I meant to post this over the weekend. Richmond-based It Takes 2 commissioned me to write an advertorial for The Times-Dispatch, online here.
Free Report: “What’s Your Story?”
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Today’s consumer is drowning in a flood of data. To stay afloat, businesses need a compelling story to lift their brands out of the detritus. The best creative in the world is useless unless it gets results, and it won’t get results if the message doesn’t stick.
That’s where I come in. I’ve written a free report about narrative marketing called “What’s Your Story?” that offers creative writing secrets you can apply to your marketing efforts – and make sure your message sticks.
For your copy, simply click here. Here’s a sampling of what you’ll learn in this valuable report:
- What writers mean when they say “Show, don’t tell”
- How good brands get inside your head with a story
- 3 important rules for creating a good story (and why you should be VERY CAREFUL when you use Rule #3)
- SEO basics, from your meta-data to your content library
I have a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, and I have three years of experience as an in-house copywriter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This twin vantage – creative writing on one hand and business experience on the other – makes me uniquely suited to offer this free report.
And if you ever need help crafting just the right story with your marketing, simply contact me at (804) 545-3403 or jon@sealycommunications.com.
Why companies fail, or: The golden era for small businesses
Monday, February 13, 2012
Atlantic columnist Megan McArdle has an interesting piece about General Motors and why businesses fail. She asks:
Why did the company wait so long and do so little—not once, but time and again—before finally falling into bankruptcy? And what, if anything, does that portend for its future? The questions go beyond GM, a company that’s hardly unique. Why did Blockbuster idly watch Netflix destroy its business? Why did Kodak let digital cameras drive a once-mighty industrial giant into penny-stock territory?
Her conclusion is that failure is related to corporate culture, that there is a “founder’s effect” where newcomers assimilate and corporate cultures tend to remain static. Moreover, she suggests that plenty of companies perform well but have completely dysfunctional cultures, and that when something changes, the internal culture doesn’t adapt, and the company fails.
This sounds plausible. Granted, there’s no substitute for offering a top-notch product or service at a competitive price, for being a wonderful company to do business with, and for getting the word out appropriately. But speaking as someone who has worked for a bunch of companies and interviewed leaders of countless more, internal culture goes a long way. As one auto dealer told me, you put your employees first; if you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers.
We don’t live in a world kind to employees. On one hand, life is incredible compared to life during the Depression — 40-hour workweeks, benefits, labor laws. But on the other hand, we in the younger generations have no pension options, and therefore no reason to stay loyal to one employer. Worse, older generations often face the chopping block first and have a more difficult road to regaining employment. As one older employee told me once, “I feel like I’m walking around with a target on my back.”
In such an environment — where the company is not taking care of you, and where it will ruthlessly cut loose even the longest-tenured employees — what options do employees have but to live in a state of anxiety, or join a labor union (if they can find one), or start their own business. The answer for companies? I have no idea how you reform internal culture — by hiring consultants? Firing your CEO? Clearly, as McArdle wrote about GM, bankruptcy proceedings aren’t a magic bullet.
I think one answer is that small and medium-sized businesses are poised to take over the void from large failing companies. I’ve had meetings with a few business leaders recently who are in charge of smaller companies, and what I’m hearing is that small businesses are spending money again. They’re growing, reinvesting in their foundations (websites, brand development) and their employees.
It’s tough to judge a company’s culture based on a meeting with one of its leaders, but my impression is that employee morale is high, and that these smaller companies are like mammals at the end of the dinosaur era — nimble, hot-blooded and swift of foot, ready to take the crown away from their sluggish forebears.
Client News: Visiting Derma Care
Friday, February 10, 2012
I recently completed some web content for Visiting Derma Care, a new skin-care clinic in Massachusetts, and the site is now up and running. The owner, Shami Kazemi, also asked me to write a sales letter to promote her services to senior living communities. She had this to say of my work:
“With the vendor sales letter you wrote for me, you delivered the message that I wanted to get across. I find you to be a very good listener, and I find your writing to be short, precise, and well said.”
5-Hour Energy: ‘You can con people one time, but nobody pays $3 twice’
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Forbes has a good profile of Manoj Bhargava, the creator of 5-Hour Energy. In the feature, he says of the product’s success: “What we did wasn’t rocket science…It’s not the little bottle. It’s not the placement. It’s the product. You can con people one time, but nobody pays $3 twice.”
This reminds me of one of the most memorable moments in Luke Sullivan’s Hey Whipple Squeeze This, a now-classic book about being an advertising copywriter. Sullivan explains that what advertising can do is get people to try a product once. He argues a campaign should look at results: If after the campaign, you see sales spike and continue to rise, the campaign worked and the product was good; on the other hand, if you see sales spike and then sink, the campaign worked but the product was not good.
Sullivan (I think) was trying to undercut the idea that advertising is a magic bullet, that ad agencies were peddling snake oil to hapless consumers and that a slick magazine ad could deliver repeated results. Clearly, that’s not the case. In every business worth it’s salt, it’s the product (or service!) that counts first.
The Craft of Writing
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
My wife and I went to South Carolina for the holidays, a 10-day trip where we visited each set of parents. We’d turned the heat down in our townhouse, locked the doors, and set the lights on timers, but we didn’t turn the water off. Why? Because we’re inexperienced homeowners.
You know where this is going. When we returned, our house was a cool 56 F and water was leaking through our living room ceiling. Two unrelated problems: the furnace was out because a safety switch was dirty, and a pipe had come loose in the upstairs bathroom.
Water puddled on our bathroom floor, onto our bedroom carpet, through the floor and into our living room. Our living room ceiling is drywall, so the water found the seams and the nails and stained the paint yellow. In one place, where two sheets of drywall met, the paint bubbled down and water dripped onto our couch.
In hindsight, it could have been so much worse, and the experience was good for me as a homeowner. I found our main water switch, for one thing. And I got to do repairs — always fun when you’re young and eager to learn something handy.
I had to call someone to fix our furnace, but I was able to replace the bathroom pipe myself. I had to pull up the carpet in our bedroom and closet to replace some of the wet carpet padding, and I repainted the ceiling. The only thing I didn’t do that first week in January was repair the hole in the ceiling, where one piece of drywall was hanging down.
This week, I made time to fix it. It turns out our house is not that well crafted, and there wasn’t a handy stud to nail the drywall back into. I had to cut away some of the drywall, insert a boar to rig a stud, then put in a drywall patch. It seemed to work fine, and I then was able to put up new tape, joint compound, and paint. Three or four trips to Lowe’s (joint compound and tape, drywall nails, dust mask and eyeglasses, patch kit), fifty bucks, and our house is spic and span.
This story is much longer than it needs to be, and I haven’t touched on my triggering idea — the writer’s craft. Many already have compared a writer’s craft to some other craft. I’m drawn to Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Digging,” in which the speaker reflects on his farming family and concludes: “Between my finger and my thumb / the squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”
A wonderful, related book is Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Richmond’s Matthew Crawford, whose central argument is that manual labor — in particular, the craft behind labor — is spiritually healthy. Crawford uses motorcycle repair and electrical work as his examples, though I imagine the same could be said of woodworking or gardening — or home repair.
Crawford and Heaney are talking about a spiritual art, rather than the humdrum task of commercial writing. But even in commercial writing, it’s a worthwhile comparison. You start by learning your craft, and you gain skill by experience. You’re making something. You’re dedicating yourself to something outside the self. In the case of copywriting, the “beyond self” has to do with the client’s project, whereas in poetry the poem is the “beyond self.” Either way, it’s a suppression of ego, which is kind of a Taoist effort. So maybe the way to understand the craft of writing is really to understand the Taoist concept of “wu wei,” of emptying the self.
That’s in contrast to the stereotype of writers as prima donnas, as the moody, selfish creators who live for their art. I’m not sure whether the selfish writer-genius is a myth, or just an outmoded model for writing in the 21st century.
Update on Komen
Friday, February 3, 2012
While I was writing my last post, Megan McCardle reported on her blog that Komen has reversed its decision to withdraw money from Planned Parenthood. File this away with the Netflix/Quickster reversal. Consumers have bitten back. I for one am thanking my stars that I’m just a small business playing in my sandbox here in Richmond, Va.
Trademarks
Friday, February 3, 2012
Last week, the Huffington Post ran an article about Chipotle’s Super Bowl ad campaign. The phrase “Super Bowl” is trademarked by the NFL, which means you can’t use it in your advertising because it implies an affiliation. When I used to proofread ads for the local newspaper, I spent a good week or two eagle-eyeing grocery ads to make sure they weren’t advertising chips and dip for your Super Bowl party.
To get around the legality, Chipotle has created this:
I love Chipotle. I think they’re one of our great brands right now. What I always harp on about branding is that it’s more than just a logo. A brand is everything from your typeface to how you greet customers. I don’t know how Chipotle is run–franchises?–but I do know that the staff at my local Chipotle in Glen Allen is terrific. The company must take care of them, because they never seem like they’re stuck in a retail job. And believe me, retail sucks.
I like that Chipotle has a sense of humor about it, and I presume the NFL is OK with it. One set of guidelines that we used at the paper, which I think came from the Virginia Press Association, said it was perfectly fine to make fun of the fact that you can’t say “Super Bowl” in an ad. (Along with “Super Bowl,” you can’t say “NFL” or team names such as the “Patriots,” though you can refer to New England.)
The ad begs the question, though, of how stringently to reinforce your guidelines. The National Association of Realtors, for instance, is vicious. If you’re not a member, you’re not a Realtor (never mind that realtor used to be a generic term, until the NAR copyrighted it in the ’50s). In fact, Realtors sometimes insist to beleaguered copyeditors that the word should be written as REALTOR with a registered trademark logo.
Other examples:
Susan G. Komen spends a good bit of money protecting its “for the cure” phrase, though they’ve got more brand-destruction publicity going on these days. About that, I might wonder if there’s some manner of corporate karma at work–i.e. you conduct business in bad faith in one area, and it comes back to bite you somewhere else.
I recently watched a documentary called The Corporation, which took an anti-corporate tone and noted, for one example of corporate insidiousness, that the song “Happy Birthday” is trademarked and that filmmakers were required to pay $10,000 to feature it in a movie.
Finally, Chick-Fil-A, which I also love, took some flak for suing a Vermont business for using the phrase “Eat More Kale.” Here, it’s not just a complete phrase but a concept that is being protected. About this, I would just note that the California Milk Processing Board may want to take drive around my hometown in upstate South Carolina, where one in three billboards asks if you’ve got Jesus.
All of these examples illustrate that we’re living in a new era of copyright vs. open-source, and that corporate brands are bigger than corporations themselves. Wiser minds have had plenty to say about copyright law. All I’ll say is that we’re living in interesting times.
Endorsement: Vanguard customer service
Friday, January 27, 2012
This is not an affiliated link; this is just praise for what I view as exceptional customer service and a model for other large companies to follow.
To coincide with leaving my job in December, my wife and I procured new health insurance, and I rolled my 401(k) into my Vanguard IRA. We also recently bought a car after the engine in my wife’s 2003 Ford Escape blew up for no discernible reason. (We’re happy with our new Subaru.)
With all of this going on, we’ve been dealing with quite a few customer service departments, most of them faulty (and as such will be unnamed here). My new health insurance program left off our dental insurance, even though our broker had submitted the application requesting a dental rider. I called our insurance company, and they wanted me to fax them my original application. (Incidentally, they also wanted me to fax them a copy of a bank statement so I could enroll in automatic billpay.)
Fax? Um, excuse me, 1985 called, and it wants its technology back.
Meanwhile, my wife has been dealing with her physician’s administrator’s to get her prescription information updated with our new insurer. It took at least two phone calls to two separate office administrators, plus a physical visit to the office, and it may or may not be taken care of.
Meanwhile, she’s also trying to coordinate between the car dealer, the local DMV, and the bank to make sure the lien information on our Subaru is recorded correctly. This morning, she discovered the bank had the VIN number wrong, that they had an 8 instead of an H. The conversation went something like this:
Bank: “Did you say, 8 as in Hector?”
Wife: “No, H as in Hector.”
Bank: “Oh, we had an 8 recorded.”
Finally, my web hosting email was backlogged yesterday. I received an email around 2 p.m. that someone sent at 11 a.m. I sent a couple of test emails to and from jon[at]sealycommunications.com, and there was a good 30-45-minute delay. When I called my hosting company’s IT support, the number had been disconnected. I emailed them, and went back and forth through several emails. (“Can you send us the meta-data from the header in the delayed emails?” “Sure.” “Actually, can you send us the entire emails as EML files?” “Sure.” “There was no header data in those EML files.”) I called again and was told, “Nope, everything looks fine. Our servers might have been a little slow, but an email queue is normal. Thirty minutes is a bit long, but it shouldn’t happen again.”
What kind of response is that? Where’s the customer service? This is my business here. I had just sent some materials to a prospective client, and how unprofessional would it be for me to send him a second email from my Yahoo account saying, “Hey, I’m a small-time chump and my email doesn’t work. Did you get everything?”
So it was with such relief this morning when I called Vanguard to see about rolling over my 401(k), and immediately got through to a friendly, capable person. After taking my information, she got me on a conference call with my previous investment company, sat patiently while I entered my account number and password and played 20-questions with their automated system, then assisted me in closing that account.
I know it’s in Vanguard’s best interest to have me roll my money into an IRA with them. But that’s business. It’s in every business’s best interest to bring in clients and to keep them, yet it’s astounding how many businesses are utterly inept at such a basic function as customer service.
Shameless self-promotion: In short, it’s my policy as a copywriter to make your life easier, and as a businessman and a consumer, I believe that starts with good customer service. Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with.
What it means for advertising to be integrated into our culture
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Two articles caught my eye this weekend. First, in the February issue of Esquire, the 1,000 words column, “A Short Prayer for Advertising” (not online yet), is about how advertising has been integrated into our lives. Years ago, you could draw a distinction between life and advertising, content and sponsorship. Ads were the commercials between shows.
Today, ads are integrated into the shows. As the Esquire writer notes, Staples will buy script-time in “The Office” rather than a commercial. Moreover, we’re all in the brand-building business, creating an ethos for ourselves online and in person. What used to be a person’s reputation is now his brand. This is a consumerist trap like The Matrix, only there’s no pill to get out.
Maybe this is just a new development of an old theme. I don’t know enough to comment on the recent SOPA/PIPA legislation, but I will say that the production of good content is not free, even though the Internet allows us open-access. A recent documentary about the New York Times notes that readers used to get newspapers for much less than the cost of production, and advertisers subsidized the bulk of the cost in exchange for market reach. Now, market reach has splintered so advertisers have cut back and the cost of newspaper production is being passed to the consumer.
The point is, someone has to pay for content — consumers or advertisers. Consumers have certain expectations about the value of that content, so producers are turning to advertisers to ratchet up profits. Does that mean the quality of content suffers? In the realm of journalism, I’d say so. Journalism is an endangered species because not enough readers are interested in hard issues, like zoning board meetings, and advertisers want captivated readers.
So, in the print world, producers are putting out upbeat, soft or highly-biased content, often mixed with canned material, which is good enough to maintain audience for the advertisers but falls short of greatness. On the other hand, consumers have shown they will pay for quality. Look at HBO, or The Sun Magazine. These forums exist without advertising, and their content is well above average.
My guess is that in the future, 100% ad-free content will be at a premium, but will appeal to smaller and smaller audiences as advertising becomes more and more integrated into our culture. As an example, here’s an excerpt from an old post from Marginal Revolution about the price of movie tickets: “Maybe the whole theatrical thing is a shadowplay for popcorn sales and advertising for a subsequent DVD release.” The Esquire column too noted that movies could be advertising for DVDs, and that CDs are advertising for concerts and T-shirt sales. Is it insidious if the consumer likes the advertising, for the bait piece to be the main event? And what does it mean for our culture when advertising is entertainment? Is it a sign of our total decadence?
The other article that caught my eye was this piece about a recent failed Twitter campaign by McDonald’s:
While McDonald’s own tweets on the topic tended along the lines of “When u make something w/pride, people can taste it,” actual customers were less inclined to toe the company line. “I haven’t been to McDonalds in years, because I’d rather eat my own diarrhea,” read one top tweet by @Muzzafuzza. Another user, @Jetsonjetsonjet, referred readers toa viral video of a mouse crawling through a bag of hamburger buns.
Advertising in today’s world involves a letting-go of the brand, of allowing the consumer to participate. Dwight Shrute could pull away from the episode to give a straightforward plug for Staples, a la The Truman Show, but the viewer would lose her willing suspension of disbelief and change the channel. The advertiser had to allow the writers some degree of freedom. But with that freedom comes the possibility of a backfire, a la McDonald’s. Both advertisers and consumers are in uncharted waters today.