelson in the park, really selling it. Third, sponsor a competition for local citizens (or anyone who wants to try their hand on YouTube) to remix or even parody the original… some very interesting things can happen when you do that.

Copywriting 101: Saratoga Chips

A local company is marketing a boutique potato chip in Saratoga Springs, NY, where that salty snack was invented in 1853. The chips are made with high quality potatoes and taste delicious. They are charmingly packaged in a replica of the “takeaway” box from the 1870s. The company is well regarded and family owned. And as a bonus, they are one of the largest clients of Saratoga Bridges, a not-for-profit that finds meaningful work for mentally disabled adults.

Okay, copywriters. Think you can create some kind of a marketing campaign from that?

Oh, there’s one thing I haven’t mentioned. For whatever reason, Saratoga Chips has chosen to sell at a per-ounce price about the same as Lays. I’m not in love with that decision because price competition is the mark of a commoditized product and this is anything but. In fact, there’s a huge potential audience of tourists who come for the track, the spa and the waters who would love to take something back to friends and family in Jersey or Florida.

Unfortunately, the marketing department of Saratoga Chips is not you nor I. Avoiding history, warmth and local color, their copywriter came up with the Walmart-style headline: “Buy local… why pay more for the national brands?” Doing the copywriter one better, the art director mistrusted the visual appeal of the product and the antique box and subjugated them to a fake newspaper page (“Crum Cruncher” refers to George Crum, the inventor of the chip, but of course the reader doesn’t know this) superimposed on a fake wood background as if, I guess, the fake newspaper has been plopped down on a fake table.

Purely on the basis of missed opportunity, Saratoga Chips is hereby fast-tracked into the Badvertising Hall of Shame.

Regional differences, revisited

In an earlier post I talked about regional differences as demonstrated by the way people talk about food on social media. Here is another example. These two gas station price signs are directly opposite each other on Route 50 in Ballston Spa NY, just north of the Highway 67 intersection. Hess is selling regular for $3.729 a gallon and Sunoco for $3.859 a gallon. Down the road past the stoplight, an independent has regular for $3.709. Seven miles up the road in Saratoga, the going rate is $3.899.

You wouldn’t see this where I moved from in California, where gas stations in the same area are universally with in a penny or two of each other. If one station undercuts another by as much as 10 cents, cars would line up around the block. But in upstate New York, you get gas where you get gas, and a few cents a gallon isn’t going to change that.

The conventional wisdom is that urban areas, where most copywriters live, are more open to new experiences while exurban folks are more cautious and conservative. After two years in Saratoga I’m inclined to say this is true. Certainly it’s true that business is conducted more on the basis of whom you know than what you can do. In California we had lots of brilliant tech folks who were a disaster at social interaction. They wouldn’t do well here.

Regional differences are why, as copywriters, we often pull back from the edge a bit in the edginess of our copy and are sure to stress that even though our product or service is “new” it’s also “proven” with absolutely no negatives for trying it. When every customer counts, you can’t afford to ignore the conservatives in Saratoga County or the flyover states even though they may not be the coolest kids on the block.

On the floor at Fancy Food Show 2011

The Fancy Food Show was jam-packed at San Francisco’s Moscone Center…. good news for business but making it difficult to navigate during a truncated visit this week. Here are some highlights:

Trending up: cured meats, especially Serrano and Parma hams. I remember when it was a rare treat to get a slice of one of these beasts; this year they are everywhere. Though oddly enough, the salt content of most seems significantly reduced from classic preparations. There was also a jerky stand advertising 50% less sodium than traditional jerky. Also, lots of high-end sodas.

Trending down: nuts. Once a massive snack category, the vendors showing fancy smoked and salted nuts are today few and far between, Too much fat for today’s snacker? Baja Bob’s, a low calorie cocktail maker, can pour you a margarita for 60 calories vs 240 calories for a regular margarita. The benefit of which, they explain, is that your date will have more than one.

Down and out: gluten free everything, All of last year’s signs were gone. Also, vendors trumpeting the ‘USDA Organic” certification were rare even though a pavilion was set aside for them. May be that, as some of the folks at Terra Madre Day speculated, the designation is cumbersome and simultaneously lets in questionable products while not defining a level of quality that is actually useful.

Paul Bertolli and his wonderful head cheese

Product of the year: Testa di Porco (head cheese) from Fra’mani. Paul Bertolli has been threatening to bring this product to market for several years and last Sunday it happened. Ethereal. It’s not little bits of this and that like traditional head cheese but nice big chunks of celery-cured ham held together with a clove-y gelee. People were standing in line for this one.

Trend to watch: consolidation. NYC-based Rick’s Picks, to take one example, is now shipping 10 standard products rather than 14 in the past. In a tough economy retailers can’t be asked to stock that many SKU’s. Rick says there’s a demand for “spears” but that yen is now satisfied with a classic dill sour (really crunchy and good) and the green bean and asparagus spears have been put out to pasture.

Most popular giveaway: showgoers who traveled across the country, and could have all the food they wanted, stood in a long line to get a tea press with the Tea Republic logo. Starbucks take note.

Terra Madre Day celebrated by Saratoga Slow Food

Yesterday was the local observance of Slow Food’s Terra Madre (Mother Earth) Day, sponsored and beautifully organized and presented in the kitchens and dining room of Schenectady County Community College chef and Saratoga chapter president Rocco Verrigni. I sat in on a mega panel discussion followed by a mega tasting of fare prepared by rising chefs; there were also student presentations and a screening of the short film “Green Beef”.

Chefs and farmers in the kitchen on Terra Madre day

The panel discussion featured local farmers (from Saratoga Springs down to the area below the Mohawk River), chefs and restaurateurs discussing their “successes, issues and stories”. Successes for me included clues of how these folks are taking small steps to become commercially viable. Tod Murphy of Vermont’s Farmer’s Diner has the goal of serving local and naturally raised meals at prices farmers can actually afford; he does this by negotiating with farmers a scale larger than boutique/retail/farmers market enterprises and by staying away from steaks. Michael Kilpatrick, a local farmer, described his success in bringing year-round vegetable growing to Saratoga; he is just 23 and I am happy he will be around far longer than me.

Slow Food snail cookies baked by SCCC students

Michael was one of several to describe an “issue”: it’s difficult to follow the national standards for “Certified Organic” so as a result none of them does it. Kilpatrick Family Farm can’t be organic because they use a sheeting product called Biotelo for their winter mulching and though biodegradable, it’s not organic-approved. Noah Sheetz, executive chef of the governor’s mansion in Albany, described another problem, which is the practicality of coordinating multiple purveyors for poultry, produce, dairy etc. plus having a backup when somebody’s delivery truck breaks down. Sysco, by offering one-stop shopping for quality products, has made it too easy for many kitchens; what’s needed is a Sysco for natural producers.

Chef Christopher Tanner and his meat curing closet

The food presentations ranged from a perfect half moon of roasted acorn squash to a groaning board of charcuterie prepared by the SCCC students in Garde Manger II, which has done nothing but make sausage all semester long. Chef Christopher Tanner showed off his curing closet for prosciutto and Westphalian ham, made by stripping the shelves from a wine cabinet and adding an off-the-shelf humidifier. Local students pay just $3533 for learning all this and virtually all of them are offered jobs in the industry at the end of their two-year program.

During the breaks there was plenty of time to talk with local farmers and make new friends along with lists of places to go and dine and find new food near Saratoga. The only bad news is that the season has ended for many of these folks (which is why they could take the day off) so I’ll have to wait for spring for many of my forays.

Wall Street Journal won’t deliver on customer service

Residents of Saratoga Springs, NY have been noticeably more clueless over the last two months because of delivery problems with the Wall Street Journal. Apparently there is some kind of turf war among carriers. So every morning I go online to https://services.wsj.com, sign in with my account number and login, and report the missed delivery.

A few minutes later I get an email that confirms my delivery problem and tells me I will be credited for the missed issue and the local office is working on the problem. It then goes on to advise me: “In the future, please go to services.wsj.com to report any problems with your delivery. It’s easy and quick to use, and our delivery staff is notified directly from the site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

See the problem? Since that’s exactly what I did, WSJ assuming I did not do it puts into question the rest of the message. And the takeaway is that I assume they are in fact doing nothing about my delivery problem, which in fact they are not.

Then, every few days they vary the mix and send an email that says “To make sure we provide the field office with everything they need to resolve this issue, please answer any of the questions below that apply to your situation.

Location questions:
— When did the problem begin?
— Where is the paper usually delivered?” Etc.

Once I rose to the bait and responded that nothing had changed about my delivery situation (the house has been here for 130 years) but it didn’t actually make any difference. Nor should it, since this is boilerplate that some helpful scribe inserted in the rotation (“if missed deliver complaints = >5, then print ‘n’ ”) so I wouldn’t see the same thing constantly. Instead of fixing the problem, they’ve focused on creating an extended library of customer service correspondence for people who get the same message over and over again.

The lesson here: If you have a contact strategy as elaborate as this one, then there’s something wrong at the core that needs to be addressed. Handle it, instead of asking some copywriter to paper over it. Oh, and don’t insert a marketing message when a customer is already pissed off, such as “Here’s an opportunity to give a great gift at a great price: The Wall Street Journal Print and Online for just $119!” Hey, I could give it to my dad… then he and I could both not receive the paper.

Chevrolet shoots self in crankcase, creates badvertising instant classic

You can’t make this stuff up. The VP, I mean Vice President of Marketing at GM, I mean General Motors, has asked all employees to stop calling Chevy by that casual name and refer to it by the formal “Chevrolet” henceforth. The request presumably extends to the brand’s new agency, Goodby Silverstein, but hopefully did not originate with them.

“We’d ask that whether you’re talking to a dealer, reviewing dealer advertising, or speaking with friends and family, that you communicate our brand as Chevrolet moving forward,” read a memo which was also signed by the Chevrolet Vice President for Sales and Service. “When you look at the most recognized brands throughout the world, such as Coke [they mean “Coca-Cola” of course] or Apple for instance, one of the things they all focus on is the consistency of their branding. Why is this consistency so important? The more consistent a brand becomes, the more prominent and recognizable it is with the consumer.”

Of course, you can also make a brand recognizable through generations of casual use until it becomes part of the national vocabulary as well as the title of several Facebook fan pages and the auto dealership of its chief NASCAR representative, Jeff Gordon Chevy. And presumably Don McLean will be asked to return to Café Lena here in Saratoga, where he originally penned “American Pie”, and revise its most memorable line to “drove my Chevrolet to the [whatever Chevrolet rhymes with] but the [whatever] was dry”.

The New York Times article which broke this story reports that there now is a “cuss jar” at Chevrolet headquarters and employees must deposit a coin every time they use the forbidden word. Once it’s full the proceeds will be used for a “team building activity”. Times reporter Richard S. Chang suggests that activity will probably not be a Mexican dinner at Chevy’s.

Thanks to Carol Maxwell to bringing this to my attention. And thank you America for making possible this badvertising epiphany. Your tax dollars at work.