There’s been a rash of controversy about whether the new Old Spice campaign with Isaiah Mustafah, almost universally admired for its audacity and humour, will prove to be successful. There is no doubt that it’s a viral smash hit, but there is critique of the campaign around whether this will translate into increased sales for the brand.
We’d love to know the goals of the campaign as set by the creative and strategy teams who worked on it. Only then, and only in time, do we think it will be possible to evaluate the success of the campaign for the brand. If it turns out that the strategy was weak, the humour most likely won’t pay off.
It’s absolutely true that, as Mark Federman, a researcher at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, notes:
“We collectively in our society like good storytelling. We like cleverness. We like unusual humour and we like humour juxtaposed with surreality.”
It’s absolutely not true that our collective love of funny and clever makes us more likely to buy brands. Not unless it’s tied to smart strategy that gets at our wants and needs. At the end of the day, it’s results that matter. In this case, product sales. Nothing else—neither clever strategy nor sparkling creative—is as important. Briefs that lose track of the broad business goals they are meant to achieve are very likely to fail. Because of this, the relationship that we advocate in our practice is goals drive strategies; strategies drive creative.
Our guess at the strategy behind the new Old Spice campaign is that they’re trying to break out of the deodorant-of-choice-for-the-50+-set box and taking a calculated risk of offending a small share of their current market for the sake of chasing a larger market (a younger segment that is more engaged by viral promotion, say) in the long term. In this case, the current campaign is likely only the first step in a larger repositioning strategy. We’ll have to watch and see if this is the case.
From our point sample of one (Craig), well, I’ll let Craig say it:
“I can say for sure that I have not given a moment’s thought to Old Spice for many, many years but I certainly have done since this campaign launched. I’m not troubled by the campaign in any way and admire the creative execution a lot. So does this improve my opinion of the brand? You bet. Does it make me more likely to buy an Old Spice product this month or next? No way. But does it lay a foundation for me to understand the brand in a different way and possibly buy in the future? Maybe.”
Interessado, as we say around here (very cleverly).
We’ve had the privilege of helping two very cool people launch their brand websites: Carrie McCarthy of Style Statement and Toby Nangle of Nangle+Partners.
Carrie and Toby—despite their very different businesses and audiences—came just as we like ‘em: passionate, intelligent, open-minded, and right on board the idea of strategy driving execution. We developed branding plans for both Carrie and Toby before jumping into tactical work, and it was thrilling to see things progress according to these blueprints.
Congratulations Carrie and Toby for your awesome sites, and big kudos for design and development to Vivien at VG Universe Design (for Style Statement) and Travis and Susie at Hop Studios (for Nangle+Partners).
Every brand has challenges. The best brands—actually, the people behind the best brands—know this, identify the challenges, and come up with solutions to at least minimize them and at best overcome them. Mediocre brands endure a perennial state of a problem’s existing but being ignored in the hopes it will somehow take care of itself or that people—read, audiences—won’t mind too much.
When a brand problem occurs on its public-facing website, it’s a big deal because websites obviously represent such a crucial touchpoint. Following are issues on all too many brand websites:
failure to state up front what the brand or company is and does, and/or to explain this enough,
insistence on brand features to the exclusion of benefits,
presenting in a bland, cold, or otherwise unappealing tone,
overestimation of the amount of time users want to spend on the site,
failure to address audiences’ needs, manifested in non-user-centric navigation and/or site behaviour, aka ...
designing the site according to internal understanding of the brand/company and not according to what audiences want to learn and find.
All of these mistakes are very easy to make, and again, they’re commonly allowed to persist because they’re “not dealbreakers.” Says who? Certainly not the visitors who walk away because of them, since they’re not talking—they’re gone.
Does your website suffer from any of them? We’ll be reviewing ours over the next few months to see where we can improve (do let us know if you have suggestions), but in the meantime, here are a couple of examples of brands that have taken the challenge of confronting—and we think, solving—a major issue they faced.
Brand:Bookriff (currently in closed BETA) Challenge: Convey a very cool but rather complicated idea as simply as possible so visitors don’t lose interest/get confused/feel it’s too complicated and navigate away from the site. Solution: Main benefit is written in bold—“build your own book”—with clear explanatory text right below. But most importantly, they include a prominent link to a high-quality how-to video for visitors who would rather learn audio-visually, as well as a link allowing them to try out the concept. We’re excited about Bookriff!
Brand:VisionCritical Challenge: Bring humanity, energy, and warmth to what could be a very cold, impersonal site (VisionCritical is an online panel research and interactive technology company). Market research sites are often plagued by jargon and boring language. Solution: On balance, ambitious and interesting copy and content. Lots and lots of video with employees talking like people really do (not canned) about what moves them and excites them. Sometimes the language gets carried away, but for the most part it’s way, way above average for its sector. Take the following for example:
With Vision Critical, grassroots insight is always on, poised to deliver when you need it. Discover and amplify what moves your biggest fans. Find out what your customers want right now. Find out what little touches keep them loyal. See trendsetting customers for what they are: a wealth of winning strategy waiting to be tapped.
Our interactive technology, strategic research and global panels turn customer groundswell into authentic, resonant brands that move with confidence.
Right now.
Because when your customers take the lead, so does your brand.
What comes across with VisionCritical is passion—and that’s a huge achievement considering how dryly the brand could have come across with another treatment. Another nice touch is their interview series: check one out at http://j.mp/6atLaN
Way back in 2007, Mailchimp, a company specializing in sending clients’ email newsletters, published an excellent article on what works and doesn’t work for email subject lines. We still go back to that article sometimes because it’s so helpful, so we thought we share some of its highlights and provide its link.
The article is based on Mailchimp’s study of open rates for over 200 million emails.
Highlights Don’t
Don’t include “free”—it’ll trigger spam filters—and avoid “help,” “percent off,” and “reminder”—they reduce open rates.
Don’t keep repeating the same subject line from campaign to campaign. It’s good to keep basic branding intact for some consistency but then it’s important to include a focus on new content. So if your September email subject line was “Bookcentral Study Shows No Interest in New Online Bookstore” you could make the next one “Bookcentral’s Top Reading Picks for 2009.”
Don’t send too frequently—everyone has too much information to process.
Don’t using splashy promotional phrases, CAPS, or exclamation marks.
Do
Do keep subject lines short—50 characters or less.
Do make it clear that your information is timely (e.g., details on an upcoming conference’s speakers).
Do make it a “newsy” headline with information designed to pique your readers’ curiosity (then make sure you satisfy their curiosity in the newsletter).
Do put yourself in your readers’ shoes—they are pressed for time and they’re only going to open your email if the subject line is relevant, respectful, interesting, and useful.
Mailchimp ends with this advice: “When it comes to subject lines, don’t sell what’s inside. Tell what’s inside.”
A long time ago I lived in Maseru, Lesotho, and there was this fabulous restaurant we’d go to for celebrations called Fat Alice. I particularly remember the restaurant’s creamy hummus garnished with kalamata olives, crunchy wee pickles, and smoked paprika, not the least because my parents would reserve the olives and pickles for me and my brother. Anyway, we always left there stuffed and happy. Before we returned to Canada, Fat Alice made us a gift of their poster, which we framed. As you can see from the pictures, the restaurant’s slogan was “Fat Alice’s Restaurant: Nobody leaves here thin.”
I love it for its boldness and sense of humour. It would have been awful if it had been paired with a shmarmy image, but it wasn’t—the picture is romantic, soft, and playfully suggestive.
Now on the other hand, I reacted negatively to Coke’s 2009 slogan: Open Happiness.
I don’t enjoy the contrived nostalgia, the nod to a “simpler” time (perhaps the 1950s). I don’t like the equation of drinking cola to happiness. I feel like they’re trying to con me in an arch sort of way. But I’m not the target audience.
Craig sent me to the website of Herrainco, a design shop in Richmond, BC, after he checked out the way they presented their portfolio of work.
All I can say is WOW. No wait, I can say more. Beautiful pictures, perfect balance of spare (layout) and lush (photography), and small but clear invitation to read more about the project. The slim gold back and forward arrows are a nice touch, too.
We’re thinking about refreshing our portfolio. Any impressive examples you’ve seen lately? Send ‘em our way.
Craig sent me a gem of a post by Lynda Partner on the OneDegree website: Cut the Blah Blah Blah—When Less is the New More. The post advocates stripping writing until only the most necessary, powerful words remain, allowing meaning and core messages to shine through to readers. Here’s an excerpt:
In 1868, writer Mark Twain said
“Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”
In an age where attention spans are shrinking, and 140 character sound bites are all you are allowed on marketing vehicles like Twitter, it is once again time for writing less to become a valued marketing skill.
When you’re excited about something your business is doing—a new initiative or product, for example—it’s tempting to want to include in your press release every one of the 34 reasons it’s so great. And explain each reason in depth. And quote all the people who were involved in the idea. And give background. And context. And related information.
But guess what?
Most people will abandon your press release unless you relinquish your dream of including everything you’d ideally like to say. Our society is time-starved as well as compelled to cram as many sources of information in as possible—we are news grazers, not gourmands.
What I love about Partner’s post is that she includes ten tips to apply to the way you describe your own business that will help you distill your message to its absolute core. Here’s Tip #7:
Count how many times you used your product or company name or the word “we.” If it’s more than once in every 500 words, ask yourself if you are writing about you or for your reader. For every statement you write, answer the question “what does this mean for my reader?”
I’m going to sit with those ten tips tomorrow and chew them over. I want to see where the exercise gets me. If nothing else it will be exercise, and exercise is the only way to become a better writer.
When you’re considering a new or refreshed website, it can be tempting to think about design first. It’s natural: we want to appear attractive to our audiences, and generally we have very definite ideas of what this looks like. So often website design takes up a lot of energy, time, and resources at the beginning, and sometimes it leaves little left over for other elements of the website. Like copy.
Don’t get us wrong ... we love great design and see it as a major source of competitive advantage. But copy is king on the web. Copy is content, and content is what everyone is looking for. We are looking for relevant information we need now presented in a logical way that respects that we have no time.
What are the implications of this?
Don’t
Don’t get fixated on design at the expense of content.
Don’t leave content to the last minute.
Don’t think flashy design will make up for sloppy or lackluster content.
Don’t think copy you write on paper translates seamlessly to a website: different mediums need different approaches.
Do
Do see design and content as inextricably, happily linked.
Do see design as having a priority: to support content effectively.
Do work on content preferably before or at least at the same time as design. At the recent Mesh 2009 conference, 37signals’ Ryan Singer put it this way: “Interface design is 90% copywriting ... good writing is good design.”
Do place your copy strategically according to the way users navigate text on sites.
To this last point, eyetracking studies provide important clues as to how to match copy and design to users’ behaviours. The study Eyetrack III (conducted by The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism and New Media, and Eyetools Inc.) “observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content.”
Some of the most significant findings from Eyetrack III for web designers and anyone with a website are:
Users’ eyes are attracted to text, not graphics “both in order viewed and in overall time spent looking at it.”
Users look first at the upper portion of a webpage—left first, then right—and give less attention to the lower portions of a page. So make sure you reference your most important messages up top, probably through headlines and subheads.
Large type promotes scanning, while smaller type promotes more focused reading. Both are important behaviours, so it’s up to you to decide which text you’d like readers to scan (e.g., to decide what they’d like to read further) and which you’d like them to zero in on.
Users tend to look only at the first few words of headlines. Make sure those first few words are good and catchy.
Navigation bars placed at the top of a page performed better than navigation placed elsewhere.
Short paragraphs perform much better than longer ones in terms of users’ focusing on them.
Ads placed on the top-left, bigger ads, and ads placed close to editorial have the greatest chance of making an impression.
Big images, especially those with people’s faces in them, attract the most attention.
Findings like these underline the importance of marrying copywriting and design for websites. In fact, separating the two given this sort of information seems counterproductive. This is well illustrated by a passage from 37signals’ book Getting Real (p. 110):
Do you label a button Submit or Save or Update or New or Create? That’s copywriting. Do you write three sentences or five? Do you explain with general examples or with details? Do you label content New or Updated or Recently Updated or Modified? Is it There are new messages: 5 or There are 5 new messages or is it 5 or five or messages or posts? All of this matters.
We’ve been working with Launchfire, a leading interactive promotions agency, on a new series of whitepapers, and the first one was just released. The topic this time around is how to motivate consumers with interactive promotions. The premise is that the advertiser-consumer value exchange that has fueled the advertising business for the last 50 years (i.e., 22 minutes of television show wrapped around eight minutes of advertising) needs to be adapted and applied to the Internet.
Interactive promotions—advergames, contests, and other viral promotions—activate this value exchange in a dramatic way. Because of this, spending on interactive promotions is expected to overshadow online search and display advertising by 2012.
The whitepaper presents findings from a new consumer survey and draws on Launchfire’s 10 years of experience in delivering interactive promotions for leading brands. The paper is available for $0.00 on the Launchfire website, and is well worth a read if we do say so ourselves.
I received a message in my inbox a little while ago that made my day. It damned me to hell and told me I was despised.
The message was from a company I have always admired. The message made me love this company even more. The company is The Onion, the very funny “news” organization that parodies the real news.
The Onion knows that anyone who likes them and their merchandise appreciates twisted humour. They know their audience expects marketing to be clever and that we’re thrilled it’s now harder for telemarketers to bombard us during Sunday dinner. They know we like to laugh, and that we don’t like earnest, insincere ploys for our attention and dollars.
The Onion knows their audience, and makes sure everything they do considers our taste and speaks to us in a unified, audacious voice.
How refreshing! In his Globe and Mail column last Saturday, “How to fix the world? Make aid work for the ‘bottom billion,’” Doug Saunders quotes Paul Collier, professor and author of The Bottom Billion, as saying:
I think that economists have a responsibility to write in such a way as to be read by ordinary people and by political leaders. So I wrote a book that’s very readable.
It sounds so logical, so ... “duh!” But it’s actually a bold and confident move for someone who is normally an academic (Collier is an Oxford professor). For anyone, for that matter. If you want to be read, make your writing readable.
His book’s title alone—The Bottom Billion—is serving Collier very well. The title neatly and plainly sums up Collier’s argument: that foreign aid needs to target not the poor, but the poorest of the poor—numbering one billion people, overwhelmingly in Africa—to reverse a tide of social, political, and economic catastrophe that will reverberate across the whole world unless checked.
Collier could have called his book Alleviating Extreme Poverty: An Argument for Targeted Geographic Reallocation of Aid—or some such jargony mouthful, but he refrained. He went for a simple, memorable, concrete title: The Bottom Billion.
As a result of this and strong, plain-language writing, “the bottom billion” is becoming a catchphrase. As Saunders reports, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Kimoon declared 2008 “the year of the bottom billion.” Collier is arguing his case—and promoting his book—across the world, and he has just won the $60,000 Lionel Gelber Award for non-fiction writing. Would Alleviating Extreme Poverty: An Argument for Targeted Geographic Reallocation of Aid have fared so well? It’s highly doubtful.
The Bottom Billion lesson is one that so many companies and organizations could profit from. It can be difficult to trade in the comfort—yes, the comfort—of industry jargon, since it masquerades as refined or “in-the-know” vocabulary. But “masquerades” is the key term: rest on the laurels of jargon, and you won’t be making meaning at all—you won’t be saying anything.
And guess what? People won’t be interested. They won’t be able to be, because there’s nothing to hang onto.
Summoning up the courage to eschew jargon—even when all your competitors use it—and wrestle to say what you mean, in plain language, is a worthwhile challenge. Just ask Paul Collier.
Ten years ago in grad school, I had to make an oral presentation to about thirty people. A daunting prospect for me under ordinary circumstances, the endeavor became much more difficult when about fifteen minutes before the presentation, I developed some bizarre reaction to a cough medicine I had taken. I grew shaky and very spacey, but the show had to go on—it was a group thing, and an end-of-the-year-marks-depend-on-this thing.
The minutes I spent up there by the podium were torturous. I laboured to get each of my planned statements out—it felt like I was pushing them though molasses. As a result, I spoke very slowly and emphatically, with lots of pauses (I was summoning up the strength—and attention span—to get to my next line). The elaborate ideas I had meant to articulate got truncated to far shorter, simpler bits.
People clapped when I was done, but I attributed this to a kind reaction to my obvious struggle. I skulked back to my team and got ready to apologize profusely.
There was no need.
According to everyone, I had delivered my most memorable, effective presentation of the year.
Haste Makes Waste
I recalled this odd event when I read Jane Taber’s “Turtle Talk Wins the Race” in the Globe and Mail last weekend (February 23. 2007). Taber delves into the reasons behind Barack Obama’s masterful oratory, calling on several speech experts to help her out. In a nutshell: Obama speaks slowly and makes use of well-timed pauses: “... he chooses his words carefully and deliberately, allowing his audience to savour every syllable, conjunction, vowel and pause.”
Taber’s speech experts advise their clients to slow down and utter no more than 110 to 120 words a minute (as opposed to the 140 to 160 words per minute typically raced through by politicians such as Stephen Harper and Jack Layton). They note that a slow pace lends “gravitas to the message almost regardless to what the message is” and by contrast, that a fast pace “loses people” and almost signals that “you don’t want us to listen closely.”
More Core, Less Bore
Good writing is in many ways like good speaking, and many of the points Taber raises can be applied to writing effective communications. One of the things we try to do with clients when helping them with press releases or communications campaigns is to focus on the core of their message, and strip out the rest.
When you’re excited about something your business is doing—a new initiative or product, for example—it’s tempting to want to include in your press release every one of the 34 reasons it’s so great. And explain each reason in depth. And quote all the people who were involved in the idea. And give background. And context. And related information.
But guess what?
Most people will abandon your press release unless you relinquish your dream of including everything you’d ideally like to say. Our society is time-starved as well as compelled to cram as many sources of information in as possible—we are news grazers, not gourmands.
Once you swallow this, the next part can be fun. It involves isolating your core idea, then coming up the best words in the world to do it justice. Instead of skipping lightly through A to Z, you embrace one letter and make it sing. Chances are, your audience is going to hear—and remember—that simple song much more clearly than the 34 items you originally wanted to cover.
It may feel strange at first—much as my grad school speech felt almost catatonic—but reducing clutter in communications is a golden rule.
Ever had that sinking “duh, no kidding” feeling when you get into a business book you thought looked interesting and find it just endlessly repeats things you already know? We have, lots of times, which is why we’re making a point to single out a title that is really helping us in our work: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath.
As you might guess, the book is about communicating in a way that makes people care about and remember what you’re saying. Appropriately, its jacket cover is neon orange, with an embossed image of silver, crinkled electrical tape smack-dab in the middle of the title.
We aren’t attesting that everything between the covers of Made to Stick is novel and practice-changing; much of it is very commonsensical and second nature among the best journalists and communicators. But the lessons and tips in the book are exceedingly well delivered and entertaining. They resonate and challenge you the next time you’re hit with a stack of boring statistics or seemingly mundane information and charged with making things interesting. They’re made to stick.
The So What Test
For example, when we’re faced with a press release assignment these days, we can’t help but recall the following excerpt on the importance of conveying a piece of information people will give two hoots about. Sounds simple, but often press releases are bogged down in information the issuing organization insists be prioritized. In our experience, these are not always the same thing.
The excerpt relates screenwriter and former journalist Nora Ephron’s experience of the impact her high school journalism teacher had on her decision to pursue that field.
Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment. [The students] would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: ‘Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium on new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.’
The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them down into a single sentence: ‘Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School Faculty Thursday in Sacramento ... blah, blah, blah.’
The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment.
Finally, he said, the lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’
‘It was a breathtaking moment,’ Ephron recalls. ‘In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.’
There are so many stories out there competing for attention. The only way to rise above them is to connect your information with the real concerns and fascinations of your target audience. For a little inspiration, try Made to Stick.
RSS
