Sample Issue - Issue 6, Volume 1

Watch The Birdie

I'd like to devote the great part of this issue to photography. And I'd like to do so because a correspondent (God bless you, sir) has written asking whether the illustrations, and in particular the photographs, in semi-technical and industrial ads are open to the same kind of judgemental criteria as those of their consumer counterparts. In other words, is there (or should there be) a difference between the two.

The answer is absolutely simple…yes, no and maybe.

First, perhaps, I ought to explain what I mean by semi-technical ads. These, in my book, include insurance, investment, recruitment, wholesale and distribution, law, accountancy, business consultancy, business training. That kind of thing.

Well, I have to declare that the whole field of photography, its techniques and skills, is a complete mystery to me. Speak to me of a shutter speed of one-hundredth of a second and an aperture setting of F8 and you might as well be speaking ancient Aramaic. In my hands, a self-focussing camera goes inexorably out of focus and a cassette film fits in the wrong way round, although the makers declare this to be physically impossible.

But one doesn't have to be a photographer in order to air ones views on photography. So here they are.
The first thing you need to grasp if you are to understand what makes the advertising world go round is that the great bulk of consumer advertising is aimed at women, whereas semi-technical and industrial advertising addresses itself very largely to men. Now women are different from men. Not just deliciously different in a physical sense, but entirely different in their mental make-up.

For a start, they actually like very young children; and they are interested in other people. Men, by and large, aren't. Women like to be given promises, whether they deep-down believe them or not. Women like to see and read about happiness, success and all the rest of the phantasmagoria of which advertising in general is so often, and so justly, accused. Men could generally care less about these things.

From this it has emerged that it is a good thing to show people in ads.

Show in a female-oriented ad a happy, successful woman well endowed with this world's goods and with slightly more than her fair share of form and beauty, and you are half way towards selling whatever it is that you're peddling. But show in an industrial-type ad a happy, successful Works Manager or Chief Accountant and you will get the horse-laugh you deserve. Readers of technical ads are realists - and whoever saw a happy Chief Accountant?

Reality bites

Therefore, the general rule is that consumer ads are better off for showing people, while industrial ads will fare better if they show things.

However, since there are no such things as golden rules in advertising, if you are in the business of manufacturing phosphor bronze bearings or electrical circuitry and you do decide to put people into your ads, for Pete's sake make sure that they are the right kind of people.

The employment of models who are patently not what they are supposed to be gives the ad in question an air of total unreality. Which is hardly the best of bases from which to launch a convincing sales message. Leaf through any technical or semi-technical publication (and this includes web pages) and you're likely to see maintenance men who look like insurance actuaries, truck driver who look like interior designers and oil-field workers who look like ballet dancers.

And there's really no get out when you aim at total reality by using people who actually do the job in question. In the first place, not looking a fool in front of a camera is a gift granted to very few of us; and in the second place it is an unfortunate fact that very seldom does anyone look as if he does what he does do. An awkward sentence, but it enshrines an essential truth. I myself once posed for a picture as a writer - which, in my own modest way, is what I happen to be. All I can say of the result is that if someone had been looking for a pic of a piano-player in a bawdy house, he'd have hired me on the spot.

The no-pic gambit

An even sounder word of advice: maybe you'd do better still not to use a picture at all. Many an advertisement requires no picture whatsoever; since often it serves no other purpose than to occupy space which could be used to more advantage by simply leaving it out and giving the rest of the ad more room to breathe.

But a lot of advertisers seem to feel that they have been somehow short-changed if their ads don't include the four sine-qua-non elements of illustration, headline, body copy and logo. It's a wholly mistaken attitude, but a very common one. The net result of it usually is that a strong headline which is perfectly capable of standing on its own two feet is watered down to tie in with a picture which has no business to be there in the first place.

'What is the reason for having a picture at all?' is a wiser question for the semi-technical advertiser to ask himself than: 'What picture can we use?' The latter leads, too often, to a faute-de-mieux shot of the Factory or, possibly even worse, someone doing something seemingly significant in the R&D lab.

The product shot

I will agree that all transformers, most refractory bricks, most condensers and most conveyor belts look very much alike. Even so, they can be made to look different. Modern camera techniques being what they are and modern photographers being the talented people they are, there should be no problem at all in photographing something as homely as a nail, a screw or a sprocket and making it a thing of beauty and drama. No question, a beautiful shot (I use the adjective in its wider sense, not in any fancy connotation) of, say, a high tension bolt can say more about quality control, craftsmanship, precision and all those other run-of-the-mill bromides than the words themselves can hope to.

In my book, a good, honest and faithful pic of your product will beat a pic of the factory or of a group of people in a mock-up training session every time. Certainly, industrial and consumer advertising share common ground insofar as all advertising has its principles. But no farther. Following too closely the techniques of consumer advertising can lead the technical advertiser completely astray. That's what I've been talking about. At least, I think it is.

What's In A Name?

I imagine that, from time to time, you have the job of devising a name for a new product, a new service, or even a website. This exercise can be great fun, but it can also be a minefield.

Putting the right brand names on products is more important than many realise. It will sink a product if it has the wrong connotation, and will ensure its success if it's the right one.

One can imagine, for instance, a truck driver going into a corner shop and asking for a chocolate bar called a Yorkie; but would the same guy ask, in public, to purchase a Curly-Wurly? I take leave to doubt it. Thus, whatever product name you come up with must reflect the psychology of the market for which it is intended.

This seems like common sense really, but some manufacturers appear to have less common sense than you might imagine.

It is, on the face of it, reasonable to suppose that a company which spends a mint of money on advertising must know what it is doing. After all, the argument runs, mammoth corporations aren't staffed by fools; therefore, what they do must make commercial sense and must be worth imitating.

But this is over-ingenious thinking. Staffed by fools they may not be, but staffed by human beings they undoubtedly are - subject to all the uncertainties and error that flesh is heir to. If its any comfort to you, which it should be, the giants of advertising are no more certain that what they are doing is right than you are or I am. Which is why the big detergent companies have, it is rumoured, requested their computers to cough up all possible permutations of three, four and five-letter words, and have registered the lot between them. We look forward (or I do at least) to them getting round to using some of the more arcane four-letter efforts.

Allow me to give you a couple of example of what I'm talking about. There used to be a household cleaning product in the UK called Jiff. It was recently rebranded as CIF (pronounced siff). It doesn't matter why this was done, what does matter is that to everyone who has ever been in the British Armed Forces, the word "siff" is a diminutive of syphilis and is used on a regular basis in barrack rooms worldwide, especially by those who have sampled certain local delights while on foreign postings. I wonder whether this was given any thought to by the company concerned? Probably not.

Some years ago, too, a car manufacturer named one of its models the Pony. This name was laughingly received in London (and elsewhere), where the word pony is the essence of a popular piece of derogatory rhyming slang i.e. pony-and-trap. If you see what I mean.

I was once asked to coin a name for a dog food that contained, of all things, egg. I tossed the proposition around for a few hours and came up with "Oeuf! Oeuf!" The client turned it down. Probably rightly.

However, the practice of tagging fancy names onto unlikely products can be taken too far and frequently is. To call a 30-ton excavator the MkIV is apt and purposive; to call it the Grantchester or the Melton Mowbray is somehow to emasculate it. And to call it the Digmaster is to reveal a paucity of invention that verges on the pathetic.
The person who first thought of adding the suffix 'master' to adjective or noun deserved a cash prize and maybe got one. Those people (and there are undoubtedly dozens of them) who are, at this very moment, bent on draining the last drop of juice from this over-squeezed lemon should, as a charitable gesture to the rest of us, give it a rest.

Giving a product or service a resoundingly evocative and functionally apt name is, I suppose, the goal of everyone. But you shouldn't take too long over it, or lose sleep over it. Because, as sure as eggs, your customers will soon be calling it the E24 or the RV88 or whatever its reference number may be. Ah, well, that's show business.

I am tempted to sign this article Patrick Carnegie-Perowne, but no one would believe it. Or, if they did, no one would care. Which is more or less what I've been trying to say.

Quote Of The Month

The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigator.'
Edward Gibbon

Cuff Note 11

Don't Tear The Fundament Out Of It

I've just been reading Pat Quinn's revised book, The Secrets of Successful Copywriting. In it, he says you can always take an old concept and give it a new lease of life with a simple twist. But he warns that in doing so you should make sure that (a) you've rehashed the idea with some originality and (b) you don't tear the fundament out of it.

This advice came to mind when I popped out for a pub lunch the other day. The pub in question is part of a large chain, which is currently running a national promotion. The essence of this promotion is that if you buy two glasses of wine you get a third free.

The promotion is being aired via a poster campaign; and a very nice and expensive poster it is too. A2 in size, it comes in full colour, with some very crisp photography of a bottle of wine and a half filled glass. So far so good.

Now, I can only assume that the copywriter responsible for the poster concept was trying manfully to say something a little different and original. Certainly, he (or, indeed, she) was striving to avoid the blandness in hundreds of ads and supermarket banners that tell us to: Buy This and Get This Free. Consequently, he came up with:

BUY 3 FOR 2.

The question is, does that line improve on:

Buy Two Glasses Of Wine
And Get One Free.

Perhaps all of this free wine is addling my brain. It seems to me, however, that the reworked headline is truly confusing, whereas the well-used version leaves no room for doubt of what's being offered.

My opinion seemed to be borne out after a quick chat with the lovely bar girl. She told me that 8 out of 10 customers who order a glass of wine have to be told about the offer. In my book, this means that the company could have saved a small fortune in posters. And copywriters!

Oh, one more point about the poster. The guy or gal who wrote it, also came up with a curious tagline. Underneath the pic of the bottle and glass is the legend:

Quench your thirst.

As innocent as I may be, I know for sure that nobody drinks wine in order to quench a thirst. Only a non-drinker could suggest such a thing; and I am amazed that the company concerned allowed it to run.

But that's show business!

Cuff Note 11

Features & Benefits - Telling the difference.

The experts tell us that in order to produce good advertising, the copy for it must sell the benefits. That's because it's the benefits inherent in a product or service that people want.

Since this lesson has been taught forever and to every kind of sales person, not just advertisers, it's a little strange that there is still confusion about defining the benefits. That is, separating them from the features.

This problem is widespread, and not only lay people get it wrong. I recently picked up a brochure from an agency offering to produce brochures for corporations. On the back cover of their own brochure they listed, what they called, the benefits of using their service. The list contained 12 features and there wasn't a benefit in sight.

So let's take another look at defining benefits.

A benefit is a feature in action. And the best way to uncover the benefit of a feature is to apply the 'so what?' principle.

Like so.

This panel is made of aluminium. (Feature)
So what?
It won't rust. (Advantage)
So what?
It will reduce your annual replacement costs by 60% (Benefit)

The above illustrates that a feature produces an advantage, and the benefit is the personal value a customer gains from the advantage.

Another example.

This washing machine has an economy cycle. (Feature)
So what?
It reduces energy consumption. (Advantage)
So what?
You save money in energy costs. (Benefit)

Or.

These security sensors measure mass. (Feature)
So what?
Pets and insects won't trigger the alarm (Advantage)
So what?
You wont have false alarms just happy neighbours. (Benefit)

Easy, isn't it?

If you're stuck with copywriting problems, or suffering from writers block or can't quite come up with that elusive headline may I recommend our own sales writers' resource e-book Word Power III?

You'll find ready-made copy such as headlines, tag lines, link lines, calls to action, price defenders, guarantees and more, which you can lift straight from the page and adopt or adapt.

You'll also discover a sales writers' thesaurus in the form of a theme finder, which will cure writers block forever. You can see it at: http://red.jwhco.net/1fcf00

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