Another simple way to gauge your copy’s potential effectiveness is to highlight it in two different colors. Whether you’re developing a letter, a brochure, a web page, or any other channel, take a few moments to highlight all of the sentences that are really about your customer and his or her needs. Let’s do that in pink. Next, highlight all the sentences that are about your company and what it does in yellow.
Now look at the page. What color is your page?
There’s a company from which I’ve been buying products off and on for the better part of three decades. I bought when they were primarily a catalog marketer, and kept buying after they made the move online. I don’t buy a lot from them — maybe something once every three or four years — but enough so they continue to stay in contact.
But I’m about to break off that contact and press the evil unsubscribe button. Why? Because whoever is in charge of their online marketing strategy seems to believe that the best way to maintain my loyalty is to stuff my emailbox with email after email — and the frequency keeps increasing.
“… He then undressed her from the waste down and cut open her shirt and bra …” That salacious gem came from a story on the Indianapolis Star’s website. I had images of Lady Gaga wearing an outfit made of trash, or perhaps someone who was stuck headfirst into a landfill. Once again, a story was spellchecked, but not edited. Or maybe the writer really wasn’t referring to a woman’s waist.
A similar, but less exciting example appeared in the February issue of Trains Magazine. In an item about a railroad executive, a writer mentioned that the man “was previously general council.” No, that would be “counsel,” a noun most often referring to attorneys when preceded by “general.” A “council” is a group of people gathered for a particular task, such as a “town council” or a “merchants’ council.”
I’ve read a lot of great books about advertising and marketing, but none even comes close to one I read as a teen. It still occupies a prominent place on my bookshelf.
It’s a 1972 text called “Madvertising (or Up Madison Ave.),” and it was created by the same geniuses who guided Mad Magazine through its glory years. Many of those writers and artists had cut their teeth in the advertising industry, and they used the book to skewer the many tricks and techniques major advertisers employ.
As a society, we’ve developed a frightening level of trust in technology. We often abandon our own knowledge and better judgment because some aspect of technology has a different answer — and it must be correct, right?
Microsoft Word is an amazing piece of technology. I spend several hours with it every day, and I know that I’ll never do more than scratch the surface of its capabilities. But any piece of software is only as good as the knowledge and preferences of its programmers.
Nearly everyone likes humor. We enjoy telling jokes, and we enjoy hearing them. So it comes as no surprise that companies try to spice up their advertising by using humor.
They reason that humor will catch the reader’s eye or listener’s ear, and make them more amenable to the sales message that will soon follow. Unfortunately, more often than not, those attempts at humor backfire.
Wonder how well your next ad, website, or brochure will communicate with your readers? Here’s a simple test that’s remarkably powerful.
Count the number of times that your company’s name appears in the text. Then count the number of times words “we,” “us,” and “our” appear in there, and add it to your first number.
I’m always fascinated by words that are frequently misspelled and expressions that are widely misused. Some may blame the mistakes on shared ignorance, but I think there’s something more insidious at work. I think mistakes are contagious. People who see the words misused lack confidence in their own knowledge and mistakenly believe that what they already know must be wrong.
And why is it that store and restaurant owners invariably ask employees who suffer from that contagion to manage the changeable-letter signs in front of their businesses?
It’s time for our semi-irregular look at mistakes in writing or marketing that may be embarrassing to those who made them, but that are darned amusing for the rest of us.
The local police report listed several calls for “wreckless drivers.” Isn’t that a good thing – drivers who have managed to avoid accidents? I suppose that a reckless driver might be a wreckless driver, but only if he or she is very fortunate.
I’ve noticed a growing, disturbing tendency in advertising. The creative teams who develop concepts for commercials insert terms and references that make perfect sense to them, but are most likely meaningless among the viewers they are trying to reach.
A recent example is a truck commercial that makes reference to “donut eaters in focus groups.” Anyone who has worked in advertising or marketing understood that right away, particularly if they have ever sat on the other side of the one-way glass and watched focus group participants drone on about advertising while gnawing on free food. The creative team displayed its disgust and frustration, and the clients approved it, because they’ve been there, too. I smiled when I heard it.