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 »

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: 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.

Some DM copywriters don’t want to write about the companies that pay them. They’d rather write about whoever’s in the target audience, and when they get away with it the results can be great.

The two kinds of copy – about the company and about the prospect – couldn’t be more different. One is writing to yourself and the other is writing to people who might eventually send you money.

In McGraw Hill’s classic “Man in the chair” B2B ad that first appeared in 1958, a grumpy old dude stares at the reader and “says”:
• I don’t know who you are.
• I don’t know your company.
• I don’t know your company’s products.
• I don’t know your company’s customers.
• I don’t know your company’s record.
• I don’t know your company’s reputation.
• I don’t know what your company stands for.
Now…What was it that you wanted to sell me?

You can see it here. 

There’s almost nothing in it about McGraw-Hill, the company that paid for the ad.

Here’s a consumer “mail order” ad from 1925

The whole thing is about the prospect and the client’s not even mentioned until the 524th word of the body copy! This ad ran for almost 50 years.

When writers have to toe the line, their copy is about the company or its product. The problem is that prospects don’t care about the company or the product. They care about one thing: what’s in it for me? We’ve got maybe a heartbeat to give them the answer.

And the answer is never about how great the company is. It is always about prospects and what the company can do for them. It doesn’t matter what medium you’re working in.