Confessions of a copywriter

Guest post #2 for “Adholics” partner Josh Anderson, I got a real kick out of this article, hope you enjoy.

Confessions of a copywriter

By Josh Anderson

Copywriter, The Adholics

The first time I told a friend I was a copywriter he said, “So you deal with trademarks?” Well no, not exactly.

When I called up my dad to tell him the first web site I wrote was published he said, “So you developed it?” Well no, not exactly.

Last time I told a peer that I was working in the marketing communications department at a leading financial services company he said, “So you sell insurance?” Definitely not.

Seems there’s some confusion as to what exactly a copywriter does. Hopefully by dispelling some misconceptions I can help clear things up. More importantly, I hope to illustrate the important role copywriters can play in the success of your company.

Truth #1: Copywriters write catchy slogans, and other important details

If you’re not an advertising insider or someone who TiVO’s “Mad Men”, I can understand how easy it is to limit copywriters to the slogans you read or jingles you hear. But we do more than that. Copywriters are responsible for writing copy.

And what is “copy”? Well, you’re reading some now.

Copy can be a blog entry, tweet or Facebook update, the words in a print ad, the script for a TV or radio commercial, the content of a web site. And yes, copywriters come up with slogans, jingles, taglines and program and product names, though these are usually part of a larger campaign.

Perhaps a better explanation is that copywriters are responsible for building a brand persona. Our copy helps give companies a distinctive voice in the marketplace. And with well-written, strategic copy, companies can more effectively talk to their target markets. Good copywriters can actually help move the sales needle.

Truth #2: Copywriters are professionals, ripped jeans and all

If everyone could write copy, then I would’ve stuck with my original plan to major in English and sling coffee at an Uptown cafe. And this would’ve been the shortest blog post on the internet.

Fortunately that’s not the case (though you may be wishing this post had ended about three sentences ago). Copywriters are professionals despite our appearance, and we take our craft seriously. We’re always fine-tuning our skills, looking for new ways to execute communications in a fresh, engaging way. And we’re constantly adapting in order to take advantage of new media – see my post on writing for social media (link).

Every company believes they have an employee who writes well enough for their needs. Chances are this person may have every relevant rule of English memorized. But it’s copywriters who know when, why and how to break those rules. And when it comes to communicating in today’s saturated mass media, doing what’s unexpected helps companies cut through the clutter and reach their target audience.

Truth #3: Copywriters work with your company, from the outside

By definition, freelance copywriters are not one of you. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Here’s why:

Fresh perspective – Copywriters have the luxury of looking at your business without bias. We can easily identify what you’re good at and we may even identify strengths that companies don’t see themselves.

No boundaries – Copywriters come at your brand from all angles. We look at what’s been done before and find ways to do it differently, or better, or both. We aren’t bound by your company’s history, inner workings or past performance.

Always hungry – Copywriters are eager to solve a marketing challenge. Sagging sales, how about mailing a killer direct response campaign? Your company’s suffering from a lack of awareness, how about running an unforgettable print ad campaign? We’re always searching for the next opportunity to churn out great copy. And not necessarily for the awards. Copywriters want to be part of something that has “legs,” an effective, memorable campaign that runs for a long time. And we want to be the person your company turns to every time you have a writing need.

Copywriters are also good editors, though not necessarily when it comes to our own blog posts. But hopefully this long-winded explanation helps clarify exactly what a copywriter does. If not, contact The Adholics to find out what a copywriter can do for you. I sure hope my dad is reading this.
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How do you really feel about Flash Steve?

Below is a short exerpt from a post written by Steve Jobs (you know, the founder of Apple Computers) on Flash and why his products do not and will not support it.

Sorry Adobe, I love your other products, but I think he has a great couple of points here.

“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

Steve Jobs
April, 2010

Read the entire post here: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Cheers,

Joshua Fedie

The “Adholics”
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Target Stadium!

The last couple of weeks in Minnesota have been pretty exciting, even if you’re not the biggest sports fan, because in Minnesota Baseball has moved back outside!

Now I haven’t officially named any of the partners involved in The “Adholics” yet, but these pictures just needed to be posted.

So that being said:

The official photography studio for The “Adholics” are Rat Race Studios www.ratracestudios.com.

They were recently at the new Target Stadium doing what they do best, taking pictures. You just have to see how they captured the stadium, I’m pretty sure the Baseball gods are smiling right now.

Follow this link to view the entire gallery: http://www.ratracestudios.com/target_field_gallery/index.html

How cool is it that photographers this good are part of my team!

Cheers,

Joshua Fedie

The “Adholics”
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It’s not just a box!

Package Design: (more commonly referred to as Packaging) One of my favorite tools in the grab bag of marketing/advertising strategies.

Marketing tactics are changing; budgets are shifting more heavily towards the digital realm, but has this changed the need for great packaging?

Not at all.

All right, all good articles need a case study, and who better than one of the largest consumer packaged goods companies in the world, Proctor & Gamble, or as you probably know them P&G.

P&G refers to packaging as “the first moment of truth” and invest heavily in their on-the-shelf appearance. I strongly recommend reading this article http://adage.com/article?article_id=143211 if you in any way utilize retail shelf space to sell your goods/services. These guys know their stuff, just look at this list of products http://www.pg.com/en_US/brands/all_brands.shtml.

But you don’t need to read the article to get the point, just ask yourself one simple question. Have you ever made a purchase based on how a product looked on the shelf?

I bet you anything you have at least once if not many times.

“But I’m loyal to my brands” you say.

Sure you are.

But how did you first make the choice about the brand you wanted to support?

I have space reserved on my kitchen sink for only two products. Mrs. Meyers http://www.mrsmeyers.com/ and J.R. Watkins http://www.jrwatkins.com/.

How did I first come upon them?

Well, aside from the fact that I was looking for a more natural alternative in my cleaning products, and at the time they were pretty much the only “natural” brands stocked at the big box stores, it was the packaging.

It was only after I was lured in by the cool look of the packaging, and even after I displayed them front and center on my kitchen sink for all to see, that I discovered that I really loved how they worked.

I’m glad I gave them a try, but not too proud to admit that if they came in a not-so-attractive container I would have passed on them all together. Being green and chemically aware is great, but coordination is just as important in my house (as long as it’s still green).

Packaging on the shelf can also have very little to do with how it is displayed at home, matching your décor may not be all that important depending on the product and use. It also depends on whether the package design is part of the product, as in a label or container, or just the method of transport and delivery, as in a really cool box.

Either way, the same message holds true, packaging is “the first moment of truth”.

So you have a great package, and consumers are buying your product up like crazy!

You’re good right?

Not quite.

It is not unlike dating; It’s the laws of attraction 101: Just like you occasionally update your wardrobe, packaging needs to be refreshed.

Don’t get too comfortable with your current design, staying on top of trends is very important and remember, your competition is watching. They can’t wait to emulate or one-up you to try and regain lost business.

And another reason for frequent packaging updates:

Have you ever stared at a shelf for 20 minutes looking for that product you always buy at that store; you just know they have it, where is it?….oh, here it is.

How many other products did you just notice while you were looking for what you wanted?

Products disappear on shelves as consumers develop blinders when things become too familiar. This is why retail establishments leave space near the registers for a rotating grouping of merchandise. This ensures you have no chance of escape, no hope of developing those pesky blinders that keep you from noticing a new way to drop another dollar. This is also why you find yourself occasionally buying the latest Us Weekly…

So as you can see, it is a whole lot more than just a box, it is on the front line of communication with your potential customer. It does not need to be all things to all people, but it does need to be something special to a good deal of them.

Cheers,

Josh Fedie

The “Adholics”
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What does your website say about your company?

I just read a great article published on www.visualthesaurus.com written by Orin Hargraves that I thought might be a good read for anybody reading my blog.

Enjoy!

“About Us”

April 1, 2010

By Orin Hargraves

Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
—William Butler Yeats, from “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

We live in the age of online presence: it’s hard to argue that you’re part of the warp and weft of modern society if you’re not somehow accessible — if others can’t find out something about you — on the Internet. This goes even more for companies than for people, since companies are, after all, public by their nature; at least, the ones that do business with or sell their shares to the public are. We’ve been exploring the online presence of companies recently in the Lounge. The language that companies use to present their public face has piqued our curiosity and we’ve been thinking about what purpose these self-reports from companies serve.

Most company websites have a bannerline or drop-down menu link called “About Us.” Another popular choice is, e.g., “About Acme Widgets” or “Who We Are.” Clicking on this link might take you to single page, or to a microsite containing numerous other links, where you can unpack the various components that make up the package of what a company wants you to think it is.  You sometimes have to drill down a few levels from the home page to find this information, and that in itself is an interesting point that we’ll return to. We looked specifically at pages in which companies lay out their business and ethical philosophy, or their “values,” which is a popular way of characterizing these aspects of a company.

Some companies lay out their values under the banner of “corporate citizenship” — a term that somewhat blurs the line between the corporate and the individual, since a citizen is, by definition, an individual. This point of view, of a company having the qualities of a person, is practical for presenting traits that are typically attributed to an individual rather than a group. It also has solid historical credentials, since corporations as they exist today were originally conceived as a sort of artificial person having a separate legal entity. Finally, presenting the company as an entity capable of holding or expressing individual human traits is useful for companies because it makes them seem more friendly — even befriendable — than they might otherwise seem.

What purpose do these “About Us” statements serve? At first glance, they seem to attempt for companies what an individual’s personal profile on a dating site does: they are a way of saying “Here are some reasons why you might want to go out/spend the rest of your life with me” — or in the case of a public company, “buy my shares” or “do business with me.” Among these pages you may find the company’s mission statement or “vision statement,” such as this one from Chevron:

At the heart of The Chevron Way is our vision… to be the global energy company most admired for its people, partnership and performance.

Or this one, a bit more bare-bones, from Cardinal Health:

Our vision
To be the premier global healthcare company.

In both cases we have preserved the italic-flagged emphasis that the companies themselves use on their websites. These two, Chevron and Cardinal, express an aspiration to superlative status, though they both avoid expressing it in language so bald as, e.g., “biggest.” Chevron merely italicizes the definite article; Cardinal uses premier, presumably in the sense “first in rank.” These language choices exemplify one theme that is invariable on company websites: a preference for gentle, civil, defanged expression. This kind of expression is at odds with the way corporations are often portrayed in public discourse: as impersonal, rapacious, and aggressive. As evidence of this: aside from purely descriptive adjectives (multinational, giant, major), the adjectives that most typically occur before the word corporation (as assayed in the 2-billion word Oxford English Corpus) are greedy, faceless, and evil.

It’s helpful to take a step back from some of these pages and analyze their content statistically; for that, we used VocabGrabber to make portraits of a few such pages, all from Fortune 100 companies. Here’s one from Procter & Gamble:

For a company that is known chiefly for its hundreds of consumer products, this portrait seems to boil down to a worthy mission: “improve life.” Kraft Foods also seems to be right on the money in making the most frequent words on its “Who We Are” page the ones that deliver its message:

Beyond the headline words, all companies are eager to put their best foot forward by cataloging their many achievements and positive attributes: words that occur frequently on almost all company profile pages are community, responsibility, and commitment. A word that almost never occurs is corporation.

Wal-Mart’s “values” page is in a similar vein. Whether intentionally or not, it succeeds in making its expanded statement a kind of holographic enlargement of its advertising slogan: “Save Money. Live Better.” Even the most scattered attention span, clocking every tenth word or so on the page, would probably still walk away with the right take-home message:

Verizon keeps to a simple message as well — “great value” — even if you miss all the other points on the page that it labels “Corporate Responsibility.”

Taken collectively, these company profiles offer a portrait of the corporation that almost glows in the dark. It is curious then that this 1000-watt bulb is sometimes hidden under a bushel, requiring the website visitor to click through several layers of links before getting to the point. In view of the disparity between the public perception of corporations and the way they wish to be perceived, why do companies not shout this information from their rooftops — or in this context, blazon it prominently on their home page?

The most obvious answer is that people do not normally visit company websites to peruse this information: they’re there to buy something, contact a service department, apply for a job, or for some other more practical purpose. To their credit, companies probably recognize this and design their main port of entry to enable the user to get where he or she wants to go quickly. But is it possible, too, that corporations are aware of the sort of cognitive dissonance that might result if this sort of information greeted the visitor immediately upon landing on the website? Say for example, that you have exhausted all the menus on a company’s customer service telephone lines and found that none of them offer you an option to talk to a person in real time. Do you really want to be told on the website that the company’s “commitment is to put our customers first by providing excellent service and great communications experiences”?

The main purpose of the “About Us” species of pages seems to be rhetorical, in every sense of the word — and even with a nod to the classical sense, reflecting Aristotle’s definition: rhetoric is “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” But is anyone ever persuaded by these corporate self-reports? It doesn’t seem likely: experience is the main basis on which people form judgments, and presumably the basis on which terms like faceless, greedy, and evil came to be associated with corporations in the first place. Presumably, this fact is not lost on corporations — and they soldier on, fighting the public relations battle on all possible fronts.

I had to give the vocabgrabber a try for my own site after reading this article, and it was pretty easy and fun to see the results.

Here is what The “Adholics” site leaves in it’s visitors mind:

The “Adholics” (You’ll have to click this link, sorry for the trouble)

Give this a try on your site, see what message you are leaving your potential customers with.

Cheers,

Josh Fedie

The “Adholics”
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Get off that path!

When was the last time you invited your marketing agency into your company’s marketing meeting?

Maybe I should back-up a bit here; do you remember the last time your company met to discuss your marketing?

I hope so.

Quick checklist of important questions:

What is your current marketing plan?

Is what you are doing working? How so?

Where is it leading your organization?

Does it fit your brand and reflect who/what your company is?

Is it bringing you the customers you want; is it bringing you customers at all?

How about this:

Whom else (other than your internal marketing department) did you involve in your last meeting?

Surely your company’s President, CEO, COO, maybe your sales director or sales team? (you should have done that)

But how about your receptionist, your accountant, that guy that manages the mail room?

Are they not an integral part of your brand message?

You better believe they are.

All right, so back to my first question: When was the last time you invited your marketing agency into your company’s marketing meeting?

If you haven’t, why not?

I know the reasons:

1. They bill us to show up
2. They are always trying to sell us stuff
3. They don’t bring Coffee
4. Or maybe you just don’t feel that they are a valid enough entity, or invested enough in the future success of your company to show up.

If your answers are 1 or 2, ask them if they will waive the billing for this meeting, and at least give them the chance to listen. I would hope that your agency would be thrilled by the opportunity to really dig in to your unique needs and concerns. And if they are not, then they fall into reason #4; and if that is the case, it is time to find another agency.

So they are invited, and they do attend, now what?

Will they offer solutions?

Yes, they better.

Will these solutions cost money?

Most likely, but that doesn’t mean they are just selling you stuff. If they listen, they will give you solutions that respond to your needs. Then the ball is in your court, do you really want to head these challenges off, or see if they fix themselves?

Hint: Nothing ever fixes itself.

And where does waiting lead? Spur of the moment decisions.

Too many times over the years at past agency’s, I’ve received calls out of the blue from clients asking for my team to produce materials that they “have to have by next week”, and I wonder when did you come up with this need? Does this fit into a plan? (I have not heard anything of this plan) and being eager to please we just produce the requested materials and send them on their merry way.

Or worse, we would learn that materials are being produced independently as a “cost saver” by someone’s sister that went to “design school” and did this “really cheap”, or pictures are taken by someone’s brother who has “a great camera of his own and can take our employee photos for our web site just fine. (It’s 11 mega-pixels!)”

Next thing us marketers know; you are on the 4^th ad, in a series that follows a mystery plan resulting in lackluster returns. Your logo is being stretched and altered outside of your brand guidelines (what are brand guidelines?) and your corporate colors have changed from green and blue to red and yellow.

This is why companies have to totally rebrand themselves 2 years after a rebranding. Urgent needs take the place of strategic thinking and after awhile, you forget what your company stands for, and your customer is confused.

Does any of this sound familiar; are you anywhere near this path?

GET OFF, GET OFF!

As a marketer, I beg of you, involve your marketing group in your planning and discussions about marketing. Allow us to really work for you and follow through on the concepts and ideas we demonstrated when we first courted your company. If we fail to show interest, let us know. If we don’t change, replace us!

You deserve a vested partner in the future success of your company, you deserve enthusiasm and you deserve results.

I hope that this in no way comes across as negative, these are common mistakes made by every company everywhere; you are not alone in your missteps, and it is not too late to fix it; ever.

So the next time you have a marketing discussion in your company, invite your marketing agency.

If they don’t want to come, invite me.

I’ll even bring Coffee.

Cheers,

Josh Fedie

The “Adholics”
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What is this Adholics business?

What do you do when the economy is in the tank?

Start a new business right?!

Actually, I think this just might work.

I have been directing new business at local creative services companies for the last ten years, and I can honestly say that the marketing budgets of the businesses I’ve been speaking with have never been more closely watched.

Or non-existent.

The problem is that they still need to market, and they still need it to be great.

That’s where The Adholics business model I think will succeed. I will have 100% access to top talent across multiple creative service companies, but will lack the expensive overhead of a traditional full service marketing firm.

I am really excited about the future of this company, everything is in development and should be ready for it’s official launch soon!

Stay tuned.

And on one final note; I have to thank my wife for thinking up this great name, it’s just what I needed to get this finally started.

Cheers,

Josh Fedie

The “Adholics”

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