The times, they are a-changing

I haven't posted in a while, and this is why. I've had some pretty monumental changes in my life recently. (New work situations, new city, heck new province all together.) And along with that came the big question: Who am I now?

I won't answer that question here. In part because it's personal, but also because unless you know me really well, the answer likely wouldn't interest you.

All of this is to say: I'm discontinuing StrategicText. It doesn't suit my life as it is now. If you've come to love posts about copywriting, I highly recommend following Copyblogger. If you like online marketing strategy, Mitch Joel is still, in my opinion, one of the very best to follow.

As for me, I've started something new. It's entirely aimed at Sudbury, Ontario based businesses. It's called Impact! The Sudbury Marketing Report. If marketing in Northern Ontario is of interest to you, I hope you'll check it out.

Thanks for coming. To everyone who's ever commented or linked to anything I wrote, an even bigger thank you.

Cheers,

Mario Parisé

Persuasion is like energy

You can't make energy. No one can. It simply exists. But that doesn't stop physicists and engineers from harnessing energy wherever they can find it and using it to build earth shaking technologies that completely change the course of history.

Persuasion is similar.

You can't persuade people into buying something. No one can. People either have desire or they don't. Marketers, however, have the interesting job of taking desire and shaping it so that people express those desires by buying whatever it is we're selling.

This is an important distinction. If people don't desire what you're selling, you don't stand a chance.

However, people also don't know what they want. None of us do. No one knew they wanted an iPod until Apple made them so damn sexy. But we did want more convenient access to our music, we wanted the status and coolness that an iPod offered, we wanted to tell ourselves a story that we were hip music lovers who could afford to splurge on a tiny device that played music. We just didn't know it.

That's why persuasion is so tricky. You can't ask people what they want, because no one really knows what they want until it shows up, and by that point someone else has cornered the market. You can't just wrap slick marketing around something no one wants, because fundamentally people aren't that stupid. But when you discover an unfulfilled desire and produce a product that meets that desire, even indirectly (like an mp3 player that makes people feel cool), magic happens.

You can't create new markets. You can't persuade people to buy a damn thing. But like a physicist, you can discover new markets and harness desire in a way that makes it seem like you created sales out of thin air.

Ethics and Trust

Ghostwriting: If you hire someone else to take your brilliance, your insights, your experiences, and create written work that you then take sole credit for, that's ok. The writer simply gave you a voice. If you hire someone to do all the research, develop all the insight, use their own experiences, and you still take sole credit, that's not ok. You're lying. More to the point, people won't trust you when you get caught.

User tracking: When users opt-in to your services and you clearly explain that you will track their information for some type of use, that's ok. If you hide it in fine print, sneakily load cookies on their systems, or otherwise avoid asking for explicit permission, it's wrong. More to the point, when the user finds out they won't trust you anymore (if they ever did).

Advertising: There's absolutely nothing wrong with advertising, unless you use nefarious user tracking to better target the ads, intentionally disrupt the user's experience with the ads, or otherwise try to trick the user into being more receptive. When you do any of those things, you lose trust.

Selling to kids: Don't. Sell to their parents. There are laws about this stuff for a reason; don't try to find the loop holes. Seriously. It's wrong and, you guessed it, you'll lose trust.

I could go on, but I'm sure you see the pattern. In everything you do as a business, in every touch point you make with your customers and prospects, ask yourself: Am I earning trust, or abusing it? You can't get away with abusing trust anymore. You might win the law suits, but you'll lose the sales.

It's 10:34 a.m. Do you know where your ad dollars are going?

Measurement. Return on Investment. Cost effectiveness. These are jargon words that business people use to ask one simple question: What am I getting for my money?

In this day and age, where money is tight and consumers are wary, it should be a sin to not be tracking your advertising spending. Do you know where it's going? What works? What doesn't? How much each new sale is costing you in advertising dollars? Do you know where your customers are coming from? What convinced them to buy from you?

There are many ways to find out. If you're advertising online, you can track every click and understand exactly where you're losing them - and fix it.

If you're selling through direct mail, you can measure what geographical locations respond best, you can test different headlines, pictures, and copy - and optimize them based on results.

Similar tests can be done in print, in radio, on TV, in person, and any other form your communication takes. It's simply a matter of identifying all the variables that you have some control over, and testing them.

Is there any excuse for not doing this? Any justification for shooting in the dark, for spending money and just hoping time and time again that it will be effective?

What are you getting for your advertising money? Isn't it time you found out?

Science or Art?

Fact or fiction? Faith or logic? These questions are implicit in everything a marketer does. Did you know that? And for the most part, there is no easy answer.

Just take a look at advertising's biggest names. David Ogilvy and Claude C. Hopkins are both legends. So are Bill Bernbach, Mary Wells Lawrence, and more recently Alex Bogusky. And yet these two groups are completely different.

Ogilvy and Hopkins would tell you to measure everything and use facts, data, and logic to drive your work. Never guess. Never do anything unless it's in order to improve your bottom line.

Berbach, Lawrence, and Bogusky would all tell you to let your inner passion and creativity wrestle for the attention of your prospects, grabbing hold of it and doing whatever you can to not let go.

I'm oversimplifying of course, and chances are none of them would use the exact words I have, but the point remains: Do you let careful measurement and optimization drive your work, or are you guided by pure creativity and instinct?

Is advertising primarily salesmanship, or entertainment with a purpose?

In that spirit, two pieces for you to consider. The first, Scientific Advertising by the above mentioned Claude C. Hopkins. Turns out you can read it for free.

The second, a video from the opening of the 2007 Hatch Awards (hat tip Ari and Holden), which arguably demonstrates a certain lunacy involved in over measurement and testing.

If you could have any of the people above in your court, who would you choose? Would you want the rational scientists, or the brilliant creatives?

Photo credit: csicop.org

Does your brand have a mythology?

When the pilot episode of the hit show Lost first aired on September 22, 2004, it appeared to be a show about a group of survivors of a plane crash. For the most part, the story surrounded their efforts to survive the first few days on an a seemingly uninhabited island. Oh, and an unseen monster mauled the pilot to death.

Since that time, every episode has allowed the mystery surrounding the island to increase just a little bit. It's become evident that the miracle of surviving a plane crash of such a magnitude might just be the least interesting thing about the show. As the mystery continues to develop, loyal fans are dragged into a never ending spiral of mysticism, myth, and magic.

Which is exactly why the show is such a success.

Before writing a single episode, creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof wrote a sort of bible that described the mythology of the show for a span of 5 to 6 seasons. From day one, they knew what the next several years were going to look like and wove an intricate story that would keep fans wanting more.

What would happen if you did the same with your brand? What if every touch point, every interaction, every product sold, and every ad displayed, offered just a hint of myth? What if, one morsel at a time, your brand's story developed into a grand mystery? Would people talk about it? Debare it? Try to predict your next move? What if the grand idea wasn't fully revealed for years, if ever?

The old adage in entertainment is to keep them wanting more. When's the last time your brand did that?

Write what's not there

"Don't play what's there, play what's not there." - Miles Davis

The other day, I was watching a documentary called Helvetica. It's a great watch for any typography nuts out there.

At one point, they're interviewing typography designers and someone says that when you're designing a letter, it's not about what you put in. It's not about the shape of the letter at all, but rather the shape of the white space around it. It's the emptiness that gives the letter its beauty, its grace, its structure. Anyone can draw a letter; it takes greatness to draw what's not there.

This is when the Miles Davis quote above came roaring back with sudden clarity. Anyone can make noise, and with practice anyone can hit notes and strum chords and even keep a beat. Great musicians though play what isn't there. The emptiness around your notes, the stuff you're not doing, is what transforms noise into music. This is why amateur musicians are obsessed with learning grand solos and rock anthems, where as the greats keep it simple. It's not what you put in, it's what you leave out.

The same holds true in writing.

Imagine if those Volkswagen ads had read, "Our cars are small, ugly, but well made and well priced." It's straight forward enough, arguably gets the point across, but it's nowhere near as good as "Think Small." It's the words that aren't there that make the line so powerful.

What we don't say, the words and syllables left out, are more important than the ones we put in. Carefully choosing what not to say brings clarity, meaning, and power to the words we keep.

When did being crass become clever?

I'm continuously amazed at the kinds of ads that get high praise. Take the above ad from Veet, for example. It's a bad pun using a slang term for pubic hair to very loudly and rudely tell the previous U.S. president to bugger off. When I saw this, my immediate thought was this was completely tasteless. Public opinion, though, as judged by blogs and newsletters, seems to disagree with me on this point.

Here's another example surrounding the inauguration: During Obama's speech, I was completely taken aback by how easily he attacked the previous administration. Here's a ceremony where all living presidents are marched in, the outgoing president has to face a crowd of people all too pleased to see him leave, and then sit there and listen to his replacement talk about how much better things are going to be now. It's an awkward situation. The polite thing to do would be to not discuss the previous administration at all. Yet, Obama did not hesitate to take jabs at Mr. Bush.

How did we get this way? How is it that our leaders (both in politics and in business) can be so crass, so rude, so lacking of good taste, and still be applauded for it? Why don't we hold them up to higher standards?

"Goodbye Bush" might have been worth a chuckle amongst college students, but it's hardly appropriate on the world stage. I'm as critical of the man as anyone else (probably more so), but there's a time and place. As creators of culture, we should be holding ourselves up to a higher standard.

Settle all writing style disputes with Google Fight

Visualise or Visualize? Should I write "text message" or "txt msg"? These are questions that plague writers every day.

If you're writing a thesis, your best bet is to pick up a style guide and see what the rule is. But if you're writing copy, job #1 is being colloquial. Which is to say, writing in the way people write.

The Disclaimer: Yes, I know this method could have alot of problems if taken too literally. Use your good judgment. If you were writing about post-it notes, "txt msg" wouldn't make any sense.

For the past few months, whenever I've debated what the best way to write something was, I've relied more and more on Google Fight.

It's pretty simple. Type in two terms, click "Fight!", and see who comes out victorious. The victor is the most popular usage between the two.

Your college professor might not like it, but if you're getting paid to write ads or other marketing material, you can't afford not to do testing like this. Especially when "txt msg" is 610% more popular than "text message".

Dear Andy Nulman

Your blog, Pow! Right Between The Eyes!, is a great read. A fantastic read. A surprisingly powerful read.

Your new book is probably just as good.

Which is why I can't help but ask for a free copy of it, and recommend that anyone reading StrategicText do the same.

If I've managed to make it in on the list, please send it on over to Mario Parise, c/o Twist Image, 49 Spadina Avenue, Suite 507, Toronto, Ontario M5V 2J1.

Dear reader of StrategicText

If you have a blog, you too can get a free copy of Andy's new book. Head on over to this post to get all the details.