The primary job of type is pretty simple: to get read. The most brilliantly written copy can’t persuade if nobody reads it.

Unfortunately, legibility often takes a back seat to “art” or “cool” or “attitude”, the sort of things designers should be doing at home in their spare time.

Unless there’s a very good reason (and I’d love to hear it) for using a hard to read typeface in a harder to read font, it’s better to go with the basics, which can be summarized as “what book publishers, newspapers and magazines use”:

• A serif typeface, roman (as opposed to, say, italic) for body copy

• A readable font size and style (e.g. not light, which is a typographic word for skinny) in upper and lower case

• Mostly narrow measure for body copy; letters and books are the exceptions – telegrams used to be an exception, too, but who gets telegrams anymore?

• Black type on a white or very light background

• Medium leading (space between the lines), pronounced ledding

• Minimal emphasizers such as bold, italic and underlined.

And that’s it.

Here’s an example of the best way to do it in this beautiful double page spread corporate ad from the mid 1980s.

Click on the ad to enlarge

The headline, author credit, the word “incomprehensibilities” and the company name are in sans serif. Everything else is in a serif face. The copy is big enough to read, has few emphasizers and it’s in narrow columns. Is it old school? Sure, but it’s old school in the timeless way that Converse sneakers, little black dress, button down oxford shirts and bourbon on the rocks are old school.

Even high end advertising has gotten away from the basics judging from ads in Harvard Business Review – the October, 2011 edition that happens to be on my desk at the moment.

I have no idea what IBM is talking about here and I’m not going to bother reading the body copy to find out; it’s in a wide, light, sans serif typeface and I’d have to force myself. Perhaps part of the problem is that the agency and the client don’t have to force themselves to read it because they already know what it says.

Do you know what ATS is? Me neither and it doesn’t matter because this ad is just ATS writing to itself in wide measure sans serif type.

The University of Michigan makes the wide measure sans serif concept even harder to read with white type on dark background (reverse type).

Ah, to heck with it. Magazines are chock full of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of advertising that nobody will read. The advertisers might as well have just written in the middle of a blank page “We were going to put an ad here but nobody would have read it. Here’s our logo.”

What about online?

A year ago, I wondered out loud why nearly all online body copy is in wide measure sans serif type. An expert told me that early computers tended to lop off serifs, so sans serif became the default. Wide measure became the norm because of the way the pages scroll.

Nonetheless, I started using a serif face for long copy emails because it’s easier to read. Lois Geller’s blog at Forbes.com is in a serif face with a narrow measure: Why A Brand Matters. National Review Online is in a serif face. The 200+ books in my Kindle are all in one serif face or another. Serif body copy is easier to read even in an electronic format.

That leaves one final question: why can’t I get my own blog into a serif face? And the answer is “I don’t know, unless “WordPress won’t let you” is an answer.”

If you sell customer service, it helps to be good at it.

This week, a lady I follow on Twitter wrote: “Are you a AAA roadside assistance member? I’ve been for 37 years — and today used it for a flat tire. Love having assurance in my wallet.”

No kidding.

Offhand, I can’t think of an organization that delivers better customer service than AAA. They sell a lot of other things, too: car insurance, life insurance, batteries, lots and lots of batteries. I bought one last Thursday.

My Explorer had made a harsh ratchety sound when I tried to start it. I called AAA (Auto Club South), described the sound, guessing that the starter was cooked. The AAA lady knew better and sent the battery guy, Maurice Watts.

He showed up in half an hour, popped the hood and let out a low whistle, “Lot of corrosion on that battery post!” He scrubbed most of it off with a wire brush.

“Will it start, now?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. “Let’s test the battery. Hmm. Looks like one of the cells is dead. I’ll get a printout.” He pressed a button and out came a paper report, complete with a diagram that showed what was faulty. I even understood it.

Maurice shook his head. “The clamp is corroded, too. I’m going to have to cut the cable but first I need to get to the car’s computer port.”

“For a battery?” said I.

“Yep. The factory settings will disappear when I disconnect the battery, so I have to hook the car up to this,” he said, pointing to a boxy thing with cables.” A few minutes later, my car started like it was new.

“You’re a genius,” I said. “Is that a bypass machine, sort of like in a heart operation?”

He laughed. “I suppose so. A lot of companies don’t do that and you have to get in touch with the factory to get your settings right and so on.”

I wrote a check for the battery, we shook hands and off he went. Nice guy. Outstandingly good at his job and pleasant.

Over the years, AAA’s emergency service has been worth a lot more than I’ve ever paid them. And, whenever I deal with any of their employees about anything, they’re all like Maurice Watts. Professional and pleasant.

They’re trained to be professional and pleasant; without great customer service they don’t get to sell much of anything, including customer service.

Maybe they could start a side business that offers customer service workshops. I can think of more than a few organizations that could use the help.

It can’t hurt to remind us that, one way or the other, we all sell customer service and if we don’t deliver, pretty soon we won’t be selling much of anything.

It sure looks like it and not only because of the inane programs. The commercials are worse.

Most people think there’s a limit on how much time commercials get. There isn’t. Some networks even have a little trick that works like this: Long string of commercials, cue theme music and say program name, another long string of commercials.

In case you’re wondering why there are so many promos for upcoming shows, it’s because the networks are filling unsold time in their scheduled long strings of commercials.

Some commercials are terrific, e.g. Target or The Most Interesting Man in the World for Dos Equis beer, but they’re lost in the swamp of so many odious commercials.

The whole mess is insane because we can avoid it so easily by just clicking to another channel or recording programs with, for instance, Dish’s DVR “Hopper” and making commercials disappear.

You’d think, then, that advertisers would do something to keep viewers watching.

But they don’t. They could create compelling, charming, watchable commercials, but instead most of them pull a concept from the disgusting → drivel continuum. Submitted for your consideration:

Drivel:
• Idiots summon genie-like insurance agent by screeching, in panic, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.”
• PeeWee Herman lookalike (more annoying, actually) gets policy holders to sing along “Nationwide is on your side” – lamely.
• Any local car dealer spot.
• Anything that mentions a “man cave”.
• Kids smarter than parents and brilliant wives saddled with brain damaged husbands.
• Snooty international business commercials: “People who know, know BDO”. Please.
• Luxury car commercials: Benz, Beemer, Infiniti, Range Rover, Lexus, – doesn’t matter. They all have just about the same script, the same pompous nonsense.
• Furniture stores with screaming spokespeople.
• Chrysler pretending Detroit is a place to be proud of. It was – 60 years ago.
• Chevrolet pretending to be an all-American icon.

Disgusting:
• Class action lawyers trolling for clients. The mesothelioma campaign is the nadir but the rest are only slightly less disgusting.
• Prescription drug commercials, especially the long read of side effects and double- especially if the side effects include oily discharge.
• Anti-smoking campaigns, like Florida’s, which have gone ghoulish with barf-inducing spots that just gross us all out. Why ruin the evening for 80% of the innocent population on the off chance that a smoker doesn’t know all this anyway? Oh, never mind, here comes the depression commercial.
• And now, ta da, we’re about to get swamped with the most disgusting of all: wall-to-wall political commercials.

Click, click, click.

I wonder if anyone has researched the impact of all this crapola.

We’re governed by people who lack the virtue of humility and the capacity to feel shame.

What brought it home for a lot of us was the Obama campaign commercial giving him all the credit for killing Osama bin Laden as if he’d rappelled into the Abbottabad compound from a chopper – machine gun blazing and a Bowie knife clenched in his teeth.

That, plus the world’s longest Ickey Shuffle, a 27,000 mile ain’t-I-great trip to and from Afghanistan.

We should have seen it when he took office. “Now the oceans will stop rising,” as if he was planning to upstage King Canute.

Shameless and without humility with a double helping of self-righteous sanctimony is as good a definition of a**hole as any.

But I suspect that our President has gone beyond a**hole all the way to malignant narcissist (MN). At least a dozen of these “Twenty Traits of Malignant Narcissism” fit him to a T: Twenty Traits

By himself, he wouldn’t even be a footnote. But he’s not by himself.

He’s surrounded by enabling a**holes and MNs: his wife, his preacher, his advisors, his mad bomber dinner companions, his czars, his cabinet, the vice-president, most of the senate, a lot of the house, useful idiots in the media, preening Hollywood know nothings, ivory tower cretins in academia, union thugs, big biz cronies and Armani-clad beggars with their hands out. And that’s just at the Federal level.

Trickling down, we find three of our formerly great states – California, Illinois and New York – completely in thrall to a**holes and MNs and states like Michigan, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Hawaii, Maryland, and Rhode Island not far behind.

Cities, too, led by the moribund Detroit, the nanny-city of New York, the egregious Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and even little Stockton, poster child for civic kleptomania.

Huge chunks of the country are now under the heavy thumbs of micro-regulating, energy-destroying, wealth-job-family-destroying, Constitution-ignoring, a**holes. Their hallmarks are incompetence, corruption, lies, cronyism, ad hominem nastiness, race and class warfare, and polarization.

It’s not that they’re dumb. They’re bright and educated. They know their “ideas” can’t work, have never worked and will never work. They know what will work but they can’t allow it because the real world doesn’t need people like them. And they just can’t stand it. So they’ll enjoy themselves while they destroy everything worthwhile. That’s what malignant narcissistic a**holes do.

Who votes for these people?

A**holes, of course.

1958. McDonald’s mastermind, Ray Kroc, had never envisioned a fish sandwich on the menu but one of his early franchisees, Lou Groen of Cincinnati, thought it might work. He explained to Kroc that he was losing business during Lent because 90% of his neighborhood was Catholic and the fish sandwich would be perfect.

Kroc thought he had a better idea, a Hula Burger with a pineapple slice instead of a meat patty. Groen convinced Kroc to test both at the same time. Filet-o-Fish won hands down and is still on the menu 54 years later.

Info, via NY Post, 5/6/2012, in a review of “How the Hot Dog Found its Bun” by Josh Chetwynd (Lyons Press).

That’s the kind of thing that made McDonald’s a great company.

A franchisee got to talk to the head honcho, disagree with him and propose a sensible solution. The honcho went along with it and lost gracefully with no hard feelings.

There were no focus groups, no analyzing the life out of the ideas. Just a simple test: what do customers like better, this sandwich or that sandwich? Total cost to figure out whether to go with the fish or pineapple? Insignificant.

The government should do this kind of thing.

The Republic’s not going to be hurt if McDonald’s doesn’t get its menu right. But it is going to be seriously damaged if we don’t get Obamacare right, or Dodd-Frank, or the Law of the Sea Treaty or alternative energy, or the idiot Buffet rule. But we don’t test any of those things. Hell, our elected reps don’t even read most of them.

The least they could do is build in an exit strategy for when their pineapple slice legislation blows up in the faces.

But they can’t do that. They are incapable of even contemplating that they might be wrong. They’re not the kind of people who should be making our laws. People like Ray Kroc and Lou Groen are.

Occasionally you wind up with an amateur client. It hasn’t happened to me in years but it does happen. Oddly enough, it’s not always a bad thing.

The most common manifestation of amateurishness is probably this reaction to creative (or to anything, really): “I don’t like it,” followed by silence.

Experienced clients will say “I don’t like it” every now and then but they’ll always explain why they don’t like it.

What’s the difference here?

Experienced clients usually have solid, objective reasons: it’s off target, doesn’t hit the hot buttons, mentions features without expanding to advantages and benefits, doesn’t ask for the order … whatever. And you can handle those kinds of things.

You can’t use reasoned arguments to handle “I don’t like it,” followed by silence. I’ve tried.

No point asking “Why don’t you like it?” because if there was a reason the client would have mentioned it.

When I was younger and much dopier, I once tried this: “So what? You’re not in the target audience. You have nothing in common with the target audience. They’re females 35-55 years old, high school grads, married with kids at home and an HHI of $40,000. You’re a guy, 28 years old, MBA, single, no kids and you make over a hundred grand. I’d be amazed if you liked it.”

That didn’t go well.

There’s really only one thing you can do. Lick your wounds and change your approach.

I found an approach that can work very well.

It starts with getting the client to sign off on all the preliminary work, mostly research and creative brief. The next step is to involve the client directly in the development of the creative.

You come prepared with, say, three concepts with scribble layouts or story boards. It works best if you do the scribbling – thumbnail sketches are best – right in the meeting while you explain.

You get a reaction, scribble some more, get another reaction. Working with the client, figure out what goes where and what gets stressed. Compliment the client with something like “Hey, you should be in the creative department!”

As soon as you can, right after your meeting, write notes about what the client said.

Now, when you go back to the client with finished layouts/storyboards and copy/script, the whole thing is presold. This works, and it’s actually easier than doing it in a vacuum.

We do. Here it is on behalf of a great many Americans: We’re sorry.

We thought he was just a two bit punk with a remarkable gift of oratory.

It seemed obvious: commie dad, hippie mom, Chicago community organizer, history of shady deals (including wife’s $350,000/yr. non-job), hanging out with obscure mad bombers, 20 years of Sundays listening to a rabid lunatic, never had a job, never created anything. All he did was talk.

So we made a mistake. He’s not a two-bit punk. He’s much more than that. In just three and half years in the oval office, he has managed to:

• Polarize the country with a brilliant reverse-Alinksy strategy. Instead of isolating the enemy, it isolates single-issue groups with grievances which he then gathers into his arms and coddles. Oh, he still does the straight-Alinsky thing, too, but now it’s part of a double whammy;
• Build on the lunacy of his most destructively dirigiste predecessors: Wilson, FDR and LBJ;
• Destroy our relationships with long-standing allies;
• Appoint dozens of czars and balloon the bureaucracy in order to regulate us to near standstill;
• Ignore the Constitution so now he, his czars and his vast armies of regulators rule us by whim;
• Get us into crushing, ruinous debt with nothing to show for it;
• Begin stripping our most abundant and efficient sources of energy while fiddling amateurishly but at great cost with idiotically inefficient sources;
• Form an axis-of-evil alliance between government and bigBIG business;
• Focus on government control of health care which effectively gives government control of everything we do;
• Appoint two supremely unqualified lock-step justices to the Supreme Court – and then mock the Court;
• Fight all efforts to control the human flow across our borders;
• Allow horrifying critters like Eric Holder, Kathleen Sebelius and Cass Sunstein to serve as unfettered dictators.

In just three and a half years he has brought the great United States of America to its knees. All that remains is that last little push to tip us into the abyss and we’re done. America will die broke and helpless.

This is not the work of a two-bit punk. This is the work of a genius. This is a man whose monument will be the destruction of the greatest free country in history.

So we are sorry, very, very sorry. We underestimated him.

I was at a poetry reading last night (stop laughing!)

My interest in modern poetry faded about two seconds after I graduated from college but I listened attentively and enjoyed the whole thing. The guy’s very good.

Someone asked “How long does it take you to write a poem?”

“Oh,” said the poet, “sometimes months. Every poem goes through at least a hundred drafts, even the short ones (pause) especially the short ones.”

Wow, thought I, the philistine copywriter.

This man writes poems very few people will ever read or hear. They may be important poems but there’s nothing at stake that will make a practical difference in a great many lives.

On the other hand, what we write – copy for ads, commercials, web sites, emails, direct mail – is important because there’s a lot at stake – sometimes millions of dollars and lots of jobs.

And how many drafts do we go through? Not enough.

If I have time, I’ll write a dozen or so teaser headlines for envelopes and something like 20 drafts of a direct mail letter. Same with an email, especially Subject Lines. But who has time anymore?

The poet doesn’t have a deadline and he doesn’t submit his work to committees for their approval. He writes for himself and he puts his name on the finished product. It’s his and his alone. That makes a big difference. I don’t see how we can bring that factor into copywriting.

But we could at least tell the committees “Look, I wrote 20 drafts of this piece, read it to a half dozen people who know a lot about copy that sells, and made more changes. Please at least read it all the way through, the way our prospects will, without a pencil in your hand.”

P.S. The poet’s name is Michael Cleary: michaelcleary.com

Too many client “communications” whizzes and general advertising/PR agency people disdain direct marketing. They’re polite but get a few drinks in them and you’ll learn that they just hate our guts.

I’ve run into it a lot and it no longer scares me but it still puzzles me. Direct marketing can’t fail on a major scale because we plan carefully, test small and roll out gradually. Plus DM allows precision tracking and generates better and better results every time out. So whence the scorn?

It took a while, but the lights gradually went on. They hate us for at least seven very good reasons.

1. In advertising agencies, the direct marketing “departments” can wind up with a huge chunk of the advertising guys’ budgets if the clients actually care about sales.
2. Direct marketing is difficult. It takes a lot more detailed planning than the other disciplines.
3. There’s almost no room for opinions because direct marketing allows for objective answers.
4. Direct marketing can get results so exact that you can learn how well it’s doing to within a nickel. In other words, DM is accountable and that scares the pants off some people.
5. Direct marketing is not cool. There’s no room for funky, edgy, creative for creative’s-sake.
6. Its focus is on the prospect/customer not on the company.
7. If there’s a serious disagreement on approach, you can test inexpensively.

All seven of these attributes are deeply offensive to ambitious and talented wannabe cutting-edge mavericks. They’re albatrosses around the necks of avant garde creative critters.

Believe it or not, making money, acquiring and keeping customers, and building solid customer relationships can be annoying secondary considerations. It’s more important to stroke egos, be ultra cool, and, occasionally, jet off to New Zealand for a location shoot.

John Wannamaker, 19th Century department store mogul, is reported to have said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Direct marketers could have told him: “We might, maybe, waste a small percentage of your budget at the start. After that, it’s all good.”