29
Mar
Do the HOMEwork too!
When it comes to Advertising, Marketing, and Persuasion, are you a student of what’s come before you?
- Do you know the history?
- Do you try to learn from the greats by reading their books and studying their works?
- Do you look at all of it? Or just a narrow slice?
If you didn’t answer Yes to the main question and the first two bullet points, you can stop reading now. Really. There’s no hope for you.
But I find that quite a few serious copywriters get hung up on the third bullet point.
These copywriters have studied the direct mail lineage — Hopkins, Caples, Collier, Schwartz, Halbert, Kennedy, et al — but haven’t looked at any of the giants of Madison Ave style advertising beyond, maybe, Ogilvy. And vice versa for broadcast advertising guys who’ve never studied Direct Response marketing.
Or they’ve never thought that the Theatre Arts or Rhetoric or Comedy Writing or Sales Training or even say, Comic Books had anything to teach them.
In other words, they dismiss stuff that’s not directly in their field or that they don’t “get” right away. Big mistake.
So today’s lesson: be a student of the game — the whole game. Learn what’s great from the past. Study it. Note that “study” doesn’t mean passively reading it. When in doubt, figure out what other great talents that you DO like see in the “greats” that you don’t get.
And here’s two great links to get you started on the path:
- This New York Times article on Ed McCabe [hat tip to The Escape Pod for turning me onto this article]
- This Invisible Ink post on learning from legends you don’t “get” at first contact.
P.S. That NYT article mentions the same Volvo ad I used as an example in my last Theory Thursday post and I managed to snag a screen shot of it. Here it is:
A bit of common wisdom for lawyers goes something like:
“When the law is against you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both are against you, call the other lawyer names”
Great advice, but how does this translate into advertising terms?
Ah, to get that, you have to go back to the Rhetorical advice from which this common wisdom came. And when it comes to Rhetoric, I always look to Jay Henrichs, author of Thank You for Arguing and Word Hero. Here’s what Jay has to say in chapter 12 of Thank You for Arguing:
“If facts work in your favor, use them. If they don’t (or you don’t know them), then…
Redefine the terms instead. If that won’t work, accept your opponents facts and terms but…
Argue that your opponent’s argument is less important than it seems. And if even that isn’t to your advantage…
Claim the discussion is irrelevant.”
Redefining Terms Read more
If actions speak louder than words, how effective can a TV ad be if its imagery contradicts its sales message? Don’t think this happens? Check out this ad FedEx ran during the Super Bowl no less:
The message: You shouldn’t judge something based on a name; FedEx ground is faster than you think
The imagery and action: You CAN judge things by their name and the only person who doesn’t question that is the only relatable character in the entire ad.
And this sort of thing happens all the time, usually in the name of humor or entertainment, where the ad ends up with imagery and on-screen action that belies the sales message.
But here’s what it looks like when you do it right — when the imagery perfectly aligns and strengthens the sales message:
The message: Benihana turns an ordinary dinner out into an EVENT
The imagery: Glamourous people flocking to Benihana to be delighted and thrilled and entertained by the kinetic choreography that is a Japanese steak house.
Hey, if you’re going out for a special dinner, why not make it an event? Now that’s a near-perfect ad with absolutely perfect imagery.
15
Mar
Visual Storytelling
In case you’re not up on your entertainment news, Nicollette Sheridan, of Desperate Housewives fame, is suing her former boss for wrongful termination and battery.
Lots of off-stage drama has ensued during the court proceedings, and lots of industry insider information has been revealed as well.
This LA Times piece does a great job of summarizing the action to date, but one quote from that article struck me as particularly important for copywriters:
“A mid-level writer testified that she earned $648,000 for one season’s work, eliciting groans from a spectator’s gallery packed with reporters earning substantially less for putting verbs after nouns.”
That quote thwacked me upside the head because of it’s mistaken assumption. Truly, the reason that TV writer earns several times more than most journalists* is because her job DOESN’T involve “putting verbs after nouns.”
9
Mar
With the movie version of The Lorax out at theaters near you, I thought you might enjoy this:
So, it’s funny because it’s true, right?
It also highlights the difference between, what a story or movie or ad is superficially about, and what it’s REALLY about. An important nuance that a lot of copywriters screw up.
An ad for a car might be about the car, but it’s REALLY about celebrating the fact that you’ve arrived. And while this ad is for a watch rather than a car, the copywriter definitely got that distinction:
You are standing in the snow, five and one-half half miles above sea level, gazing at a horizon hundreds of miles away. It occurs to you that life here is very simple: you live or you die. No compromises, no whining, no second chances. This is a place constantly ravaged by winds and storm, where every ragged breath is an accomplishment. You stand on the uppermost pinnacle of the earth. This is the mountain they call Everest. Yesterday it was considered unbeatable. But that was yesterday. As Edmund Hillary surveyed the horizon from the peak of Mount Everest, he monitored the time on a wristwatch that had been specifically designed to withstand the fury of the world’s most angry mountain. Rolex believed Sir Edmund would conquer the mountain, and especially for him they created the Rolex Explorer. In every life there is a Mount Everest to be conquered. When you have conquered yours, you’ll find your Rolex waiting patiently for you to come and pick it up at Justice Jewelers. I’m Woody Justice and I’ve got a Rolex… for you.
So when writing your ads, make sure you ask yourself: “What’s this about? What’s it REALLY about?”
P.S. If you have trouble with this, think in terms of creating an emotional understanding of an intellectual truth.
If you can find that kernel, the core of what that product is, so that when you talk about it, no matter how you talk about it, people respond and say “Yes! That’s right!”, then if you talk about it in a strong, interesting, memorable way, they say “Yeah that’s right, I’m gonna buy it.”
- Jim Durfee (co-founder, Carl Ally Inc.) as quoted in Art & Copy
Every now and then an ad comes along that really nails the true essence of the product. Ads that achieve both maximum impact and dramatic sales success. Think “Got Milk.”
This Clorox ad belongs in that category:
Think about it, bleach isn’t really about just getting things clean. Soap does that well enough. Nor is it about merely disinfecting things, although that’s closer to the mark. Bleach is about making things “ritually clean.”
When a kid poops in the tub and you bleach it, you not only cleaned the tub of poop, you removed whatever imaginary, psychological contagion might have been left over. That’s how we think of bleach — it’s beyond clean, beyond merely disinfected, and taken all the way to pristinely, immaculately, safe. And, yes, there’s a whole lot of Magical Thinking involved in this.
The essence of Clorox isn’t just what it does (Pine Sol and Lysol also disinfect), but encompasses as well what we unconsciously believe bleach does, as well as the full context of it’s use and role in our lives.
Remember that when creating advertising for your products.