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.