AdBriefing Articles

THE CURSE OF REVERSED-OUT TYPE

2006-08-20T11:36:00.000+01:00

Copywriting Tips

This article is brought to you by AdBriefing.com. Our aim is to produce a library of informative pieces that contain copywriting tips, marketing know-how and lessons in good advertising practice.

THE CURSE OF REVERSED-OUT TYPE

Patrick Quinn

I know nothing about design. I do, however, know a little about typography, since I started my working life 200 years ago as a hot-metal compositor. And in design terms, I also know what I like. With these caveats, I’d like to say a general word or two about a certain design anomaly in ads and websites that has me more bemused than usual.

Clearly, the more appealing an ad, a brochure or a website looks, the better it will be received by its target audience. Of course, appeal is in the eye of the beholder, but my definition of ad appeal is that the presentation should be clean, uncluttered and, above all, readable.

Why is it, then, that so much promotional work is neither clean, uncluttered, nor readable? All right, unclean and uncluttered one might, in order not to upset the sensibilities of designers and art directors worldwide, be able to live with. But unreadable?

Why, then, do advertisers and webmasters persist in spending good money to produce material that is a nightmare to read because the type is positioned on a dark background; or sometimes, as a faint gesture towards legibility, reversed-out white on a black or deep tone background? There is, I admit, little wrong with this latter device if the type is of a substantial point size. In the normal course of events, however, such reversed type is slapped down in 8-point Myopic – which means that only a well-practiced hawk can read it.

This sort of folly is usually the fault of quasi-designers who are trying to be terribly artistic and who don’t really give a damn whether the stuff can be read or not, just as long as it looks fancy in their own portfolios. Such people would be better gratifying their instincts in a garret rather than fouling up pieces of commercial print.

I recently came across two particularly egregious examples of this practice. The first had a pic of a sultry woman in a black dress; behind her, was a waiter who was about to top her glass with champagne. (What either of them was doing in an ad for tachometers is a question I’d rather you didn’t ask.) Anyway, the headline type ran across her black-haltered bosom, so it was reversed out white. Ah, but it also ran across the white napkin the waiter was holding, so that it virtually disappeared. The result was a piece of copy that I wouldn’t mind betting was read by only one person apart from those directly concerned with it. Me.

The second example was error twice compounded. It was a type only web page in four colours – yellow, orange and a sort of subdued cyclamen, all on a black background. Have you ever tried to read cyclamen coloured type on black?

Apart from that, this garish combination of colours produced what I believe the French call a trompe l’oeil which made me recoil and then hastily hit the back button. I would name the website, but I haven’t a pair of tinted glasses handy.

There are a couple of morals here, for those of you who are short of them. One is that if you, as someone in charge of accepting or rejecting a layout, are confronted with something which involves type on any kind of coloured or tinted background, think hard before giving it the nod. And the longer the copy is, the harder you should think.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I always think that if you’re going to have words in a publication, it’s not a bad idea to present them so that they can be easily read.

What do you think?

END

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Long or Short Term Advertising

2006-01-04T11:51:00.000Z

Copywriting Tips

This article is brought to you by www.AdBriefing.com.

Our aim is to produce a library of informative pieces that contain copywriting tips, marketing know-how and lessons in good advertising practise

Long or Short Term Advertising

Patrick Quinn

It often happens – no, it usually happens – that advertisers, once they have run a campaign explaining the basic advantages of their product or service, think that this particular job has been done more or less for good and all.

They see and see again their own ads plugging these basics; they see their competitors’ ads doing the same thing; and they come to the conclusion that the whole world knows about it and is rapidly tiring of hearing about these primary product properties.

This is a conclusion which is sometimes justified; but more often it is vastly mistaken. Customers as a race are only about one-tenth as aware of your product or service as you think – and about one-twentieth as knowledgeable as you hope.

Always remember that when you run a campaign, you are preaching to the indifferent. You are talking to people who would care more about leaving their umbrella on a train than about news of you leaping under one.

Generally speaking, nobody gives a flying flinch about you or your products. There is, therefore, a lot to be said for keeping on plugging away at the simple, straightforward product-advantages or sales propositions that you have to offer.

The truth is, an ad campaign has a longer life than anyone associated with it thinks it has. So, if you have a campaign that projects your product benefits sensibly and forcibly, run it until you are absolutely sure that everyone is fed up to the back teeth with it. Then give it another twelve months for luck.

END

If you’re stuck with copywriting problems, or suffering from writers block or can’t quite come up with that elusive headline may I recommend our own sales writers’ resource e-book Word Power III.

You’ll find ready-made copy such as headlines, tag lines, link lines, calls to action, price defenders, guarantees and more, which you can lift straight from the page and adopt or adapt.

You’ll also discover a sales writers’ thesaurus in the form of a theme finder, which will cure writers block forever. You can see it at: http://www.wordpower3.com

Patrick Quinn is a copywriter, with 40 years' experience of the advertising business in London, Miami, Dublin and Edinburgh. Over the years, he has helped win for his clients just about every advertising award worth winning. His published books, include:

The Secrets of Successful Copywriting.

The Secrets of Successful Low Budget Advertising.

Word Power 1, 2 & 3.

For a free monthly newsletter with copywriting tips and tutorials, plus advertising and marketing know-how, just click here.

http://www.adbriefing.com

Raising The Value

2006-01-03T12:34:00.000Z

Copywriting Tips

This article is brought to you by www.AdBriefing.com.

Our aim is to produce a library of informative pieces that contain copywriting tips, marketing know-how and lessons in good advertising practise

Raising The Value

Patrick Quinn

Every ad, brochure, website or radio commercial should initially fulfil one very important task. And this is to raise the value of your product or service in the potential customer’s mind.

This has nothing to do with a policy of low pricing or, indeed, cut-price offers. But it has everything to do with making a sales pitch that immediately demonstrates the outstanding value of your goods and services – no matter how much you are charging for them.

Look at it this way, a gallon of petrol costs around £4, but if your car runs out of gas on a lonely, rain-swept moor in the middle of the night, with the prospect of a 30-mile walk to the nearest filling station, how much would you pay for a gallon of petrol from a passing stranger? £10? £20? £50?

And there’s the essence of it. The value of that gallon of petrol is raised in your mind by your circumstances. Likewise, the cost of a given product or service is in direct ratio to the importance of owning it.

Are you with me?

If you’re stuck with copywriting problems, or suffering from writers block or can’t quite come up with that elusive headline may I recommend our own sales writers’ resource ebook Word Power III?

You’ll find ready-made copy such as headlines, tag lines, link lines, calls to action, price defenders, guarantees and more, which you can lift straight from the page and adopt or adapt. You’ll also discover a sales writers’ thesaurus in the form of a theme finder, which will cure writers block forever. You can see it at: http://www.wordpower3.com

END.

The Secrets of Successful Copywriting.

The Secrets of Successful Low Budget Advertising.

Word Power 1, 2 & 3.

For a free monthly newsletter with copywriting tips and tutorials, plus advertising and marketing know-how, just click here.

http://www.adbriefing.com

Getting Your Message Across

2005-12-12T13:00:00.000Z

Copywriting Tips

This article is brought to you by www.AdBriefing.com.

Our aim is to produce a library of informative pieces that contain copywriting tips, marketing know-how and lessons in good advertising practise

Getting Your Message Across.

Patrick Quinn

It has been scientifically proven that most of us take in only around 40% of what we actually see. Our brains edit out the other 60% of visual information as unimportant. On these grounds, if you have a serious proposition to make in your website, brochure or sales letter, it would be wise to repeat it. And not just once, but several times.

Just because you are deeply immersed in your offer or promise, it doesn’t follow that your market will be likewise informed after only one reading. Ads, brochures and websites are the most negligently read materials on the planet. Aside from you, nobody has any real or abiding interest in them. Always remember that you are preaching to the indifferent.

Therefore, if you have something to say – say it often. Everything will bear repetition if it is sufficiently interesting to the audience.

END.

The Secrets of Successful Copywriting.

The Secrets of Successful Low Budget Advertising.

Word Power 1, 2 & 3.

For a free monthly newsletter with copywriting tips and tutorials, plus advertising and marketing know-how, just click here.

http://www.adbriefing.com

What’s In It For Me?

2005-11-23T11:31:00.000Z

Copywriting Tips

This article is brought to you by www.AdBriefing.com.

Our aim is to produce a library of informative pieces that contain copywriting tips, marketing know-how and lessons in good advertising practise.

What’s In It For Me?

Patrick Quinn

Many well-meaning writers on the subject of copywriting are happy to tell you that the headline is the single most important element of any ad, brochure, website and so on. Which, of course, it is.

They also tell you that the headline must be so cleverly framed as to practically force the reader into the compass of the body copy. Which, again, it should.

But it is right there that the commonsense comes to a stop. Because they then go on to offer you a formula of some kind along the lines of: 'Ten Ways To Write Killer Headlines', or 'Eight Sure-Fire Methods For Creating Copy Impact'. Some even go so far as to say something like: 'If You Can Write A Headline Like This, You'll Be A Cash Millionaire This Time next Week.' The latter is usually accompanied by a sample headline that, take my word for it, would get most ad agency trainees fired on the spot.

Let's clear the decks. There are no formulae, no quick tricks, no lazy ways to produce a good headline. A good, selling headline depends for its success on just one simple ingredient - a statement of benefit. Meaning a benefit inherent in the product or service that the consumer will reap if he goes out and buys it.

Every product or service has a benefit. If it hasn't, why is it being produced? Thus, the best headlines, those that move product, say to the reader: 'Buy this product and get this benefit.'

Simple, isn't it?

END.

The Secrets of Successful Copywriting.

The Secrets of Successful Low Budget Advertising.

Word Power 1, 2 & 3.

For a free monthly newsletter with copywriting tips and tutorials, plus advertising and marketing know-how, just click here.

http://www.adbriefing.com

TOO CLEVER BY HALF

2005-08-01T10:14:00.000+01:00

Advertising Tips

This article is brought to you by AdBriefing.com. Our aim is to produce a library of informative pieces that contain copywriting tips, marketing know-how and lessons in good advertising practise.

TOO CLEVER BY HALF

Patrick Quinn

You might describe me as a progressive reactionary. The progressive in me is as eager for new ideas and new techniques in advertising as a young beagle chasing its first hare. But the reactionary in me tends to view innovation with the kind of sour suspicion with which Scrooge greeted Marley’s ghost. Why? Because a lot of what is new tends to be clever – and, all too often, too clever for its own good.

I’ll explain. The public, at whom the mass of consumer advertising should be aimed but often isn’t, aren’t vastly interested in cleverness as a whole, let alone cleverness of copy and art. The kind of ad that the average person considers to be good is apt to be the kind of ad that causes the average copywriter and designer to feel like reaching for the Prozac. This, admittedly, is a sorry situation, but it is one of the sad facts of life.

And it is to the average person that we look to spend the money to buy the products we advertise and keep us in meat and potatoes with an occasional splash of gravy. Why is it, then, that a large proportion of advertisers (terrestrial and internet) set out to make fools of their target market by feeding them material that they patently won’t understand?

To prove my point, take a look around you at the huge number of ad illustrations that have no bearing whatsoever on the product. And also at the myriad headlines which, likewise, have no bearing on the product. The sales message, if they have one, is lost within the slickness of the design and the obtuseness of the copy story.

The advertisers concerned may be overawed by the beauty of their artwork and the cleverness of their words, but they are convincing nobody but themselves. And if the consumer fails to understand the sales proposition at first glance, he will very quickly go and spend his money with someone else.

Quite right, too.

END

For a free monthly newsletter with copywriting tips and tutorials, plus advertising and marketing know-how, just click here.
http://www.adbriefing.com

The Secrets of Successful Copywriting.

The Secrets of Successful Low Budget Advertising.

Word Power 1, 2 & 3.

For a free monthly newsletter with copywriting tips and tutorials, plus advertising and marketing know-how, just click here.
http://www.adbriefing.com

THE PROBLEM WITH INDUSTRIAL ADVERTISING

2005-07-15T10:44:00.000+01:00

Advertising Tips

This article is brought to you by AdBriefing.com. Our aim is to produce a library of informative pieces that contain copywriting tips, marketing know-how and lessons in good advertising practise.

THE PROBLEM WITH INDUSTRIAL ADVERTISING

Patrick Quinn

I think it true to say that industrial advertising, the sort that fills the pages of the thousands of technical and semi-technical magazines, is the most neglected of all advertising types. You only have to flick through the pages of publications like Bulk Handling International, or Building Services & Environmental Engineer, for instance, to see that advertisers are nowhere near as clever with their promotional work as are their counterparts at the consumer end of things.

This is no reflection on the professionalism of the magazines mentioned. They can only publish the material they receive. What it is a reflection of, however, is the belief held by many industrial advertisers that cleverness and creativity in advertising are luxuries to be indulged in only by those soft mass-media advertisers with all their millions to throw away on fripperies. Many of them also hold the view that advertising is pretty much a waste of time, energy and money. They do it only because their competitors do it and it is therefore expected of them.

These are fallacies to end all fallacies; and the result of such thinking is tired, lifeless and unimaginative advertising that sells nobody anything. And I’m sorry to say, too, that much of this work originates from those advertising agencies which profess to specialise in industrial-type work.

To be sure, it may come as a comfort to an industrial advertiser to find an ad agency whose executives and writers are passingly familiar with digital voltmeters, modular breadboards or higher-frequency potential avalanche transit-time diodes. To be able to talk to them about high-power logic triacs or tantulum capacitators without them looking bemused or falling asleep must make such clients feel that they’ve stumbled upon the Holy Grail.

But this is an understanding simply of the nuts and bolts of a client’s business; and that’s a different thing altogether from having an understanding of the basic precepts of advertising – and, I submit, a far less important thing.

It’s a sad fact that that the great majority of industrial ads don’t have anything specific to say. They may kid themselves that they have; but if their originators would look at them dispassionately, even they would concede that they haven’t.

This is perfectly understandable. No advertiser can expect to come up with something new and exciting every time he hits print. This, incidentally, is the reason why the bulk of industrial advertising is, or should be, a long-term and strategic exercise, rather than short-term and tactical – but that’s another subject entirely.

Now, the ability to take nothing in particular and to devise around it something that is interesting and striking without being foolish is a rare gift. It is the essential art (or artifice or artfulness) of advertising. It is what advertising is very largely about; and the fact that it is a difficult, demanding and mentally corrosive task explains why the people who are best at it are so grossly overpaid, why their intake of alcohol is so excessive, and why life-assurance actuaries have nightmares about them.

The kind of people I’m talking about are as scarce as cab’s on a wet night in ad agencies which specialise in handling technical/industrial accounts only. Professionals you will find there, for sure. Good, honest hard-workers with a refreshing absence of temperament But those gifted with the rare ability consistently to make an extraordinary something out of a very ordinary next-to-nothing? Not very likely.

There are two simple reasons for this. The first is a sordid commodity called money. The second is that, for the best writers and designers, the pabulum of the soul is not only creative freedom but also creative diversity. And, in technical agencies, they just can’t get it.

So where does that leave us? In the first place, industrial advertisers should take a long, hard look at their promotional philosophies. In the second place, whether their material originates from their own publicity department, or from a technical-type agency, they should think very seriously about hiring people who are capable of producing original and effective campaigns that actually sell product. Just because someone has a marketing degree or has studied on one of those dubious communications courses, it doesn’t make them capable of producing the kind of work I’ve described above. Likewise, a BSc and a likeable demeanour carries no guarantee that the person concerned will be a whiz at moving your product.

If this means spending a little more money on securing the right personnel, then so be it. In the long term, and I guess we are all in business for the long term, we are judged by appearances. And no matter how ground-breaking our product may be, if our appearance is shoddy, unimaginative and dull, we shouldn’t be surprised if buyers go and spend their money somewhere else.

And there the matter, whatever it is, rests for the moment.

END

For a free monthly newsletter with copywriting tips and tutorials, plus advertising and marketing know-how, just click here. http://www.adbriefing.com

The Secrets of Successful Copywriting.

The Secrets of Successful Low Budget Advertising.

Word Power 1, 2 & 3.

For a free monthly newsletter with copywriting tips and tutorials, plus advertising and marketing know-how, just click here.

http://www.adbriefing.com

HOW TO TEST YOUR HEADLINES

2005-07-04T08:18:00.000+01:00

Copywriting Tips

This article is brought to you by AdBriefing.com. Our aim is to produce a library of informative pieces that contain copywriting tips, marketing know-how and lessons in good advertising practise.

HOW TO TEST YOUR HEADLINES

Patrick Quinn

A correspondent to AdBriefing, my monthly newsletter, has posed a very sticky question. How, she asks, can you tell whether a headline you have written is a good one…or not? What she means by this, I imagine, is whether the headline will actually help to make sales, rather than just act as a passing amusement to its readers.

Obviously, there is no absolute test. If there were, we benighted copywriters would be earning ten times what we are earning now, on the grounds that our work would be foolproof.

But there is a test – a very good test – that you can apply to any headline you create. I call it the ‘So What?’ test.

Allow me to give you an example of ‘So What?’ in action. If you produce a headline that says: Our Widget works twice as fast as any other Widget, and then ask yourself ‘So What?’, it immediately becomes clear that the line is bereft of a sales proposition. Because there is no obvious benefit to the potential customer.

On the other hand, if you write: Our Widget works twice as fast, so you do the job in half the time, then the ‘So What?’ has been answered. Your customer can cut his production time by 50%.

Likewise, were you to write: Our Widget is so small, it fits into the palm of your hand, you simply invoke ‘So What?’. Which results in: Our Widget fits into the palm of your hand, so it goes wherever you go. In this case, the benefit is portability.

Over the years, I have found the ‘So What?’ test to be invaluable. You might care to give it a try yourself.

And on the subject of headlines consider this.

When trying to write a headline many people tend to go off half-cocked. They consider the marketing brief, then bash down a headline or two to satisfy it. After that, they write the body copy.

Experience shows, however, that if you write the body copy first, the odds are that there will be the makings of a headline within it struggling to get out.

Body copy is, or should be, a carefully worked and logical encapsulation of the marketing brief. In other words, the whys, the wherefores and the benefits of owning the product or service. It makes sense, then, that if it is properly written, there is a very real chance of finding an embryo headline lurking within it.

Why not give it a whirl? You may be agreeably surprised.

END

For a free monthly newsletter with copywriting tips and tutorials, plus advertising and marketing know-how, just click here.
http://www.adbriefing.com

The Secrets of Successful Copywriting.

The Secrets of Successful Low Budget Advertising.

Word Power 1, 2 & 3.

IF YOU CAN’T BE ORIGINAL, BE ACCURATE

2005-06-27T15:33:00.000+01:00

Copywriting Tips

This article is brought to you by AdBriefing.com. Our aim is to produce a library of informative pieces that contain copywriting tips, marketing know-how and lessons in good advertising practise.

IF YOU CAN’T BE ORIGINAL, BE ACCURATE

John Powell

I’ve just been reading Pat Quinn’s revised book, The Secrets of Successful Copywriting. In it he says you can always take an old idea and give it a new lease of life with a simple twist. But he warns, make sure in doing so that (a) you’ve rehashed the idea with some originality, and (b) you don’t tear the fundament out of it.

This advice came to mind when I popped out for a pub lunch the other day. The pub in question is part of a nationwide chain which is running a promotion whereby, if you buy two glasses of wine, you get a third free.

They are promoting this splendid offer via a poster campaign throughout the chain; and a very nice, and expensive poster it is too. A2, full colour, with some very crisp photography of a bottle of wine and a half filled glass. So far so good.

Now I can only assume the copywriter who wrote the poster was sick to death of the hundreds of ads and supermarket point-of-sale materials that tell you Buy this and get this free - so he or she went for what they misguidedly thought was originality and came up with the alternative headline:

BUY 3 FOR 2.

Is that improving on?

Buy Two Glasses Of Wine

And Get One Free.

Perhaps my brain is addled with too much wine, but it seems to me the reworked headline is confusing, whereas the well used version leaves no room for doubt about what’s being offered. And my opinion seems to be borne out by a quick chat with the lovely bar girl. She told me that 8 out of 10 customers who order a glass of wine have to be told about the offer. In my book this means that the pub chain could have saved a fortune on posters.

Oh, one more point about the poster. The guy or gal who wrote it came up with a curious tagline. Underneath the pic of the bottle and glass of wine it says:

Quench your thirst.

Hardened tippler, I may be. Potential coach for the English Olympic drinking team for sure; and I await the phone call from the Committee with cheerful confidence. However, I’ve never thought of dowsing a thirst by guzzling wine. This is a case, I feel, of writers having no idea whatsoever about the motivations of their target market.

You drink beer to quench a thirst, but you drink wine in order to develop a nice, warm buzz, along with an eloquence that startles even you.

Therefore, a more pertinent tagline might have been:

Drink up - your third glass is on us.

Come to think of it, that would probably have made a far better headline!

END

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HOW TO BUY BAD ADVERTISING

2005-06-19T18:16:00.000+01:00

Advertising Tips

This article is brought to you by AdBriefing.com. Our aim is to produce a library of informative pieces that contain copywriting tips, marketing know-how and lessons in good advertising practise.

HOW TO BUY BAD ADVERTISING

Patrick Quinn

I have had an e-mail from a gentleman with something on his mind. Since what is irking him may be of general interest, he has been good enough to allow me to dissertate on it right here. As a matter of fact, it’s of a touch more than general interest, because his is exactly the kind of account that the freelances among us earn our bread and butter from. So it could be a lesson learned.

The gentleman in question is the advertising manager of a Midlands engineering company with a total promotional budget of around £200,000. Of this, some £150,000 is spent through an ad agency. Up to a couple of years ago, our friend had been using a local agency which, he says, ‘gave us excellent service; but their output of ideas and their general standard of creative work left a lot to be desired’.

Accordingly, not without a good deal of heart-searching, he moved the account to a medium-sized, up-and-coming London agency with a strong and growing reputation for creative originality. Has everything turned out fine? Not particularly. He is not getting the same kind of ‘we’ll be around in five minutes for the brief and have some scribbles ready for you in the morning’ service that the previous people gave him. Nor has his present agency exactly set the Thames on fire with its standard of work.

Yet, he says (and here’s the nub of it) they are doing some outstanding work for other clients of theirs. Therefore, is his appropriation too small for them to bother about? Has he jumped from provincial frying pan into metropolitan fire? “In all fairness to them,” he ends, “ours is a rather difficult account which presents special problems.”

Well, let’s take the service angle first. If someone lives on your doorstep, and if your business represents a sizeable slice of his turnover, obviously he is going to hop around to you quicker and jump to your wishes more smartly than someone who is 200 miles away and to whom your billing is relative peanuts. This argument is sustainable despite the convenience of instant communication via e-mail and intranet because, generally speaking, clients do like to see on a regular basis the people who are working for them. It’s something of an anachronism, but it’s true. After all, an e-mail can’t take you out to lunch or allow you to win on the squash court – if you see what I mean.

Something else. Practically any given agency will feed to practically any potential client a yard-and-a-half of eyeshine about all its accounts, large or small, getting an equal slice of the service cake. But, let’s be sensible, the smaller a client is, the bigger the pinch of salt he needs to take this with. The point is too obvious to be laboured.

And now for his second point. Although ‘ours is a difficult account which presents special problems’ is a familiar cry, it is seldom as true as it is cracked up to be. Everyone thinks his business is unusual and complicated. In advertising terms it rarely is.

What this guy should really be asking is why the agency concerned is producing second-rate work for him, yet is doing first-rate work for others. Either he is not getting his fair whack of their creative talent, in which case a little determined hell-raising in the right quarter will work wonders. Or he is not allowing the agency to live up to its capabilities. I don’t know which it is, of course; but if I had to bet blind, I would put my money on the latter.

So here’s the moral to this sorry story. All advertising, when you really come down to basics, is in the hands of people called copywriters and designers. This applies whether the people in question work for agencies or for themselves as freelances. There generally ain’t no difference in work standard or commitment. I know for sure that the sad experience of my correspondent is by no means a singular one. It is being repeated daily up and down the country. It therefore follows that what these hundreds, possibly thousands, of ad managers really need is nothing more than a good, local freelance writing/design team which knows a thing or two about client service.

A freelance team, unlike an agency, has minimal overhead; and its fees will, or should, reflect this. And because a freelance team works for itself, it will almost certainly be hungrier and therefore more conscientious than its agency counterparts.

Were I the ad manager of a company, I would choose a freelance team rather than a local agency every time. Likewise, were I the ad manager of a company with a modest budget, I would steer very clear of big-ambition metropolitan agencies. And when it came down to it, I would far prefer to have lunch or play squash with my nubile secretary than with some hairy artist.

Therefore, if you are a member of a creative team, does the local industry know where to get hold of you? Do they even know you exist. I am conscious that writers and designers are notoriously bad at promoting themselves; but on the basis of what we’ve just heard, there is a huge market here just waiting to be tapped. So tap it.

END

For a free monthly newsletter with copywriting tips and tutorials, plus advertising and marketing know-how, just click here. http://www.adbriefing.com

The Secrets of Successful Copywriting.

The Secrets of Successful Low Budget Advertising.

Word Power 1, 2 & 3.

For a free monthly newsletter with copywriting tips and tutorials, plus advertising and marketing know-how, just click here.

http://www.adbriefing.com

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

2005-06-11T20:27:00.000+01:00

Advertising Tips

This article is brought to you by AdBriefing.com. Our aim is to produce a library of informative pieces that contain copywriting tips, marketing know-how and lessons in good advertising practise.

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

The story I am about to tell you is thought to be apocryphal, which is why I shall refrain from naming names. Nonetheless, it is a classic example of what advertising is – or, rather, should be - all about. It demonstrates that good promotional concepts, the ideas that sell product, are based wholly and solely upon (a) the product story, (b) the benefits of owning said product and (c) the image of the product in the eyes of its potential customers.

Step back with me, then, about 40 years, when advertising agencies were less dependent than they are now upon market research, consumer panels, think tanks, marketing strategies, consumer profiles, computer-based market analyses and all the pseudo-scientific claptrap with which agencies are these days lumbered. We are returning to a time, the late 60s, when creative people (writers and designers) ruled the ad agency roost. Indeed, many of the better UK agencies were then run by creative people and not by accountants as so many of them today are. And because of this there was a kind of freedom in the air. Writers and designers were given their head; they were allowed to do whatever their guts told them was right; and the resultant advertising was, without a doubt, the best that has ever been produced before or since.

So it was in my story that a large London agency, headed up by a brilliant writer, was invited to pitch for the British Rail account. As I’ve said, the MD of the agency was brilliant with words. He was also flamboyant in dress and in manner; and his reputed attitude towards clients was one of take it or leave it. As the rumours go, he would back his creative team to the hilt, and he would actually fire clients who did not express a generous enough attitude towards his agency’s work.

Anyway, accepting the offer to pitch, the agency invited the Advertising Manager of British Rail, along with his entourage, to its offices in salubrious Mayfair. On the appointed day, as the visitors filed in, a catalogue of events unfolded.

They were greeted, first, by an indifferent receptionist who had a cigarette poised between her lips. She barely acknowledged them, but pulled herself away from a magazine long enough to direct them towards an ante-room, telling them that the agency MD would be along in a moment.

Inside this ante-room, the décor was somewhat grubby and there were not enough chairs to go round, so several of the visitors had to stand. Also in the waiting-room was a coffee table littered with used coffee cups, torn magazines and ashtrays piled high with cigarette ends. There was also litter on the floor.

And the visitors waited…and waited…and waited. After fifteen minutes or so, they had understandably had enough of the awful waiting room and decided to leave. Just as they were exiting, the agency MD arrived. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he greeted. Pointing back to the room from whence they had come, he said: “This is the image that most people have of British Rail. This, by and large, is how passengers are treated when they use your services.” Then he smiled. “But I intend to change all that.”

Apocryphal or not, this story clearly shows that advertising is not just about presenting a product with nicely framed words and pictures, it is really all about knowing the essence of the product. It’s about understanding how to make the most of its attributes. But, above all, it’s about realising where its faults lie and how those faults may be corrected.

I can’t count the number of times, when working on a creative team, that we have spotted the downside to a product or service – something about which the manufacturer was blissfully unaware. It is, of course, very difficult to convince a client that there is something not quite right about his product, but a good writer or designer will do so as a matter of course…and to hell with the consequences.

Like our agency MD above, I reckon it’s all part of the job.

END

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