The 6-word copywriting challenge

Recently, in a four-way e-mail conversation with friends, someone mentioned talking to a teacher from our high school days. When my name came up, the teacher described his memory of me in six words: “wavy hair, glasses, big into theater.”

Wow. I didn’t know how to take that – the very core of who I am, or was, compressed into six highly descriptive words. When I shared my dismay, one of my friends referred me to a book that dealt with this very idea.

It’s called Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

Here are some excerpts from the book, which I’m quoting from Amazon.com:

Some writers tell their stories with humor and self-deprecation:

>> Woman Seeks Men–High Pain Threshold.
>> My first concert: Zappa. Explains everything.
>> Aging late bloomer yearns for do-over.

As you would expect, there are many bitter or bittersweet references to relationships gone bad:

>> Girlfriend is pregnant, my husband said.
>> Just in: boyfriend’s gay. Merry Christmas.
>> Let’s just be friends, she said.

Some lucky people sent memoirs that radiate contentment.

>> Alone at home, cat on lap.
>> Hope my obituary spells “debonair” correctly.
>> Wasn’t born a redhead; fixed that.

There is the contingent who describe themselves without judgment:

>> Gave commencement address, became sex columnist.
>> Mormon economist marries feminist. Worlds collide.
>> Still lost on road less traveled.

And last but not least, the philosophers who distill life experience into a greater truth:

>> Palindromic novels fall apart halfway through.
>> Cheese is the essence of life.
>> Wandering imagination opens doors to paradise.

I occurred to me that this would be a top-notch copywriting exercise. No, I won’t ask you to write about yourself. That’s just too hard. Instead, pick a product, any product, and try to describe it in exactly six words.

Here’s one for beer: “Low carbs. Makes date look great.”

You can do this on your own, but I’d really like to see what you come up with. Post your six-word masterpiece below.

How to write the “classic direct mail package”

Advertising direct mail takes many forms: envelope packages, self-mailers, catalogs, magalogs, flyers, postcards, and more.

That’s one of the advantages of direct mail. You don’t have the format restrictions of magazine print ads, the time restrictions of radio or TV ads, or the technical restrictions of e-mail and Web site advertising.

As long as you comply with basic postal guidelines, you can send pretty much anything through the mail. This is good for products and services that require a lot of information to convince people to buy or try. But it can be a challenge for copywriters and designers without significant experience in creating ad mail.

Let’s take a quick look at how to write and design the granddaddy of all direct mail formats, the classic direct mail package.

The most important principle to understand is “divide and conquer.” That means that when you’re creating a direct mail package, you should understand the purpose of each element and allow that element to do its particular job.

Outer Envelope. This is the distinctive feature of the classic direct mail package: an envelope that carries all the other elements through the mail. It’s called the “outer envelope” or OE to distinguish it from the “reply envelope.”

The appearance of the OE can be anywhere on a scale from plain, with little or no copy or graphics, to bold, with lots of “teaser” copy and images. Plain or bold is a strategic choice based on what you believe will get the most people to open the envelope and read the contents. Read more

“Bite the wax tadpole,” said the copywriter.

Writing clear copy is hard.

One reason is that everyone speaks a different language. Something that seems clear to you may not be clear to someone else. Let me give you a few extreme examples:

• Coors created the slogan “Turn it loose.” It made sense in the U.S., but when it appeared in Spanish, it was understood to mean “Suffer from diarrhea.” Not good for beer sales.

• Clairol introduced the “Mist Stick” curling iron into the German market, but later found out that the word “mist” is slang for “manure.” Turns out few Germans wanted a “manure stick.”

• Pepsi’s upbeat slogan, “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” translated poorly in China, where it meant “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.” Not so upbeat.

• Ever heard of Perdue’s chicken? Their slogan, “It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken” translated into Spanish as “It takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.” I won’t even comment on that one.

• Coca-Cola is pretty savvy at global marketing. But when they took their product to China, the name was read as “Ke-kou-ke-la”, meaning “Bite the wax tadpole” or “female horse stuffed with wax.” Huh?

• Maybe the most outrageous example is from the Parker Pen company, which sold a ballpoint pen in Mexico with ads bragging “It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you.” Unfortunately, it was translated to say, “It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.” I should hope not!

Read more

AH-HA! Break though creative block in 4 steps

You’ve just been handed an assignment to write a direct mail package for a new product your client is introducing. It’s an important launch. You’ve been asked to be fresh, dynamic, and creative.

So, you pour yourself a cup of steaming coffee, turn on your computer, and settle in to give birth to an epic campaign. However, when your fingers hit the keyboard … nothing happens.

Nothing.

You write a few words. Delete. Then write a few more. Nothing. You try again and again to piece together a complete sentence, but you begin to realize that you have no idea what to say. You have no ideas. You’re dry.

Now you start to sweat and find yourself glancing frantically at the clock every five minutes. You can feel that deadline creeping up on you. Your stomach turns and you begin to wonder why you ever took on this assignment. You wonder why you’re even in this business.

And still the clock is ticking ….

Sound familiar? It has happened to all of us in the creative business. Some call it creative block. Others call it a slump. But whatever the term, the result is the same: frustration, stress, missed deadlines, or poor quality work.

The problem here is more than a tight deadline. It’s our society’s concept of creativity. Generally, we think of creativity as that mysterious “AH-HA” experience, where an idea seems to leap magically into our head in a bright flash of inspiration. But this “AH-HA” feeling is just a synapse firing in our brain. It’s an electro-chemical event over which we have no control.

However, what we CAN control are the events that lead up to and follow that sudden spark. Creativity isn’t just a moment. It’s a process. And despite what you might think, the process isn’t disorganized at all. In fact, it follows definite steps that you can apply to your everyday work to help free your mind and unleash your creative powers. Read more

B2B copywriting vs. B2C copywriting

Recently, I ran across a short interview I did with Inside Direct Mail several years ago about the difference between copywriting for business to business advertising (B2B) and business to consumer advertising (B2C).

Given the growth in B2B, and the fact that I came off sounding reasonably intelligent, I thought I should reprint the interview here on my blog.

***

What is one of the key differences between B2B and consumer writing?

Business buyers often aren’t spending their own money. That’s good and bad. Good because they’re more open to big-ticket purchases. Bad because they usually have to get approval from others. In fact, you must sometimes talk to many layers of a company before making a sale – decision makers, buyers, and end users. All of which means you have to provide more purchase justification than you do for consumers.

Two other challenges also face the B2B marketer:

First, the buying process is often complicated, following a formal, rigid pattern of bids, budgets, bargaining, and analysis.

Second, you often have to get past a ruthless mail room or secretary before your message reaches your prospect.

However, these differences too often overshadow the similarities. Remember, business buyers are people with the same basic problems, fears, feelings, and dreams as everyone else. They just have those problems, fears, feelings, and dreams at work instead of at home. So while your products may be less sexy than in consumer marketing, you must never separate the sizzle from the steak. Read more

Learn to write headlines at the grocery store!

You can read books, attend seminars, and study famous ads to learn how to write headlines.

Or you can just go to the grocery store.

Standing in the checkout line, you will see some of the best examples of headline writing on the covers of popular magazines. Why? Because these publishers know that to sell magazines, they have to capture your attention fast. So the top magazines have become very, very good at writing headlines.

Now for the record, I don’t read these magazines. But my wife does. And she squirrels them away all over the house. So I have a massive collection to dive into when I’m looking for some inspiration.

Here are some good examples from two Glamour magazine covers:

PSSST! Why guys love your body exactly as is – Read their head-to-toe lust list on p. 220

SEXY HAIR IN 10 MINUTES (OR LESS)

Find your best birth control – Intimate advice you’ll never hear from your doctor

Men’s new sexual needs – Thanks for sharing, guys!

15 SUPER HONEST ANSWERS TO YOUR MOST PRIVATE HEALTH QUESTIONS

Major beauty miracles! All the skin and hair secrets you’ve been begging us for

10 things no woman should feel guilty about

Most of these are “fascinations,” a type of headline that acts as a teaser. Each headline promises interesting information, but reveals nothing about the content. Notice the specifics, alliteration, and rhythm.

Also notice the double whammy of headlines such as “Major beauty miracles! All the skin and hair secrets you’ve been begging us for.” This is typeset as a two-part headline, the first part to grab your attention and the second part to give you more detail.

Not all headlines should be written like this. There are many other approaches. But when you’re looking for ideas and inspiration, go shopping. Major magazine editors have turned provocative headline writing into an art form.

Ad copywriting tip: Tell an interesting story

Some of the best advertisements are built around a story.

This is an advanced copywriting technique and takes a deft hand to pull off, so I don’t recommend it to novice copywriters. But when you can do it convincingly, it’s a thing of beauty.

Here’s an ad I ran across while rifling through some folders this morning. This is probably too small to read, but you can click on it to download a PDF image of the entire ad.

Let’s take a look at a few things that make this ad work. Read more

Boost response by positioning your offer

In direct marketing, everything is built around offers. In fact, to create a true direct response ad in any medium, you must do 3 specific things:

1. Make an offer.
2. Provide sufficient information to accept the offer.
3. Provide an easy means of responding to the offer.

So, in any direct mail piece or ad, the offer is the heart of the message. But while a rose may be a rose, an offer is not an offer.

An offer is more than a fixed monetary exchange. A 50% discount is not the same as “buy one widget, get the second widget free.” In dollar terms, these are identical. But how you position this deal creates different perceptions and different response rates.

Offer positioning is a vital step in the copywriting process. And businesses should be open to suggestions for more powerful ways to position offers.

Let’s look at an example.

Imagine you have a magazine subscription offer. The magazine sells for $3 an issue and 12 monthly issues are $36. The publisher wants to test a price reduction of 50%. Here are a few ways you can position this offer:

• 50% off
• Save $18
• Only $1.50 an issue
• Save $1.50 per issue
• 6 issues free
• 12 issues for the price of 6
• Less than 5 cents a day

This is more than wordsmithing. Buyers perceive each of these offer positions differently, each with a unique perceived value.

And what’s the value of testing different ways to position your offer? Better response. For example, most tests show that a “buy one get one free” offer will beat a “half off offer.” Why? Greater perceived value. Getting something free carries more psychological weight than saving money, even when the monetary value is identical. “Free” is easier to understand and more tangible that a percentage savings, which is an intellectual mathematical concept.

The takeaway? Don’t accept your offer at face value. Try different ways to position the offer to make it feel more valuable.

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