Brendan Staunton’s Blog

Ad #1

I like wordplay, but like all forms of play, it has rules. In the case of a double entendre, both meanings need to work. Alas, in the ad on the left, neither of them do. Firstly, the newspaper I was reading (Metro) is not rubbish. Indeed, I consider it a remarkably concise summary of the day’s affairs. Secondly, while I was reading it I was using it, so it wasn’t rubbish by that definition either. Replacing the word ‘is’ with the words ‘could be’ would be less snappy, but it would make the ad work. I think it’s important that an ad actually works, don’t you?

Ad #2

Imagine if you actually saw yourself enter the tube carriage that you were sitting in - how cool would that be! And what if you then came right up to yourself, held up a badge and told you that you were a London Underground ticket inspector! A pretty good idea for a sci-fi movie… but, I don’t think it’s what the ad on the right means. Actually, I don’t think the ad on the right knows what it means. If ticket inspectors were habitually decked out in fetishwear or walked on their hands or carried giant inflatable guava fruits then, yes, they’d be easy to spot. But they don’t and this ad doesn’t work. Incidentally, I’m no typographer but what is the purpose of those huge full stops?

Often wondered why the word “proud” still appears in corporate statements. It seems so archaic, like something out of the nineteenth, not the twenty-first century.

Still, there’s nothing wrong with claiming to be “Proud sponsors of the East Grinstead Under Nines Netball tournament” or some other worthy cause.

But “Proud to restrict your purchasing options to just one credit card”? Might as well say “Proud to restrict customer choice” or “Proud to cause you personal inconvenience” or “Proud to send you scuttling off to the nearest cash machine”.

Or “Proud to let you walk on by and take your custom to some other shop with more amenable service”.

Beware of the first thing that pops into your head. It will pop into other heads too.

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Years ago I enrolled on a touch-typing course. My handwriting was illegible to a point that would have challenged Alan Turing so it seemed like a good move. In view of how the world has changed since then, it was.

It was also good fun. There were so few guys and so many women to impress with my oh-so-witty observations about the daily eye-to-hand coordination exercises. “Misplace one hand”, I affirmed “and the text looks like Dutch. Misplace both and it’s more like Polish.” That was one of the better ones.

Anyway, every two weeks, a new intake would arrive and begin the same elementary lessons. Sometimes my course mates and I would share a lift with these callow newbies, amused to hear of their struggle with challenges we’d long since overcome.

Less amusing was hearing them repeat many things that I thought so original coming from my own mouth a fortnight earlier - often in my exact wording! It was unnerving, but the truth is that different people will react to novel situations in similar ways. Would advertising even be possible if we didn’t?

So before you write anything for your own or anyone else’s business, check out the competition. Your first thoughts were probably their first thoughts too and will need to be developed. Too many businesses fail to grasp this point.

In order for your message to justify the investment made in it and achieve stand-out, it requires serious thinking. Trust me, spending money on putting out the same message as your competitors is no laughing matter.

Has there ever been a more terrible offence against humanity than this headline? I mean, other than those that people actually go to jail for? Maybe jail should be considered in this case.

I don’t even understand it, and nor will anyone that sees it. They’ll just groan with displeasure. That’s right: groan at a piece of communication that must have cost a fair sum, bearing in mind how often I keep seeing it.

The Wallace Collection is an excellent museum that deserves more visitors. This was plainly not written by a copywriter and it makes an excellent case for hiring one and not doing this kind of thing in-house.

For a small outlay they could then avoid the kind of execution that would make even this cavalier blush.

In these Twitterfed times, skim reading goes little deeper than the title. The screenslave sees it, thinks: Hey, advertising’s over – cool! I’ll re-tweet it to everyone and look rad. So off it goes on a viral diaspora of re-tweets without anyone actually examining the contents.

So this time I did.

The above piece was created by 90:10, a business consultancy committed to innovation, efficiency and transformation through social technologies. Essentially it’s their Powerpoint presentation from Omexpo Madrid 2010 repurposed as a report.

Now, we all know that these opinion pieces are distributed to demonstrate the thinking of the organisation that produced them. It’s advertising in other words. So does it work? Is this the kind of thought leadership that will get the phones ringing and bring 90:10 lots of yummy, free-spending clients?

Well…

I have previously criticized the lack of proofing standards in online communications. Yet, glitchy copy is one thing; glitchy thinking quite another. Just because you’re drawing attention to important changes doesn’t excuse reports littered with gross generalisations, exaggerations and untruths. Let’s look at a few.

Page 5: Globally more time is spent with online than with any other media.

As it stands this is simply ridiculous. Believe it or not there are many people who don’t live in major western cities and some of them haven’t even heard of computers, let alone networked ones.

Page 13: The tech gets better yet the experiment (of advertising) continues to fail.

We’ll pass over the dubious idea that advertising is some kind of experiment and tackle the main point.

Fail?

A global industry employing hundreds of thousands of people making billions in every country on the globe has failed? It’s coupled with Einstein’s quote about the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again. Forgive me, but are we still in 1962? Is Don Draper still knocking up campaigns on the back of fag packets? Has the author ever seen a modern campaign action plan?

Eventually we ride to the big point:

Everyone’s an advertiser now!

But is everyone good at it? Perhaps I’m generalising but I’d say that, compared with Joe Public, the advertising industry is pretty good at advertising. Look at the average amateur website or myspace page if you don’t believe me.

I could quote a lot more examples, but this blog would end up as long as the report itself. What narks me most is the sloppiness. Just like those housewives who can’t be bothered changing out of their jim jams when buying groceries, media agencies are increasingly hyping reports that lack even the slightest bit of crafting.

The other thing is this: I love the internet, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t believe for a moment that it’s all about innovation and creativity. For lots of people it’s about distracting themselves, gambling, playing video games, watching funny clips, insulting each other on message boards and surfing porn.

Still, the news for 90:10 isn’t all bad. The format of this ‘report’ breaks every known rule of presentation and is thus unreadable. I’m confident no one will ever examine it as keenly as I did.

As for the question of how advertising will deal with the rise of social media - well, there’ll always be good and bad advertising. The best will embrace it with grace, wit and intelligence. The rest will eventually figure out how to turn a buck or else they’ll drop it and try something else. Advertising isn’t going away any time soon, believe me.

Nail On The Head factor
A few points but finding them isn’t fun.

9 web copywriting tips our mothers could have told us

Being a Mother involves a lot of thankless and time-consuming tasks. Little wonder they developed so many stock phrases to express their exasperation. Lately, though, I’ve been reflecting on my own Mum’s favourite sayings and realised that they apply to a lot more than bringing up brats. Some of them could even help to improve web copywriting. The following are among my favourites.

1. What do you think this is, a hotel?
Don’t say ‘Welcome’ on your home page. There isn’t time. Get on with explaining what the visitor might get from being there. Remember: they could leave at any second. It’s later than you think.

2. Self praise is no praise.
Blowing on about your quality and expertise won’t impress anyone and may even hurt your brand. So don’t boast. Instead explain what you do, use testimonials, show examples. Let the work speak for itself and allow your greatness to permeate the whole site.

3. If everyone else jumped off a cliff would you?
These days very few companies offer anything genuinely original and you need to exploit every opportunity to differentiate yourself. So don’t be like lemmings. Strike out! Find your voice. Be original.

4. Don’t make me get up!
Your visitors didn’t come to your site to work. So it’s your responsibility to write as well as possible, indeed to make your copy a verbal magic carpet ride through all your best benefits. As soon as reading it takes effort those visitors are gone.

5. Don’t use that tone with me!
Imagine a Hurrah Henry in a working men’s club, or a radical feminist at a rap gig – is your copy like that? Is it friendly enough for a vet? Formal enough for finance? Quirky enough to sell mp3s? Mums care about detail, so should you.

6. If I want your opinion I’ll ask for it! (or if you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all).
There’s no problem in being negative or having an opinion, just keep it well away from the selling part of your site.

7. You’d make a better door than a window.
Get out of the way of your offering. How can visitors see what’s in it for them if you keep interrupting the sale to say you were formed in 1860 or just moved to new state-of-the-art offices? I know I’m repeating this point. Mums repeat points a lot too, and with good reason. If you must ‘blow your own trumpet’ (where have I heard that?) then put a tab in there called ‘About Us’ and fill it up. You never know, someone might even read it.

8. I haven’t got all day.
Some of your visitors haven’t got more than a few seconds, so don’t waste their time: keep it brief.

9. It’s nice to be important but it’s much more important to be nice.
You might really want to write about your new £1 million pound rebrand, or the fabulous new clients who’ve just signed up for your service. However, your time would be better spent simply making your site easier for to read. Or ensuring it has good usability and fulfilment. That’s what a ‘nice’ site is. Make yours one.

As a young teenager, the moment my Dad got home from work I’d grab the tabloid from his jacket pocket and read it front to back: the ads for lawnmowers, the lists of horses’ names in the racing section, even the weird reminiscences of confused pensioners on the letters page. Mine was a bad case of print hunger.

Nowadays, though, with ubiquitous digital publishing, every man and his dog (and his dog’s fleas) is busy putting out free print publications and my hunger has long since abated. They’re everywhere; messing up our neighbourhoods, trashing our tube trains and littering our letter boxes.

Naturally, local councils like Haringey couldn’t wait to get in on the act, but as you’d expect Haringey People is a far from riveting read. Style wise it’s about as inviting as a tour of a staple factory, and with all the body text printed in sans serif font, it’s also tough on the eyes. Not that anyone will notice because no one is reading.

Ironically the first headline I spotted told how the council had signed up for Friends of the Earth’s Get Serious About C02 campaign. Yet Haringey continues to publish and deliver this 40 page free colour magazine to 100,000 households through which it usually passes straight to landfill without even a rip of the polywrap.

Haringey has numerous problems: inefficient services, negative media coverage and large holdings in Icelandic banks, not to mention the imminent prospect of an axe wielding Tory government. So why not kill off this daft piece of vanity publishing and then cut council tax with the savings. The local press can handle the stories about new drop in centres for drop outs; the information sections belong online.

Of course Haringey resents the media’s indifference to their efforts in (ahem) delivering front line services to a diverse and challenging community. Well, if that’s the case, they should hire a good PR agency. Then we can all be spared pointless filler such as: Top Tips on Combating Crime which includes this gem: Don’t give spare keys to people you don’t know well.

Nail on the Head Factor
I say kick it in the head

This gem is from the home web page of Bradford’s Telegraph & Argus newspaper. I’ve long believed that proofing standards are a problem within digital communications and here’s further evidence. If, as I suspect, this ad has been nationally syndicated then someone should be very embarrassed.

Now, copywriters like me aren’t natural advocates of grammatical correctness. We regularly stretch or ignore the conventions of written English with gleeful abandon. But breaking rules for fun or effect is one thing; failing to spot errors… well, that’s something else. It puts a brand’s communications on a par with those glitchy customer reviews you see on Trip Advisor – the ones that actually put you off anything they recommend.

My point is this: today’s hot new media shops are dying to introduce big clients to all those exotic new digital delights they’ve been cooking up. Yet they don’t always seem to understand why print media is so obsessed with tedious old school disciplines like proofing. Either that or their business models don’t stretch to it (or they can’t get the staff).

Proper proofing will never be sexy, but nor are typos. The public assumes that any company with sloppy communications will be sloppy in other ways too.

So what’s the answer? Well, it’s tough on the goatee brigade but here goes: there is no online workaround widget for delivering professional written content. As the song goes: it’s got to be perfect. What’s forgivable in Tweets, maybe even in blogs, will never be acceptable within UK plc. Credibility with big clients means either taking the time or spending some money.

American author Mary Heaton Vorse put it like this: Writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. A Glasgow business acquaintance of mine was even more to the point: It’s either right, or it isnae.

Nail On The Head Factor
I suspect someone might be nailed to the cross