National Geographic has sent me 10 different 6” x 9” packages over the past couple of weeks, each one selling something different. That’s a lot and it’s a mystery to me why I get them.

In all my life, I probably haven’t bought $100 worth of anything, total, from NG and the last thing was a book over a year ago.

The really odd thing is that all the packages are basically the same thing, like a formula, no matter what each one is selling. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t all come so close together. It’s not annoying, just very odd.

What would I do differently? Maybe test just one package that offers everything at once, at least for unproven one-timers like me. It could be in book or magazine form with a window cover and a bound in personalized letter and order form. It’d be easy to print and assemble on a fast web and it’d be a heck of a lot cheaper than 10 expensive individual mailings. Might get more multiple orders, too.

Who knows? Maybe they did test it.

Around the same time, a company in the database business, sent a half dozen self mailers all at once to our agency’s former Miami office (we moved out 4½ years ago) all addressed to people who worked for us in New York City five years back! It’s easier and quicker to just burn money.

On Saturday, November 15, ten catalogs landed in my mailbox. That’s a lot of catalogs. Some of them are catalogues, which are a lot like catalogs only snootier. Here’s the lineup: The Smithsonian Catalogue, Winter Silks, Hammacher Schlemmer, National Geographic, Wine Country Gift Baskets, Harry and David, Frontgate (which gets this years’ special raspberry award),Wolferman’s, PBS and Domestications.

Frontgate’s raspberry is for a callout from a photo of a trash compacter which has a special “junk mail” separator. Bite me.

I’d never heard of Wolferman’s. They sell breakfast stuff: bagels, muffins, bread, jam, coffee, etc. Their slogan is “Because Everything Starts With Breakfast.” I’d drop the Because.

All the catalogs invite response by mail, online, phone and fax. One offers email response after downloading an Excel sheet which sounds ’way too complicated for me.

An interesting trend is that most of these catalogs have on page order forms, on glossy stock which is hard to write on without smearing, and they make you find your envelope. The two with bound- in order forms and formed envelopes make you find your own stamp. Looks like the general idea is to discourage mailed-in responses. I suspect that adding an envelope with prepaid postage would increase overall response and, at the prices charged in these catalogs, it’d be a cheap way to generate a lift.

They all have negative guarantees which amazes me. A negative guarantee says something like “not satisfied” or “if it ever fails”. A positive guarantee is phrased slightly differently, “You must be delighted or simply return …” Domestications doesn’t even call its guarantee a Guarantee; it’s a “Return Policy”.

A few catalogs have little letters boxed on the inside front cover. One of them, Hammacher’s, is about the guarantee and it’s really strange. They offer to take back whatever you don’t like but say nothing about returning your money.

What am I going to buy from any of these catalogs? Hammacher has a nifty looking item on page 14, a sort of Gameboy for bridge players that my girlfriend might like.

Impersonation, Knowledge & Mudslinging.

No matter who we’re writing to, we’re always selling the same thing: Response. Persuading people to actually say “Yeah, I want that, here’s my money” is hard as hell, but it’s a little easier if we take the right first steps. (Isn’t everything?)

Be the audience:

Amazing but true. In a lot of agencies, copywriters have no idea who they’re writing to.1 Nobody tells them. Years ago, David Ogilvy, or his brother – I forget which – wrote a direct mail letter in Greek and sent it to headmasters of British schools. Huge success because he knew who his target audience was and he became one of them.

If you don’t know your audience, you can’t get into their skin and if you can’t get into their skin, you’ll find persuading them is unnecessarily difficult. “Being the audience” will give you a non-fake personality, a tone and an attitude your readers can relate to. You’ll be halfway home before you even start.

1 Copywriters would almost never write “… to whom they’re writing.”

Know your stuff:

There is no substitute for knowing what you’re talking about. You’re supposed to get the info you need in what’s called a Creative Brief. Once upon a time, briefs were crammed with information. Now they’re not. Instead, they’re filled with corporate gobbledygook and cover-your-ass generalities. Read the brief anyway, if you’re lucky enough to get one, and take notes. Then ask as many questions as you can get away with, do some research on your own and write your own damned brief. Read the rest of this entry »

Some copy mistakes don’t matter much. Some do.

          In the ’60s Minolta came up with a campaign to show us all how smart the company was. In a commercial highlighting tech-advanced products up flashed the new slogan: Out of our Minds.

          I’ll say.

          If you’re going to have a typo, make it in the headline in gigantic type. I edit a magazine about Western Canada and a few issues ago we ran a headline with the word Saskatchewan in it, only it came out missing an s: Sakatchewan in letters an inch and half high. Nobody called or wrote about it.

          My all time favorite typo came when I was in Maclean Hunter’s circulation department in Toronto. I worked on 5 titles, one of which was a French language news magazine called “L’actualité”. The premium for new subscribers was two wall maps, one of Canada and one of the world. The headline was “L’actualité vous offre le Canada et le monde.” which means “L’actualité offers you Canada and the world.”

          One Friday, I signed off on a blow in card and left early for a three day road trip. An art director, who knew just enough French to be dangerous, decided to help me because she thought I’d made a major blunder. Under the impression that “vous” was the subject of the headline (it’s the indirect object; L’actualité is the subject) she recast the sentence to read “L’actualité vous offrez le Canada et le monde.” The z at the end of offre changed the meaning to, well, gibberish.

          Everyone at Maclean Hunter had a fit when it was printed. Un désastre!  The editor and publisher in Montreal wanted to kill me. I survived somehow, probably because the blow ink was the most successful they’d ever run and they didn’t get even one letter or call.

          I suspect that people (readers, not clients!) really don’t mind typos. We all know that shit happens and some of us find little mistakes endearing.

          But mistakes of ignorance, especially when the ignoramus is trying to be upscale, which is what the people who came up with Out of our Minds were doing, can be irksome to knowledgeable readers and that can depress response.  

          For instance, a lot of words and expressions don’t mean what we think they mean. Decimate, for instance. It doesn’t mean wreck or demolish; it means to kill every tenth one.

          It’s is not the possessive of it. It’s is short for it is. An easy way to remember is to thinks of his, hers, ours, theirs. We don’t write hi’s, her’s, our’s, their’s. No apostrophe.

          You see beg the question a lot which amazes me. It doesn’t mean “bring up the question”: it means arguing in a circle or answering a question with a part of the question. Why is John such a nice man? Well, he’s a very pleasant person. The sentence in italics is an example of begging the question.

          You will occasionally see a reference to The Immaculate Conception in copy, most often in snotty op-ed columns. Just about everybody thinks it refers to getting pregnant without having sex, as in Mary with Jesus. It doesn’t mean that at all. It’s Catholic dogma that means, unlike the rest of us, Mary herself was conceived in her mother’s womb with no original sin on her soul. 

          More importantly is an expression as common as sand on a beach these days. “John is a generous man; more importantly, he’s generous with his own money.” The –ly makes it an adverb which it isn’t here, can’t be. The proper form is “John is a generous man; more important, he’s generous with his own money.”  No –ly.

          Does any of this matter? It can. There’s certainly no harm in taking a minute or two to look things up.

Sometimes I wonder if idiots like me will ever understand what companies are up to. Take cell phones. That’s what most of us call them but the cell phone companies call them something else - wireless. Sounds like radio in England during WWII, doesn’t it?

So why do they insist on calling them wireless?

I finally figured it out, thanks to a Sprint commercial. You’ve probably seen it. It’s the one that starts with an exterior shot of a super hip retro diner. I think it’s in Manhattan, maybe the one on 23rd Street. Quick cut inside where the tieless and jacketless president of the company is sitting at the counter like any Joe would. He talks about the wonderful communication devices we call cell phones and why would we call them just phones when “these amazing devices” can do so many other things?

Suddenly I felt like Keats looking into Chapman’s Homer. I got it! They call them wireless because they’re more than just phones. I should have figured this out when I called AT&T to ask them to remove everything my cell phone does that doesn’t have anything to do with, you know, working like a phone. The AT&T lady said I was the first person who’d ever asked her to do that. “You don’t want to text?”

What?

Anyway, one mystery solved but others remain, such as why the wireless companies can come up with only an adjective, wireless, for their product. We can see it’s wireless. Wireless what? Even they don’t know what it is, except, maybe amazing.

Tuesday. Lot of mail today. A couple of magazines, some bills, a personal letter and 12 direct mail efforts: 3 catalogs, 2 self mailers, 4 envelope mailings and 3 postcards.

Hmmm. This is weird; 3 of these are from National Geographic, a Christmas, oops, Holiday gift catalog and two envelope mailers, one offering calendars and one offering an Encyclopedia of Animals. Three direct mail efforts all on the same day? Does that make sense? I don’t think so. People at NG should talk to each other.

One of the other catalogs is from Brookstone. It’s a Holiday Preview, maybe for Halloween or Thanksgiving or Saint Andrew’s Day? Nope, the featured product on the cover is a triangular tree, a fake, all lit up with LEDs and gold and red wrapped presents ‘neath it. Hmm, wonder what holiday they’re previewing here? Could it start with C and end in s with hristma in between? Gutless.

Since when is a fake tree, even with LEDs, part of the world of innovation? Maybe one of the four featured products in the smaller photos on the cover is especially innovative? Let’s see, there’s a cordless LED window candle, a wine chiller, a motorized grill brush and a – looks like a turkey fryer, whoa, it’s an ultrasonic jewelry and eyeglass cleaner. Sorry no innovation here, except maybe the societal innovation of not mentioning C-h-r-i-s-t-m-a-s at all. Coal in the stockings of everyone at Brookstone.

The third catalog is from Cordial Greetings. They sell Holiday Cards & Calendars designed with your business in mind. (I’ll bet.) They’re off the hook in the chickening out of Christmas sweepstakes, though, because they cover a lot of holidays and they do offer a card or two with Merry Christmas, even one with magi, mules, you know who, Joseph and Mary. Good for them.

The self mailers are weird. One’s from AT&T with “Important information about your wireless account.” on one side, and “Important customer information enclosed.” on the other. Wow, talk about making sure I know there’s important information in here. Maybe they’ve caught the extended car warranty creeps who keep calling! I eagerly slice the two clear sealing disks and ta da! Here’s the news. My account number and payment address have changed. Be still my heart! I wonder why this couldn’t have been an insert in my actual bill with a different headline, perhaps something subtle like “Who gives a shit?”

The other self mailer is for a class “in my town” for Adobe Design. The nearest location is about 40 miles up the road. There’s not a hint of how much the classes costs but I’m guaranteed a full refund anyway.

One of the postcards is from JC Penny offering $10 off any purchase of $10 or more. Makes sense. There’s a lot of mice type which I waded through and it turns out the $10 discount isn’t valid on a lot of things, including lingerie, electronics, cookware, cosmetics, fragrances, gadgets, personal care, fitness – all of which are known collectively as Christmas presents. The French call this “le offer gutless.”

The American Express postcard is what all American Express postcards are. Can anyone tell the differences between this one, the one they got last week and the one they’ll get next week and every week after that for as long as they have an Amex Card?

The envelope mailing, “package”, from National Geographic offering the Encyclopedia of Animals is a standard 6” x 9” affair with all the bells and whistles: 4 color window OE, large card with an L perf on two sides of the smaller detachable order card. This little wonder could be a mailer all by itself. My name and address are on it, along with a picture of the encyclopedia, a removable “Yes” sticker, downsell (Regular) and upsell (Deluxe) offers, big Guarantee box, send no money now.

There’s a buck slip, well, a piece of paper bigger than a buck, touting, on one side, the premium, a plush toy, and on the other side, a zen-inspired nothing at all. Standard gigantic fold out biiiig color brochure with all the NG photos you’d expect plus a few odd trivialities like “Why are lions and other cats called silent hunters?” The answer is that they make no noise when they’re hunting. Who would have guessed? And there’s a startling revelation that polar bears crawl into snow dens to give birth. Where else?

But what really interests me is letters.

This one’s addressed to Dear Parent. That isn’t me. This is an NG letter; it should be a beaut. It isn’t. It’s laid out like a patient etherized upon a table. The font is plain old Times Roman. The copy rambles shamelessly. I think it was rushed or some high mucky-muck crushed anything worthwhile. Shame. Letters alone can sell but this one needs all the support it can get. The signature’s in black (even though the crossheads are in blue), a sure sign that no actual thought went into this letter.

The whole thing is one of those old school packages that give old school a bad name. It looks okay but in an “I’ve seen all this stuff somewhere before, a lot.” way. It might work because it’s for kids – and parents are suckers for plush toy premiums – but it could do a whole lot better.

All 12 things that came in the mail have one element in common: no thought whatsoever given to copy, not even headlines. It’s all gutless corporate gobbledygook, every bit of it. What’s happening to us?

Thomas L. Collins of Oregon shares his creative brilliance in a regular column for DIRECT Magazine. He starts by showing us a real ad, ostensibly a DM ad, then makes it over, carefully explaining his thinking.

He does this with no hoo haw and with an astonishing humility in a man so talented. Every now and then an advertising guy will write a letter to DIRECT taking Collins to task for some “creative” blunder. By “creative”, advertising people mean artistic.

Collins’s reworks are always plainer and simpler than the originals. They’re also much more clear, easier to read and the copy is compelling.

In the July, 2008 issue, he shows us a Bounce ad with a vague, soft focus drawing, a blind headline, a blind subhead and body copy set wide with tons of leading that overwhelms the tiny sans serif yellow type. In other words, it’s unreadable. The whole ad is nearly indecipherable but it looks nice.

His makeover is much less artistic but it’s easy to read. No drawing; instead there are photos of people. The new headline is as clear as can be and the copy is as easy to read as the front page of a newspaper.

The lesson of every one of Collins’s columns is that Advertising people should not be designing or writing DM ads.

photo credit: alykat

I may be thick as a post but I can’t see email as an acquisition tool. And I’m beginning to wonder about its potential for customer relations.

I’ve probably asked 5,000 people “Have you ever responded to an email from a company you’ve never dealt with before?” In 8 years, nobody’s ever said “Yes”. But everyone buys something online and gets followup emails.

I buy flowers three times a year from ProFlowers. They send me maybe 24 emails a year but I respond to three.

1-800-CONTACTS emails me so often, they must think I wear three or four lenses at once.

Barnes & Noble reaches out all the damned time with special offers on DVD’s and CD’s but I’ve never bought either one from them. I buy lots of books, though, and I’m buying a lot fewer of them at B&N than I used to.

Borders sends 30% off coupons I can use for anything. Even better, they don’t charge me to belong to their “club” and it’s got real benefits. B&N wants $25 and I just won’t pay them for their own loyalty program. I spend a lot more at Borders these days.

American Airlines and Jet Blue haven’t noticed that all of my flights for the past four years have originated in Fort Lauderdale; they send me specials for people flying out of LaGuardia and JFK. Useless to me down here.

Alamo car rental? Lots of email but so far not one deal at any of the destinations I go to most often.

Costco? This amazes me because I buy a lot of stuff at their big store on Biscayne Boulevard. They email me regularly but not once have they ever sent me an offer for anything I’ve bought in the past. A buck off mixed nuts and I’d be all theirs.

Email that theoretically interests direct marketers seems to be limitless and I just delete it all nowadays. I used to read them when the Subject Line promised some kind of useful information but I had to log on first, sometimes remember a password, answer a whole lot of questions … and then find an ad with no information at all. Overpromise and underdeliver. To hell with it. Denny Hatch’s online column is the sole exception.

I stayed at a hotel in Venice Beach a few years ago and they email me a couple of times a month. If I ever have to stay in Venice Beach again, I’ll probably take them up on an offer.

What seems to be going on here is that a lot of companies are sending benefit-free emails that contain nothing of any interest. Borders does an excellent job; ProFlowers and 1-800-CONTACTS do so so jobs. The rest of them? A total waste of time.

Maybe it’s because the medium is “free”. A few years ago, someone brilliant suggested that the USPS charge postage of a quarter of a cent for sending an email to any computer in the USA. Normal everyday business people who send 25 emails a day would have to pay about 35 cents a week. Let’s do it.

Even just a quarter of a cent per email would make legitimate emailers think twice before sending out the completely self-serving crapola we’re getting now and it’d stop spammers in their tracks. Not to mention all those “jokes”.

photo credit: Will Lion

Print ad, direct mail, email, Internet, doesn’t matter. When your message gets into the hands of prospects, they make two nearly instantaneous decisions based on simple questions: 1) is there anything in this for me? and 2) is this easy to read?

If the answers are 1) no and 2) no, then you’ve got a problem. See this article for how to deal with the what’s in it for me problem and let’s focus here on making sure your stuff is easy-to-read, using print for example.

There are four things you’ve got to worry about in order to get a yes to the easy to read question: Layout, font, spice and words. Length is not an issue in letters and print ads.

When your message is a solid block of type, it’s dead. Your prospect can see at a glance that it will be a pain in the butt, heavy slogging.

Loosen things up with a lead sentence of no fewer than 7, no more than 13, words, {in print} indents at the start of each paragraph, double space between paragraphs (if you have room), short paragraphs (but not staccato - vary the length from 1 to 7 or 8 lines, with most of the paragraphs 4 or 5 lines long), crossheads, and, one or two indented paragraphs.

This is a crosshead.

In print, pick a serif font, a classic serif font, like Baskerville, Caslon, Garamond, even the boring Times Roman. A serif is the little pedestal on which letters sit. San serif typefaces are okay (only okay, not great) for headlines and small sidebar boxes.

This is a serif face.

This is an indented paragraph.

When an art director wants to use a sans serif face for body copy, I ask just one question: Have The New York Times, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Forbes and Fortune switched to sans serif? Let me know when they do, then we might consider it.

If you never use reverse type or type on tone, you can’t go wrong.

Font size matters. Body copy should be between 12 point and 16 point.

You’re reading this in 12.

Spice is nothing more than a few tricks of the trade: underlining, italics, bold, handwritten notes, circled highlights. Used sparingly, as you would cumin or garlic when cooking, they boost readership and comprehension.

A short paragraph can be spice, too.

Now comes the hard part: words. Once people start reading your copy, they’ll stop as soon as they run into the wrong words.

Normal, simple English words work best. Forget fancy. Dickens started A Tale of Two Cities with a dozen simple, one syllable words: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …” Good enough for him, good enough for us.

However many words are in your third draft, you probably have 25% to 50% too many. Try chopping all the adverbs first (they’re going to sound like b.s. anyway) and then go after the adjectives. Turn all compound sentences into simple sentences. Use Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin words.

The passive voice must be eschewed. Get rid of the passive voice. You’re one of the finest writers in the world but some of your more pressing arguments might be construed as self-serving. Get rid of puffery. More about words soon.

Crane, the business publisher not the toilet maker, puts out a magazine called CREATIVITY.

Its logotype looks like this:

Because, I suppose, that’s creative.

I’ve always found it a hoot. It’s about creativity in advertising, mostly, and it showcases creative directors, copywriters, art directors, producers, etc., as well as what those people call “the work” and the rest of us call ads and commercials.

There are more words in CREATIVITY than you’d expect, lots and lots of words that almost nobody will read because they’re all set in huge blocks of tiny type, often sans serif tiny type, even reverse sans serif tiny type.

If you ever want to make it impossible to read lots of words, follow the design of CREATIVITY.

The August, 2008 CREATIVITY is a double issue with two covers, upside down to each other so there are two front covers.

One of them is about production and the other is about awards.

The word creativity crops up in advertising all the time. You almost never hear it in direct marketing circles although we do use the word “creative” to mean the copy and images we use to sell things.

The CREATIVITY awards news this year has an astonishing tidbit in the side-by-side-by-side lists of most awards by creative directors, art directors and copywriters. There are 28 different people mentioned in those lists and as near as I can tell only one of them is a woman, although there may be a couple more because three of the people have ambiguous first names: Gerry, Takayuki, Omid. (I should know what those last two are, but I don’t.)

The male to female ratio of overachievers is somewhere between 27-1 and 24-4. Apparently the glass ceiling in advertising is made of concrete.

There’s a POV page in the awards part of the magazine.

A guy from a big LA agency wrote the August POV; he’s worried about awards for pure creativity as opposed to awards for effectiveness. In his opinion “Advertising is, and has always been, a balancing act between creativity and effectiveness.”

That’s as good a summary of the problem with advertising as I’ve ever seen.

In direct marketing, if we ever had to put it in words, we’d probably say something like “In DM creativity is effectiveness and vice versa.” To us, creativity in the CREATIVITY sense is meaningless. If it isn’t effective, it can’t possibly be creative.