Words matter Archives - Page 5 of 12 - Otis Regrets... or not

The Writer’s Diet

Pompous, stilted and jargon-esque prose may be popular in corporate marcom departments and annual reports, but it turns readers off and causes copywriters to lose their jobs because we’re putting people to sleep. That’s why we need to stay ever-vigilant against that dark inner voice that keeps whispering, if we aren’t saying anything or don’t know what we are talking about, we better sound smart.

Along with the beloved we-we calculator that tells us if our copy is too me-centric, we have a useful new tool in the Writer’s Diet from Kiwi pedagogist Helen Sword. Cut-and-paste an entry from 100 to 1000 words and her program will score you from “Fit and Trim” to “Heart Attack Waiting to Happen” for readability based on your choice of various parts of speech.

A snippet of my direct marketing copy was labeled “fit and trim” with a recommendation to tone up some abstract nouns. (I was writing about an abstract concept.) My intro to a fiction piece was labeled “needs toning” based on a “flabby” score for my verbs in which a passive observer is commenting on what he sees around him. Busted. This sucker seems to work pretty well.

I had originally encountered Dr. Sword through her article “Zombie Nouns” in the opinion pages of the New York Times. These are “nominated” words in which a verb or adverb is transformed into a noun: participation, perception, observation, nominalization. A few of these are fine, but when they are overused they suck the life out of the text as in this example from a social sciences book:

The partial participation of newcomers is by no means “disconnected” from the practice of interest. Furthermore, it is also a dynamic concept. In this sense, peripherality, when it is enabled, suggests an opening, a way of gaining access to sources for understanding through growing involvement. The ambiguity inherent in peripheral participation must then be connected to issues of legitimacy, of the social organization of and control over resources, if it is to gain its full analytical potential.

For those of us who work with technology companies, this is new yet oddly familiar—companies in this space (another word to hate BTW) tend to turn verbs into nouns (verbalization?) that have the ring of authenticity without really meaning anything; cf. “impact” (how will this initiative impact our bottom line?).

In both cases, the construction of active, well-structured sentences using simple yet evocative words will awaken our readers and, hopefully, keep the zombies at bay.

Should you ever turn down business as a copywriter?

When I started freelancing, a couple decades ago, a wise old art director counseled me: never turn down work. Even if you’re super busy, stay up all night to get it done or offload it to a fellow creative and hopefully mark up their work. After all, you never know which new client might become your bread and butter or, conversely, if your current bread-and-butter client might go belly up tomorrow.

And I do try to stay hungry. But recently I’ve been turning down a bit of work. Part of this is a hunch we are headed for good times. Freelance creative are the canaries in the coal mine, first to get laid off in a recession but also first to know when companies think they better get cracking to stay competitive. And that’s what seems to be happening right now. Buy U.S. equities, dear reader. Buy Facebook like I did last week. (Though not at the IPO price obviously.)

And, another part of my reasoning is quality of life. I’m trying to get some traction on a fiction project, which uses the same brain cells as my copywriting. At the end of the day, when I’m trying to get the attention of David Ogilvy at that great water cooler in the sky, do I want to admit I didn’t get my novel finished because I decided to take on yet another few hundred $$ project? Not to mention my kid’s in the Little League playoffs and we are looking pretty good over here.

Both my turn down projects this week had to do with budget contractions. When times are good, prices start rising all over the place (the $3.47 deck pieces I wanted at Home Depot rose to $5.94 in the space of a month, for example), and it’s natural to get aggressively defensive.

One client wanted to redefine a project to pay less for work we’ve already agreed to. There’s a line item for A, and a line item for B, but the assumption is you’ll get both and I do research and prep with that in mind before I ever type a word. Now this client wants to only pay for the “A” portion which makes it a loser for me since the prep work is the same, so I’m outta here. Have to finish current projects but asking to be excused from future ones.

The second contested budget was much, much larger… an entire website. This is always a leap of faith because you don’t know how the pages will shake out when you estimate and hopefully pick a per-page number that averages out (same with catalogs by the way). With a new client, you also don’t know how finicky they will be and how complex the revisions. So I added something I thought was pretty generous, which was an offer to write 10 pages of the client’s choice at the per-page rate, charge nothing for my startup research time, then after that we could decide if it make sense for both of us.

Client instead wants a deal of some kind, which I can’t offer because my deal was my deal. This could have occupied me late into the night for much of the summer. Instead I’ll be baking baguettes, following the capers of my protagonist (a 19th century Quaker with a terrible problem) and maybe watching Logistics One finally get the best of Staffing in the Saratoga American Little League. Maybe I’m crazy, but maybe not.

Are you a “Buckeye” copywriter? You should be.

My colleague Russell Kern sent back some copy with the request that it be made more “Buckeye”. Which, on investigation, means more plain spoken, middle American… you know, Buckeye. As in Ohio State Buckeyes. And he flattered me by saying that “of course Otis is a Buckeye copywriter.”

Well, guess I wasn’t, at least in this instance, but I try to be. It is rarely a good idea to use anything but plain language in your copywriting. Remember that anything that trips the reader up is likely to send them toward the delete button or recycling bin, not the reference desk. Don’t use words a sixth grader wouldn’t understand. And don’t use complex sentences and grammatical constructions and expect the reader to parse them for you, because they won’t. They’re too busy getting past your unwanted promotional message to the next thing in their lives.

The late John Caples used to keep a Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog on his desk, just in case he ran across a product that was unfamiliar to him. Those catalog copywriters were Buckeyes for sure. They were selling to Midwestern (often immigrant) readers ordering items sight unseen, and their clear descriptions were what built these companies.

There are exceptions, as always. Selling luxury goods, which people want but don’t need, seems to benefit from a few unctuous words they can roll around to make themselves feel special. Health advice can be bolstered by a bit of sternness and a professorial tone. And financial writing often requires an extra level of formality. But even in these instances, it’s never a bad idea to be plain spoken in your core message.

If you’re a copywriter reading this, you almost certainly came from some other discipline like a study of English literature. You’re probably a very good writer and would love to sell a story to the New Yorker or get your screenplay produced. But your reader doesn’t give a crap about any of that or about you in general. They just want to buy products and services that will make them feel better or make their life easier, and your job is to describe those benefits without letting your college degree get in the way.

Be a Buckeye. (But not Woody Hayes.)

General Motors doesn’t like Facebook… and the feeling’s mutual

GM Facebook page — GM's got a fan page on Facebook!

So General Motors has pulled its Facebook advertising because it determined its ads had little effect on consumer behavior, according to the Wall Street Journal. Marketing VP Joel Ewanik says the company “is definitely reassessing our advertising on Facebook, although the content is effective and important.” And by “content” he means the pages GM isn’t paying for, as opposed to the sidebar ads.

The story goes on to say that GM had a $40 million Facebook budget, only $10 million of which actually went for ads. The rest “covers content created for the site, agencies that manage the content and daily maintenance of GM’s pages, people familiar with the figures said.”

I took a look at what we can assume is the flagship page for the company, http://www.facebook.com/generalmotors. You can see it pictured here, but you should go check it out for yourself. Then go check out a few other pages, like Chevrolet (NOT “Chevy”) , Camaro, Chevrolet Volt and Corvette. Notice anything interesting? Yeah, the layout and content design is all the same. The whole thing is probably auto-filled by a content management system. If this is worth $30 million I want that gig!

Now notice what GM is doing to promote itself: promote ITSELF. There’s news of what this brand or that brand is doing, Guy Fieri driving a Corvette at the Indy 500 (let’s hope it doesn’t get stolen like his last car) and some proud customers pulling up to a plant in their car on a road trip. Yes, there’s a blurb at the top, “Welcome to the official GM fan page [sic]. Share your thoughts, tell us your story and join in on the discussion.” But nobody’s actually doing that. How about inviting readers to interact with you by sending in photos of their cars, telling stories about their first car, and maybe giving them a chance to WIN something?

And, almost none of these pages has any sidebar advertising. I’m guessing that Facebook pulled all the ads in a fit of pique, to make the pages even less interesting than they are. But here’s an idea: now that you’re spending 75% of your budget to build a “web presence”, is it worth the other 25% to give people a call to action and maybe buy something?

Probably not, if everybody is like GM executives and other WSJ reader: in a poll accompanying the article, 93.4% said they “rarely or never” are affected by Facebook advertising. What more proof could you want that this whole Facebook thing is a flash in the pan?

KISS: selling complex products with simple messages

Rovi Bridezilla Ad — Rovi "Bridzilla" Ad in today's Ad Age. Thanks to client Bill Smith and his trusty iPhone.

I’m on a panel at this fall’s DMA called “K.I.S.S – Keys to Copy & Content that Generate Results”. My partners in crime are Dawn Wolfe from Autodesk and Philip Reynolds from pharma agency Palio. The idea is to talk about strategies for translating complex products or services into simple and universal human language that sells.

I’m thinking of using this Rovi promo, which appears in today’s Ad Age, as an example. Rovi does the ads that appear within onscreen television guides and other formats where the viewer is actively involved with a remote or other electronic device; viewers aren’t dozing or distracted so this is an attractive option for media buyers, our target audience. A bit complex so we boiled it down to this idea of the bridezilla who is so enamored of her remote that she can’t put it down even in the wedding chapel.

The antonym of this is the ads you’ll find in any issue of Wired or Fast Company for high-performance automobiles or audiovisual equipment. Those ads typically use visual metaphors of power and performance and expect the reader to be awed, not involved.

The session is happening on October 17, so plenty o’ time to noodle on this. If you have any thoughts or examples on this topic, please send them along!

Beware, legal beagles at work

How would you like to win a new Ford “Focus”? Probably not a lot because putting the name in quotes is akin to a wink. It’s not really a Focus but a Yugo with a Focus skin of some sort. Or, it’s a cake in the shape of a Ford Focus. Whatever, your response is likely “do not want” and that’s bad news if there is a copywriter who wrote that promo and is getting paid for it.

I mused on this when I saw this ad in the NY Subway last week. And those aren’t really quotes around the word “Focus”. Click on the thumbnail and look at it full size and you’ll see there is actually a register mark after the “Ford” and a TM after “Focus”. WTF?

What is happening here is that some legal beagle is trying to justify their paycheck, unfortunately at the expense of yours. By mindlessly second-guessing the concerns of some other legal beagle in a second company who is also trying to justify their paycheck, they will insist on a trademark or register mark every time a brand is mentioned. They may also insist on the insertion of qualifiers when none are needed, eg changing “you’ll enjoy driving this car” to “you may enjoy driving this car”.

Why is this harmful? First because it’s idiotic. Second because the little rat-turd looking legal marks clutter up the visual appearance and make the copy difficult to read. Third because it removes any artifice that makes it seem that your communication is “real” vs. hucksterism.

I once backed a very senior legal person into a corner at a large publishing company. They told me that if you use a register mark or other qualifier the first time you mention a brand name on an element, and either credit the owner in a footnote or else simply say that “all trademarks are the property of their respective owners” then you’re good. If it’s a multi-component direct mail package you’d need to do this once on the outer envelope, once on the letter, once on the brochure and so on. Then you’re covered. Anything beyond this is legal self-gratification and self-manipulation and you should fight hard against it.

Welcome back, Lands End copywriter!

: Got to love an all-copy cover!

In my copywriting class I use the Lands End catalog as an example of great catalog copywriting. They are unexcelled at building on details about a fabric or a tailoring process until it becomes irresistible. The story may be about a buyer’s obsessive desire to solve a fitting problem, or about the scientific process by which a synthetic fleece can be light yet warm. Often it’s accompanied by personality profiles of a tailor or a happy wearer.

If you are used to seeing Lands End catalogs in the mail, you probably have no idea what I am talking about… because in fact the examples I use are well over a decade old, before Lands End was acquired by Sears. Recent Lands End catalogs are pretty much like any other midrange fashion retailer’s.

Which is why I was so excited by the spring Men’s book in the mail last week. The cover and the first six pages are all about Irish linen. “We could bring you assembly line linen at a lower price but wouldn’t you rather have the real thing? Here’s the very best, the linen of knights and kings, fearless RAF pilots and world famous rogues.” That’s the headline of the opening spread and I’m already reaching for my credit card even though not a single product is sold here.

The sell begins comes on the next spread, which educates us about the fabric: “Linen comes from long, golden fibers encased inside the woody stalks of the flax plant. Extracting them takes months, which is why fine linen is so prized. The basic steps have changed little from the time of the pharaohs…” Note that these are generic descriptions of linen, but because Lands End takes the trouble to research and tell us its story, the fabric becomes uniquely theirs by default.

The next spread is about linen pants and it has a little repetition, making me wonder if they hired some superstar copywriter and could only afford a few copy blocks, which were then cut and pasted to create new ones. If so, I hope it’s one of the old crew lured out of retirement.

If you received this catalog, take a close look at it… there’s much to be learned. (And order from it, so Sears will discover hard sell is not always the best sell.) If not, I’m delighted to find there’s a continuing feature online called “Anchors of Style” (terrible non-descriptive title incidentally) in which part of the linen story is currently available here.

Specifics sell… provided they’re the RIGHT specifics.

We talked recently about the importance of being specific in your selling copy. Now here’s more. 381 words more, to be specific.

I found an interesting example of specific selling on the Marketing Experiments Blog… the same folks who brought us the fascinating subject line contest. A marketer changed this line on an ecommerce page:

Simple Fix for Blown Head Gaskets

to this one:

Repair Blown Head Gaskets in Just One Hour

The result? Combine with some other redos, the second headline brought a 58.1% (no, not “nearly 60%”) increase in conversions. Of course you want to know what those other redos are and in fact there was a considerable redesign. But the most important thing about the page didn’t change: a decision to show the actual product, which is obviously a liquid in a bottle.

If you have ever done work on internal combustion engines, you know that a permanent solution for blown head gaskets does not come in a bottle. You have to take the heads off and replace the gaskets which is a time consuming, dirty job. Presumably this liquid is some kind of magic sealant which will ooze into the cracks or warped areas and plug them up, thus reducing the loss of compression which is why blown head gaskets are a problem. But it sounds kind of too good to be true, right?

So if I see “a simple fix” and then a bottle, I’m going to reject it before going further. But if I see “repairs in one hour” then I might consider it; that’s not a big commitment and I will also notice the page offers a money-back guarantee. The ad is engaging with me in a context where I will find its selling proposition acceptable.

This case history (which is presented in an online class that lasts nearly an hour, so it’s great value for the bargain price of free) demonstrates the importance of the RIGHT specifics in your marketing proposition. “Simple fix” is actually a pretty good phrase… two powerful selling words in there. But it’s the wrong message to this audience about this product. “Repairs in one hour” is more specific but more important it’s credible. Good job to the copywriter and the rest of the team for doing their homework.

47 reasons that specifics sell in copy

Herschell Gordon Lewis has a great example about the value of specifics in copywriting. It’s a fundraising headline to the effect of “about 200,000 children will die of starvation in Africa without your help.” The word “about” sucks the urgency and empathy out of the statement like a needle puncturing a balloon. If the copywriter didn’t care enough to find out a more accurate number, why should you care?

Specific numbers and statements help prospects visualize what they’re actually going to get when they respond to your advertising. Specifics are more believable and smell less like puffery. Specifics are also a kind of rite of passage for a copywriter… they show your bosses, your clients and ultimately the recipient that you’ve done your homework.

Which is more credible? 100% pure, or 99.44% pure? The latter, obviously. It’s also better than 99.99% (a number you frequently see applied to IT system uptime and other quality-controlled processes) because it’s so random it could only have been arrived at through careful research. (Bonus question: what is the product, and when was the slogan first used? You probably know the first answer but I’ll bet you’ll be surprised at the second. Proves that good copywriters have known this strategy for a very long time.)

Which is more credible? 30 days to a better figure, or lose weight fast? The first one, and 29 or 31 days would have been even better because of the apparent randomness as noted above.

Bad: many reasons to buy now. Better: 10 reasons to buy now. Best: 9 reasons to buy now. If there really are only 9 reasons, why pad it to get to a nice round number?

I realize I’m far short of 47 reasons, but I think I’ve made my point. And by the way, have you ever noticed how often the number 47 appears in narratives, especially science fiction narratives? One reason is that it appears to be the ultimate random number. But actually, it isn’t.

You are in the top 2% of copywriters… now prove it!

At the conclusion of my 2-day copywriting intensive for the DMA, there is a graduation ceremony. I tell my students thanks to what they’ve just learned, they have a better chance of success than 98% of professional copywriters… and I mean it. By understanding some basic selling techniques, how to organize and present their work, and how to manage copywriting as a business, they’re way ahead of the game in terms of winning controls, getting promotions, or making a living as a freelancer.

There is currently a great opportunity for you to prove that you’re smarter than the average bear, at least as a copywriter. The Marketing Sherpa/Optimization Summit people are having a subject line contest! The email’s already written (to promote the event, obv) and you just need to add a subject line which you will do by entering it as a comment. A few semifinalists will be chosen by a panel of experts and then these will actually be tested in email transmissions, and the best subject line gets a free pass to the conference. (It’s in Denver at a great time of year, early June, and it’s worth $1900.)

And, since the submissions are in the comments field, you can read what your competitors are coming up with. (Not all of them though; there’s a glitch on the website that keeps some comments from being presented.) You may well think, as I did after reading a few of them, that you can do better. So go for it!

If you want to brush up your skills before packing your bags, read a few posts from the Copywriting 101 category on this website. Or better yet, buy my book. And yes, I plan to enter the contest myself, so bring your best game sucka!