Inserts: It doesn’t matter what your message is if nobody can read it.

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Because I’m in the business of writing and designing inserts, amongst other things, I look at inserts.  Whereas most normal people shake them straight into the bin.

Which is why an insert has to be very, very eye-catching: very instant with its messaging. It needs to say STOP! LOOK AT ME! DON’T BIN ME I’VE GOT SOMETHING INTERESTING FOR YOU! Arguably even more than the regular advertising in the paper it comes in.

An insert flopped out of my newspaper on Saturday.

It was green. Very green. It was an A5 single page flyer, printed both sides. Green all over.  A sort of appley mid-green. There were some line illustrations on the front which were white (reversed-out is the jargon phrase).  And therefore very hard to see.

The main headline was also white. And therefore also virtually invisible. (Perhaps just as well as we’ll see in a second, it was so terrible.)

On the back was the body copy. White. In a sans face. Utterly impossible to read.

The whole thing was so recessive, so technically incompetent that it made me angry for the poor client who bought this appalling example of design.

The client was something called Mylawyer.co.uk. So let’s look at what mylawyer.co.uk had to say.

Main headline: Everyday legal services – what you don’t need.

Question one, pens ready please. What the hell is an everyday legal service? Who uses legal services every day apart from the police? You use legal services once in a blue moon when you’re buying a house, writing a will, divorcing your husband.

Question two: why are you telling me what I DON’T need? You’ve got a nano-second to tell me why I should read this green monstrosity. So tell me what you’re offering me! And just in case I don’t know what ‘outrageous hourly fees’ means you show me a picture of clock. Apparently I don’t need expensive premises either. So you show me a picture of, er, a picture.

Onto the back. The headline is: What you do need. Now, one of the tried and tested techniques for inserts is to make sure that the main proposition, the main offer, is clearly visible front and back because you don’t know which way it will fall out of the publication.

This one fails in this respect because if it lands backside-up I’ve no idea what’s being offered to me. I’m told I need a Computer. Some tea/coffee (Optional). Be still my quaking sides. And a Phone. But not what I might need them for.

The body copy starts with “If you’re shopping for everyday legal services…” Finally, a bit of a clue. (But of course most people will not have got this far.) The authors clearly love this phrase. The fact that we have no idea what it means has whizzed over their bewigged heads.

After much waffling, no sub-heads to help us, it gets to the point. “We’re an online service which means you don’t even have to leave home to deal with legal matters such as wills, powers of attorney and a wide range of other issues which we can’t be bothered to mention.” (I made that last bit up.)

So it’s actually quite an interesting service. Cheap lawyers online for your less complicated legal needs like wills. But the vast majority of people will never know what they’re missing because the instrument of communication, as a lawyer would probably call an insert, is such a disaster of copy and design in every conceivable way.

 

 

Does your online ad need a logo?

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I was browsing some of the so-called classic press ads from days of yore recently and something suddenly struck me. Something that, I’m ashamed to say, I’d never noticed in all my years of rattling the stick in the swill bucket.

The old ads didn’t have a logo.

Even the famous Ogilvy Rolls-Royce clock one. No logo.  Why was this? Surely the whole point of the advertising was to get the brand name into the public consciousness as swiftly and effectively as possible?

But, of course, anyone who’s worked in proper direct response advertising will tell you instantly why the ads didn’t have a logo.

Because they were designed to look like editorial.

Direct Response experts always make their ads look like the editorial matter that surrounds them. So the customer is tricked into looking at the ad for that tiny nano-second longer.  He thinks, for a split second, that it’s editorial and therefore interesting so he glances at it. Whereas, if it looks like advertising, he will instinctively ignore it.

This is one of the key reasons why you still see many direct response press ads that have lots of copy, laid out in editorial-style columns with a squared-up picture at the top and an editorial-style headline.

We did the same thing at the Reader’s Digest with envelopes for DM. You make your envelope look like a bill, a parcel, a tax demand…anything but a piece of advertising. Just so, for that tiny moment, the customer engages with it just a little bit longer. And in the scheme of things, where every percentage point counts, that’s enough.

We now see the same principles at work online. We ignore the banner ads and do our best to ignore the Google adwords ads too.

But the online ads that actually work are the ones that look like editorial. Bournemouth granny reveals secret of wrinkle-free old-age. The weight-loss trick that doctors hate. Why vegetarian sausages can add 20 years to your dog’s life.

These get under your radar simply because, unlike most online promotion, they don’t scream I AM A BANNER AD PLEASE IGNORE ME. And without exception, they don’t have a logo.

What makes a great advertising headline?

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One myth that needs to be nailed into a lead coffin and buried at least six feet under right now is this one: good advertising headlines involve a pun.

Where this nonsense actually originated I have no idea, but practically every junior creative team I come across (and far too many senior ones as well) seem to think that all you have to do to create a great print ad is write a pun. Their portfolios are full of them. The press is full of them.

My own theory is that this misguided belief stems from a lack of understanding that a great headline depends on a great thought.

A great headline contains a great idea that resonates with the reader. And if it’s a great thought, it doesn’t really matter how you write it—the actual words you use are secondary to the idea it encapsulates.

Or, as any good copywriter knows, WHAT you say is always much more important than HOW you say it.

Think of the famous Rolls Royce press ad: At 60mph the Loudest Noise is the Dashboard Clock. 

This headline contains a beautifully engaging thought.

The feature it’s communicating is simply that this car is unbelievably quiet.  But to turn this feature into a headline that emotionally resonates with the potential buyer, the headline brings it to life—by painting a word-picture that puts the reader right there in the sumptuous, leather-clad driving seat. You can almost hear the delicate tick of the clock as you read it.

But because the line has a strong idea, you could actually write it in any number of ways and it would still be just as powerful.  (Think of the brilliant press and poster campaign for The Economist from a while back.) In fact, the line I quoted above isn’t even the actual headline from the Roller ad. It’s just the thought it contains.

It’s what the headline is about that counts.

The lazy headline writer who simply looks for a pun has failed to grasp this basic truth and believes that the HOW is more important than the WHAT. So they aim for what they think is amusing wordplay instead of doing the much, much harder job of finding a fantastically engaging thought that brings to life a clear, relevant and hopefully unique, product benefit.

Learn the awesome power of The So What Test

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When I’m training bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young creatives how to create effective advertising, or telling junior clients how to evaluate and comment on creative work, I often tell them about the power of The So What Test.

It’s all about making sure that your copy and concept is relevant and interesting to the target audience. If they’re going to read it and say, “Yeah, but so what?” your ad or mailer or flyer or website or e-newsletter will fail.

The So What Test is a remarkably useful tool to have in your utility belt—it’s so easy to get wrapped up in your finely-crafted headline and beautiful imagery that you don’t notice it means diddly squat to the people who are supposed to be engaged and captivated by your sales message.

Clearly the people who produced, and bought, the new BMW press ad didn’t perform the So What test.

The headline of this cracker is, wait for it, DESIGNED TO MOVE. (In capital letters, too.)

This is an advertisement for a car. A high performance, expensive, beautifully engineered German sports saloon, coveted by sales reps everywhere.

And the best headline they could come up with to sell you this car was “Designed to move”. As against a car that’s designed to stay still? A car designed to be a permanent museum exhibit? A car made entirely of butterflies wings so delicate that to simply breathe upon it would spell disaster?

The idiocy of this headline is jaw-dropping enough on its own. But the copy carries on in the same vein. It reads as if the writer has never seen a BMW, has never been given any information about why one might want to drop twenty grand on one, has no clue why a BMW might be any different from any other thing that’s designed to move.  Like a pram. Or a slug.

And to add insult to injury the copy includes the seemingly obligatory, utterly lame pun. Apparently BMW are jolly committed to “…deliver the The Ultimate Driving Machine. It’s the only thing we won’t be moved on.”

It’s not clever, it’s not witty. In fact, it doesn’t even make sense.

It’s a junior copywriter labouring (although clearly very little labour was involved) under the delusion that good copy is that which contains a pun, no matter how mind-blowingly crap it is.

‘So what’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.

What today’s digital marketer can learn from The Reader’s Digest.

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When I was working at The Reader’s Digest Association (I headed up their in-house Promotion Department for five years) people always asked me: “Why do you put all those bits of stuff in the mailpacks, isn’t it just a waste of trees?”

And the answers are, from a direct marketing perspective at least, very interesting and have a very timely resonance for today’s digital marketers.

The first thing to note about Reader’s Digest mailpacks is that their basic construction evolved over the best part of 50 years. By testing, testing, testing.

So the famous packs that used to roll out worldwide were beautiful examples of where testing gets you. It gets you busy, multiple piece mailings stuffed with all manner of printed items.

Nothing is in the pack by accident or whim. It’s there simply because it increases response.

Three important DM techniques make this so.

The first is the use of incentives. They are the magic ingredient that converts a punter from a ‘maybe’ into a ‘yes, please’.

Many of them in the RD packs were prize-draw based of course. The main incentive, and the one given the most real estate in the pack, was the main draw: ‘Win £250,000 when you respond’. ‘Yes, please’. Double your prize draw win if you respond within a week ‘Yes, please.’

And remember, the big prize draw didn’t actually incentivise purchase. You could reply and enter the draw using the ‘No’ envelope. It’s illegal to offer a simple draw for purchase in any case (hence the No Purchase Necessary on your baked bean tin competitions etc).

But 1) allowing a No response builds you a list of responsive punters and 2) people learned that they could open one of our packs and enter the draw without having any pressure to buy.

But if you did decide to buy the book or CD set or whatever, you got extra incentives—like additional competitions, often a spot the ball to win a car, for example. (The law considers this a test of skill and judgement so not a draw.) And an extra prize on top if you buy quickly.  Or a free widget.

So each incentive is tested to see how it increases response. Perhaps it first appears in the letter. It increases pull by 5%. So then it’s tested as a separate ‘action device’. A little mini-promotion in its own right.

And this is where the second principle comes in: Entry Points. Having several bits of stuff in the pack allows different people to ‘enter’ the pack from different places. Hmm, win a car, hmm, win £250,000, hmm a great DIY book, hmm some stickers to play with….

So the pack gradually build in size and complexity as each new incentive idea is tested and then given its own separate identity. (And of course these stand-alone pieces can be used in loads of different packs, all over the world too.)

(By the way, good direct marketeers are always conscious of Exit Points, too. Places where you give the reader an opportunity to stop reading. That’s why mid-copy links are such a terrible idea on your hard-selling website.)

The third key principle in a Digest pack is personalisation. This is all about making the reader feel that he or she is somehow being addressed one-to-one. The pack has been put together just for them.

So we use lots of mechanical perso and copy techniques like Reward & Recognition (‘because you’ve enjoyed our cookery books before, Mr Scrolls, I thought…’) and Selection (‘Only two people in Stafford Road will receive this chance to win £250,000…’).

We’d often make the envelope look like a personal package from DHL or something. (A good envelope could easily increase pull by 20% in a test.)

Most importantly, we make sure nothing in the pack looks like advertising. Everything is carefully under-designed

Odd is good, we used to say.

In today’s digital-focused world, making direct response stuff look like advertising is still the easiest way to kill its pull stone dead. Same in the press; editorial style ads always outpull ads that look like ads. Same on telly.

And this is the reason why banner ads that look like banner ads simply don’t work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is selling a science or an art?

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It’s a funny old business.

If you’re a big gun creative director in the world of advertising, your salary depends on the amount of awards you’ve won.

But if you’re a big gun creative director in the direct marketing business, your salary depends on the amount of stuff your work sells.

That’s why real direct marketing copywriters are always looking for new ways to increase the response rates their work generates—always seeking a little copy twist or technique that will add a percentage here, a percentage there, to the ‘pull’ (DM jargon for response) of the campaign.

And they know these techniques work because they test. And test and test. If the new technique adds response, you keep it. If it doesn’t you ditch it. Simple.

It’s what makes direct marketing seem more like a science than an art. Which, in many ways it is. And, as in science, things often happen that are completely counter to many people’s intuition.

Here’s a great example, and a very interesting technique.

A client I was working for made their money out of those Premium Phone Lines that everyone hates.  Not a client I’m particularly proud of, but instructive none the less.

The business model was this: you send a letter telling the punter that they have been selected to receive an award. You give them a list of the awards which will be distributed. They have to ring up to find out which one they can claim. Naturally most get the cheapest one on the list, the voucher, the mp3 player etc.  The phone call they make costs a ludicrous amount like five or six quid, which is how the company makes their money.

So it’s all about getting as many people to call as possible, like any other direct mail exercise.

Now, two of the most powerful sales/response motivators are what social psychologists call Social Proof and Scarcity.

Put crassly, Social Proof works by appealing to one’s herd mentality. “Nine out of ten owners say their cats prefer it”, “87% of women said it improved their appearance of youthfulness”.

If you want to persuade someone to do something, show them that lots of other people are doing it. It’s an unbelievably powerful motivator. It’s one of the reasons testimonials always work so well, for example. (And the reason why suicide rates always increase when one is reported in the news.)

Scarcity, on the other hand, works by planting an idea that something the punter wants/is on the point of buying is quite scarce/rare so you better snap it up quick, madam. “Only two days until Sale ends”, “Last ten pairs available” “Strictly Limited Edition”. (Ebay is a master of manipulating this of course: “Don’t miss out on…”)

What I did for this client is combine these two motivators. I wrote some copy for a test which said “Experience shows us that this offer is certain to be hugely popular. We apologise therefore if the phone lines are particularly busy when you call, but your call will be answered. Please call promptly however as the number of awards are strictly limited to those shown here.”

The client was very reluctant to run the test because he felt that telling the people the lines would be busy would put people off calling.

Quite the reverse.

Inserting these simple sentences into the call to action bit of the letter increased response by enough to make it a valuable addition to the control pack.

And now you know why. “Hugely popular” and “particularly busy” leverage social proof. “Strictly limited” leverages scarcity.

All of which goes to show, if you’re really interested in selling stuff, not just winning awards, you should study human motivation and the psychology of persuasion. You’ll get far more ideas than you ever will from the D&AD annual.

Search Engine Optimisation—a cautionary tale

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Last year one of my long-standing online clients, Robin, MD of Planet Numbers, phoned me up in a bit of a tizz. Apparently his website had ‘stopped working’.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Well, suddenly we’re not getting any sales at all!’.

‘What have you changed on the site?’

‘Er, we’ve just had it search engine optimised by these SEO specialists. Cost us a bloody fortune.’

I went and had a quick gander at the site which, hitherto, had been pulling like a train (modesty forbids me to mention who wrote the copy).

Eek! (I actually uttered a slightly stronger word than Eek!, to be honest.)

Yes, these gurus had SEO’d all the copy, all right. And the hits were flying in from Google. Trouble was, once you arrived at the site it was virtually unreadable.

I mean, serious rubbish. Copy that looked like it had been written by a four year old. Full of all the right keywords (hooray!) but, to all intents and purposes, utterly useless in terms of driving online sales or even enquiries.

I rewrote it from top to bottom, keywords and SEO structure and all, and, as if by magic, the sales suddenly started coming in again. Literally as soon as my new copy was live.

Scary, huh?

All of which goes to show that SEO in itself is a pointless exercise. Unless your customers buy something when they get there, and unless you get the right customers going there in the first place, SEO is meaningless.

You’ve got to get them there, of course. And SEO in all its guises is the way to do it.

But when your punters arrive you’ve got to use every copy technique at your disposal to get them buying/responding or whatever it is you want them to do.

It’s about sales, not about hits.

As someone much cleverer than I, once said, HITS stands for How Idiots Track Success.

 

The Red Cross and The Reciprocity Principle

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A door drop thumped emphatically on to the Nobodyscrolls doormat this week, from The Red Cross.

Stuffed to the gills with goodies to try and persuade me to give to this most worthy of charities. This was a direct response pack put together by somebody who really knows what they’re doing. Lovely jubbly!

As well as the letter—nice and long, two sides of smallish type, long PS. Weak headline, weakish opening—takes a while to get to the point but its heart’s in the right place.

Demands that I give a fiver upfront though; an ‘early close’ we DM folk call that. This one’s in the first headline so you can’t get much earlier than that.

But what the pack really majors on is reciprocity. This is a tried and tested sales technique that relies on me giving you something in order for you to (unconsciously probably) feel obliged to give me something in return. In this case, your hard-earned fiver.

(There are loads of interesting studies on how the principle works. Cialdini is the name to Google here.)

So how do they leverage the reciprocity principle? By including in the pack a bookmark, two greetings cards for me to use, two floral drinks coasters and a biro!

All in an envelope with a huge window so I can see the goodies before I even open it.

Now this pack will have cost A LOT. But the people who put it together know precisely what they’re doing. Because they know that the more gifts they include for me, the more likely I will be to donate to them in return. The ROI will work.

How do they know? Because they’ll have tested in small increments.

Put one gift in, response goes up. Put another one, response goes up again. Put some coasters in? Up again. And so on.

Until they get a killer ‘control’ pack that does the business for them time after time. It becomes harder and harder to beat.

And that’s when they call me in. Please.

The snake oil salesman is alive and well

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They used to be called mountebanks, charlatans, snake-oil salesmen or simply confidence tricksters.

But now they run companies called Ouch! or Connexshuns or Orange Toad or something similarly fashionable and fatuous or, even worse, they’re Marketing Journalists.

What they all have in common is that they pontificate profoudly on marketing and advertising but have never actually had to sell anything in their life. And they therefore come out with stuff that sends the bullshitometer crashing into the red zone.

I made the mistake of idly glancing through a supplement to The Guardian this weekend  (“Superbrands”, whatever they are) which was rammed with pretentious statements by a choice selection of these self-proclaimed gurus.

Here are a few of my favourites…

“Heritage brands reign supreme for consumers, while virtual consumption gains pace in the business world”.

Virtual Consumption?  Eh? Sorry, new one on me. I read the article and was none the wiser. Is it imaginary customers buying pretend goods with hallucinatory money? Or just people visiting websites? No idea; but I do know the piece was written by a nice gel called Lucy. Which came as no surprise at all.

Here’s another one from Ms L: “In times of austerity consumers often revert back to what they know and trust, to find a sense of security in an otherwise mixed-up world”.

What on earth is this poor woman talking about?  Clearly she’s so posh she’s never actually met anyone suffering an attack of austerity.

It isn’t about some crazy, mixed-up world, dear. It’s about Not Having Enough Money To Buy Stuff. But then the lovely Lucy writes for The Guardian so she’s probably never met anyone suffering a bout of austerity in her life. Or a nasty case of consumption, virtual or otherwise.

But this is a cracker:

“With service organisations, consistency of the customer experience is critical to the strength of the brand”.

Riiiiiiight. So you’re saying, correct me if I’m wrong, that a service company needs to provide good service in order to be successful. Fascinating. What a brilliant marketing insight. No wonder this chap is, I kid you not, a Professor of Marketing no less.

And last but by no means least, a woman who works for an outfit called Contagious (told you so) says: “Disintermediation was the marketing industry’s buzzword of 2012″.

No it wasn’t.

 

What the hell is Brand Response?

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Brand Response. One of the newest manifestations of ignorance, stupidity and fashion that is sweeping through the marketing industry.

In case you haven’t stumbled across it, Brand Response is a new term used by many marketing people and advertising agencies to describe an advertising campaign that is created to do a brand-building/image/awareness job and at the same time generate a bit of direct response. (I’m already getting cross, just writing this description, it makes me so crazy! Deep breaths….)

Now, the smarter readers amongst you (especially the ones who don’t work in marketing or advertising and therefore still have a modicum of common sense left between your ears) might be scratching your head and thinking “But surely all advertising affects the customer’s perception of a brand, whether it’s designed to generate a direct response or just awareness or image building?

Surely a customer’s perception of a brand is affected by every interaction she has with it—whether it’s watching a telly ad, reading some PR, sampling the product, talking to their customer service reps, visiting the website?”

And of course you’d be absolutely correct.

Direct response advertising doesn’t exist in a separate universe to any other sort of advertising. To suggest it does is patent nonsense to anyone who pauses to think for a moment.

You build a brand by getting the punter to sample your products and forming a good opinion about them, about your company, about the way you talk to him, treat the environment and so on and so on. Direct response advertising, like any other form of promotion, is simply one of the many ways whereby your customer can form an opinion about you.

Put simply, every ad is a brand ad. Whether you call it Brand Response or Direct Response is utterly irrelevant.

OK, so we can tick the ‘brand’ half of the equation. But what about the ‘response’ half? This is where Brand Response falls crashing to the ground.

It doesn’t work.

The copy isn’t long enough, it doesn’t focus on the consumer benefits enough. It doesn’t demand a response and rarely uses any incentives, closing dates or any of the other bog-standard, tried-and-tested tools in the direct response armoury.

Brand Response ads are mostly written by agency creatives who don’t know anything about how to write copy that is designed to drive response—a very different skill to awareness/award-winning/portfolio-packing advertising. (Sadly, this now includes most creatives in direct marketing agencies, too.)

These creatives are briefed by planners who don’t know the first thing about what makes direct marketing tick. The work is approved by a Creative Director who is only interested in the next awards ceremony. And the work is sold to the client by an account team raised on the mantra: Short Copy Good. Long Copy Bad. (I wish I were exaggerating here, but I’m not.)

Of course, the client may get a bit of response from the ad—simply because it’s got a phone number on—but nowhere near the response they’ll get if it were put together with the specific intention of driving response.

And of course its ROI (return on investment) will be simply too horrific to contemplate.