Tag: Words matter

Are copywriters the last storytellers?

Every copywriter should read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey and following that, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey. The first describes the classic myth structure which has existed across many civilizations and millennia: the hero emerges from humble beginnings, deals with adversity and learns from it, battles for cause and identity, suffers a major setback and enters a dark period, then draws on everything he’s learned to rally and prevail in a final battle. The Writer’s Journey is the same story, but told through the lens of Star Wars, one of the most popular films of all time.

I go to movies often with my teenage son, and it is painful to me that so many of today’s films are CGI spectacles devoid of plot or character development that could have been improved by a rote interpretation of the above sequence. I wonder what the budget meetings were like when they decided to put in yet another car crash or exploding head instead of spending a few bucks on a junior screenwriter.

If you’re a copywriter, you can’t afford to be sloppy like the Hollywood studios with your plots. You’re telling a story in which your prospect is the hero (thanks to your product) or in peril (but your service will save her). It needs to be credible and complete or you will be shown the door. Always remember that the marketer is an uninvited guest at the hearth of life. Your fellow travelers may be willing to listen politely for a moment but, if you can’t hold their attention you’re out in the snow. And, unlike failed Hollywood blockblusters, there’s no foreign distribution to redeem bad copy.

Yesterday in the car, I was listening to our recent Nobel laureate in literature for the first time in a while. “The drunken organ grinder cries…. I want you.” Parse those words and you’ll see there’s more drama and pathos in two lines than in most recent movies. The organ grinder is a street performer, someone who’s not particularly valued though he may amuse us. This one, though, has troubles. He is lovesick and that is probably what led him to drink. We want to know more.

Write copy that good and you’ll be a success, even a hero. Unlike yours truly, you may even sell a screenplay some day.

Does ScoreIt teach you to write like Stephen King?

Food for thought: I recently received an email from Bowker, a service that provides ISBN numbers to self-published authors. They have a new product that allows you to compare your prose to that of successful published writers and find out who has a style and genre close to yours. The software is ScoreIt, and it has a hefty price tag of $99. If they’d let me do one match for free I might have tried it but as it is I will just opine about something I know nothing about.

Let’s say ScoreIt tells me I write like Stephen King, and that my story of teenage mishaps is closest to his horror works. What am I supposed to do with that information? I suppose I could advertise my work with phrases such as “if you liked Carrie, you’ll love Teen Troubles!” And certainly I can use it for the elevator pitch to prospective agents in which you tell them your writing is like Stephen King crossed with Herman Melville (for argument’s sake I’m presuming that’s a secondary match). Is either of these worth $99?

What I’m worried about is that ScoreIt is going to make writers try to train themselves to write more like Stephen King. They’ll pore over his books (and the reports from ScoreIt which I presume have granular detail on shared vocabulary, sentence structure etc). And it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of developing their own voice, they will indeed write more and more like someone else.

Of course, I used Stephen King as my straw man for a very good reason. He has a completely different voice from book to book, depending on topic and presumed audience. And he explains his craft and technique quite fully in On Writing, a standard textbook in college writing courses. The $10 or so that costs you on Amazon would be a better investment, methinks.

What the pool guy can teach us about selling freelance creative

I’ve recently moved into a house which, two owners ago, was tricked out with all the bells and whistles available in the early 1990s. Most of these tchotchkes have fallen into disrepair and must either be abandoned (like the in-wall coax cabling throughout the house) or gussied up. This has caused visits by a stream of spa guys, pool guys and sprinkler guys and I’ve noticed something interesting and consistent in the way they address my wife and me which can help in selling freelance creative.

“See the three holes in the top of that sprinkler head?” says the sprinkler guy. “That’s a Toro. They require a special tool to open the head, so you have to call a service to do it for you. I’ll replace all those with Rainbirds you can adjust yourself.”

“This is junk,” says the pool guy as he turns the handle on the filter tank. “$125 for a new one.” Water starts to ooze out. “Look at that.” As the gaskets become saturated, the leaks stop. “Well, maybe it’s good for one more season. But keep an eye on it. If you lose your prime [which for some reason is what they call pressure in the system] then your pool will become filled with algae.”

What’s happening in both these instances is that the contractor is sharing a do-it-yourself tip to make me, the client, feel in control while simultaneously instill fears, uncertainties and doubts that I’ll actually be able to do it.

“Write like you talk,” you might tell a client who thinks they can do their own copywriting. “Short sentences, no more than 10 words on average but break those up with an occasional one- or two-word sentence. Paragraphs no longer than five lines, but break them up with an occasional one-line or even one-word paragraph. And your vocabulary should be plain English. No words over ten characters if possible.”

Now who’s going to remember all that? The guy is going to dutifully write it down, and possibly try it, but will quickly abandon the effort and call you. And you may well be able to ease your estimate a bit higher because they now have more appreciation of your craft.

This is why I shake my head at creatives who present their work as a black box and refuse to open the kimono and explain what they’re doing. The more you tell them, the more they will respect and trust you, and the more likely they are to hire you to do it for them. Now I’ve got to go down in the basement, because the last owner loved to tinker with his sprinklers and I’m pretty sure he had one of those special Toro tools.

Why Cadillac “Dare Greatly” campaign doesn’t

While many brands made a political statement with ads on the 2017 Super Bowl, Cadillac saved theirs for the (surprisingly non-political) Academy Awards telecast. “We are a nation divided. That’s what they tell us, right?” the ad begins. “But what they don’t tell you, what doesn’t make the news, is this: We carry each other forward.” And we have a series of clips of Americans supporting or carrying others, sometimes literally.

Next we go to a montage of historical figures standing next to their Cadillacs. “No matter who we are, or what we believe, or where we come from, we’ve had the privilege to carry a century of humanity,” the ad continues. The “carry” metaphor is not very subtle, but it speaks well to Cadillac’s history as a symbol of having made it. I grew up in a suburb of Dallas with a very eclectic population mix—from college professors to poultry distributors, and from aristocrats with a long southern heritage to first generation immigrants.

Some folks thought owning a Cadillac was a way to show off your prosperity; my Uncle Jim bought a new one every year. But others would never own a Cadillac because it was not appropriate to be so ostentatious. I suspect the new Cadillac campaign is speaking to the first group. You may live in fear of deportation, you may belong to an ethnic group that is the subject of hate crimes, but if you have money for the down payment at least you can drive a nice car.

As it wraps things up, Cadillac stretches its metaphor a bit too far in my opinion. “But maybe what we carry isn’t just people. It’s an idea. That while we’re not the same, we can be one. And all it takes is the willingness to dare.” And we close with the Cadillac logo and the tag line, “Dare Greatly.” (The tag is not new, but was introduced with this campaign a couple of years ago.) Again, what we’re talking about is bourgeois prosperity. It’s the same kind of daring that might cause you to go for it with a nicer anniversary gift or a pricier steak than you had planned because, hey, this is America and you can. It’s really not that daring, but maybe it hits the Cadillac buyer’s sweet spot.

The branding continues to veer off course with the next spot, “Pioneers”. “We’ve always been dreamers. We’ve been a symbol of the future…. A standard… a star. But our past is just that, past. What lies ahead is in our hands.” And the ad goes on to introduce concept vehicles including self-driving and electric Cadillacs. The drivers in these vehicles are younger, much younger.

The third ad, “Pedestal”, starts with a vehicle literally on a pedestal surrounded by gawkers. A well-dressed 30ish woman comes forward, mesmerized. “We know how it feels to be treated like a trophy. Driven to awards shows… parties… and across so many silver screens…. But a Cadillac is no trophy, no museum piece. This is our future, and it will inspire every car that follows…. Intermission’s over. This is how we drive the world forward.” And now the mesmerized woman is behind the wheel while multiethnic pedestrians gawk at her good fortune.

The problem here is that Cadillac is trying to transform its brand and appeal to a new audience, yet its history is the reason for its cred. They should have done what Lincoln and Chrysler did, in high concept campaigns of the past. Tell your story, then shut up. The campaign can continue with product-focused features and performance ads, and buyers will connect the dots.

I’ll close with Electro Cadillac, presumably a current owner, who says much the same thing in a comment under the YouTube “Pioneers” video:

“I can’t believe this… This commercial is basically telling you that all the achievements and great cars that were made in the past, history (which, let’s be honest is much better than the weak plastic bullshit we have today) let’s just throw all that in the garbage… I enjoy driving and all this ‘futuristic’ crap is getting on my nerves with every single day going by…

“One thing that is fundamental guys, Cadillac hear me out: You can’t beat the old school. Those flimsy plastic bumpers will never compare to those good old chrome steel ones.

“And here is another thing. I am watching the Oscars as we speak, and your Escala commercial says this: ‘Our cars will never be like before’. Well that means that you’re not going to be Cadillac anymore.

“Here is a new slogan for you: There is no future without the past.”

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.

Why copywriting is like fixing a hole in the wall

I live in a 135-year-old house with lath and plaster walls. I have two teenage boys. Thus, I have a lot of opportunity to patch holes in those walls. Recently I’ve gotten a lot better than this, and it occurred to me there are lessons that apply to copywriting or any repetitive artisanal task.

Originally I patched the holes with Durham’s Water Putty, which is a wonderful substance so long as you do not ever plan to sand or otherwise change it after it dries. Fortunately I did not fix too many holes this way. I’ve evolved to what I think is a pretty standard formula: two layers of gypsum patching compound over the lath, then a final layer of Sheetrock drywall mud. (There’s possibly been some new regulation for health reasons, because the drywall mud is no longer available powdered but only in a premixed tub labeled “Dust Control”.)

Sometimes the laths are missing or broken. I use 1 x ¼ inch trim strips from Home Depot to replace them, applying wood glue and clamping the ends to the backs of good lath till it dries. The resulting lattice has a Rube Goldberg look, but once the plaster is applied nobody can tell what’s underneath.

Sometimes the plaster has separated from the wall. Using the technique I read about on this site, I drill numerous 3/8 inch holes through the plaster with a masonry bit, squirt a generous amount of Loctite All-Purpose Power Grab adhesive through each hole, then tighten the plaster down against the lathe with a short drywall screw and a fender washer. Two days later I remove the screws and knock the washers off with my drywall knife, and the wall is ready to be patched.

Applying the final layer is critical to making it look like you have not patched a hole. The coat needs to be even and it also needs to be “proud”, a wonderful plasterer’s word which means it’s raised slightly above the existing surface so it can be sanded down flush. If the coating isn’t proud, you will end up applying another layer to fill depressions left after sanding.

I’ve also learned to use the right sanding tool. Power sanders are too rough and kick up dust. Squeezable wet/dry drywall sanding sponges take forever. I use a flat drywall hand sander made by 3M with a 3” x 9” sanding face. It makes the wall as flat and even as it can be and exposes areas that will need to be built up. I start with 80 grit paper (also from 3M, and specially cut for this sander) and finish with 150 grit. On a couple of occasions my initial surface was way too high so I attacked it first with a Stanley surform plane.

So how is this like copywriting? First, your work improves with repetition. You observe what you are doing both consciously and instinctively, note what works and what needs to be corrected. In my experience improvement doesn’t happen gradually. You start a task you’ve done many times before, and suddenly realize you’re must better than the last time.

Second, you need to use the right tools and materials. For a writer, these include your creative brief, whatever method you use to organize your work and any props you use to improve your focus. (One great copywriter I know keeps a photo of his intended reader stuck to his monitor, for example.) You can’t just sit down and expect that inspiration will strike on a regular basis.

Third, you want to spend your best energies on the things that get noticed first. In a wall patch, you want to avoid bulges, dips, rough spots and separation lines where the patch doesn’t feather smoothly into the underlying wall. For the copywriter, pay attention to the outer envelope teaser, the subject line, the headline, and of course the clarity of the underlying concept.

Don’t get bogged down in the details until the big picture is clear in your mind. Your reader will forgive you the occasional flat sentence in body copy as long as your core premise is sound. Just as my home visitors, and future home buyers, will look past an occasional nick or ripple. Because no 135-year-old-wall is perfect… and neither is your copy.

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.

Cadillac “Dare Greatly” ad campaign has an elephant in the back seat

During 2015 March Madness I’ve seen the Jason Wu Cadillac ad numerous times. Certainly it’s daring greatly to heavy up on a story about a guy whose mom gave him a sewing machine during the uber-macho celebration of NCAA basketball, and the ad is a great story. But what’s that vehicle rolling into frame at the end? Oh, wait, it’s a Cadillac… whaat?

I went googling and found Cadillac’s Dare Greatly page, which provides nice access to all the celebrity stories featured in the campaign. I watched the story of Jason Wu in full (that’s the video link above; the ad itself doesn’t seem to be available online) and also that of Anne Wojcicki, founder of 23andme. They’re well done. The overall impression is of somebody who was immensely talented to begin with, but then took a career path that took them out of their comfort zone. Obviously that’s a great metaphor for a once adulated, now staid luxury car brand that wants to reinvent itself.

But here’s the thing. I can’t imagine any of these people actually driving a Cadillac, other than maybe Steve Wosniak who’s a car collector and something of a schlub. (In fact, if you can prove to me Anne Wojcicki doesn’t drive a Tesla S, I’ll send you a free copy of my book right now.) So the ads, while celebrating the daring and talented, inadvertently separate the product from the celebrity endorser.

This campaign is often compared to the iconic Chrysler spots featuring Eminem and later Clint Eastwood. But those gentlemen weren’t endorsing a car. They were endorsing a spirit: Rocky, relocated from Philadelphia to Detroit, the downtrodden American underdog rising from the ashes of defeat. You buy a car from these guys not because they drive one, but because it’s the right thing to do.

When Chrysler next hired Bob Dylan and turned him into an Ed McMahon-type huckster, it was cringeworthy. A better use of the celebrity as pitchman was the Lincoln ad with Matthew McConnaghey where he comes right out and says “I’ve been driving a Lincoln since long before they paid me to do it.” Anyhow, what all these ads had in common was that they make a direct connection between the celebrity and the car—in most cases, the spokesperson is behind the wheel in at least one scene. (I think Eastwood may have stepped from the shadows behind a Chrysler.)

And that’s the disconnect with Cadillac’s Dare Greatly campaign and its celebrities. In order to convince them to participate, Cadillac obviously told them they did not have to mention Cadillac, appear with Cadillac, or drive a Cadillac. So we have the choice of questioning the credibility of the endorsement, or realizing it’s not an endorsement at all.

Celebrities are infinitely useful as metaphors, especially if they’re dead. (Think of the “Here’s to the…” images in the Apple “Think Different” campaign.) But if you’re interacting with live ones you can’t put up a firewall. You have to ask them about the car. That’s the lesson here.

The creative parable of the 100 light bulbs

A creative director recently shared with me the parable of the 100th light bulb. It goes like this:

When you turn on the first light bulb in a dark room, the effect is transformative. Where before there was only darkness, now there is light. But by the time you switch on the 100th light bulb, the incremental difference is so small that nobody notices. The lesson is that there’s a point of diminishing returns where it’s not worth the effort to keep exploring new ideas.

I disagree.

For one thing, if your project is a web page or an email, turning on the light bulb is so trivial a task you shouldn’t give it a second thought. Through multivariate testing, marketers can not only turn light bulbs on and off, but move them around at will to see if one arrangement is better than another.

But beyond that, turning on the 100th light bulb is what we as creatives are paid to do, assuming we charge more than the journeyman copywriter who can take a brochure and turn it into a sales letter.

In the heyday of subscription direct mail, the 1980s and early 1990s, writers like Bill Jayme and Linda Wells were paid tens of thousands of dollars (1980s dollars) to produce circulation promotions that, if they were successful, might increase response rate by a microscopic fraction of 1%. But because the numbers mailed were so large, it was a savvy investment by the publishers.

I myself once wrote an ad that appeared in Computerworld, for a long departed agency and software client. They marketed primarily through direct mail, but some targets just didn’t ever respond. This ad won a new account from one of those targets, and the value of the business was such that it paid for the entire cost of the ad, including media, for the life of the campaign.

Was that worth the 100th light bulb? I think so.

Boredom banished at DMA 2014

The Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference is happening this week in San Diego, and I’ll shortly get on a plane to join my colleagues. I will be on a panel Tuesday morning October 28, called “Creative Slamdown: How world-class creatives successfully sell strange, obscure, boring or even the most mundane products” put together by estimable designer and freelance creative director Carol Worthington Levy. Panelists Kathy Lemmon and Michelle LaPointe and I will vie to present the most interesting case history of a dry, difficult or tedious assignment which was executed in an interesting and hopefully effective (since this is a direct marketing conference, after all) way.

My centerpiece is a print ad for Rovi’s advertising in the guide (the ads the appear on your TV channel guide while you are looking for a show to watch) aimed at media buyers. Come see how we turned a straightforward and complex pitch/explanation into something memorable, or at least unexpected.

The session is at 11 am, just before the “Hall of Fame” luncheon which is traditionally a barn burner, so this is a great way to get all fired up and ready to go.