Entries Tagged 'Copywriting' ↓

Frank H. Johnson died at the age of 88 on March 6, 2001.

He was a famous direct response copywriter with a distingushed career, including serving as the circulation and promotion manager for Fortune magazine for many years.

His most obvious claim to fame is that he invented box that bears his name, used in direct mail sales letters.

What is a Johnson Box? It is body copy that is emphasized by being in an outlined box composed of asterisks or a different background color than the body of the main text. It is a staple for creating any direct mail presentation. In effect, it is a super emphasized main point of the selling letter.

I found a few by searching the web. These examples include a photo of the product being sold and work as a call to action, closing the sale.

One direct mail agency president, Albert Fried-Cassorla, called Mr. Johnson’s invention “one of the most potent features of any direct mail communication.”

For more on Johnson boxes and other examples of effective direct mail methods, see Million Dollar Mailings by Denison , an unabridged-dictionary-sized book of the most effective mailings in recent years, and Overlines, Johnson boxes and other assorted screams and moans, a short e-document about direct response techniques.

Anheuser Busch, possibly in a marketing move meant to emulate the famous “New” Coke(tm) efforts of 1985, has introduced a new adult beverage, B-to-the-E. The new drink rolled out nationally in January this year, after successful marketing trials in New York, LA, Boston, Miami and other test markets.

This is a slim 10-ounce can that contains, in effect, the ingredients of that yummy rave drink Red Bull ™, and good ol’ Budweiser ™ beer. It contains caffeine, guarana and ginseng — a sort of healthy wake-up drink mixed with beer, 6.6 percent alcohol by volume. (I must have the turbo version. Web articles say it is a 4.5 percent alcohol beverage.)

Red Bull ™ has a healthful, uh, healthy, 70 to 90 per cent of the energy drink market — about $1.6 billion according to SellingPower.com. While describing this success, they admit it doesn’t taste very good: I’ve had it and it makes me long for orange Triaminic ™ Cough Syrup, which is flavored to prevent not-very-sick kids from malingering at home.

“You’ll need that orange cough syrup every four hours.”
“That’s OK, Mom. My throat feels better. I think I’ll go to school and take that test I haven’t studied for.”

I can see why anyone might try RB once, but repeat buying is a mystery. (There is no nicotine in any of these products.) Apparently, RB supports extreme sporting events and has a lot of word-of-mouth buzz marketing. Think young; think Tony Hawke fans. RB is often served as a mixer with vodka. (Aha, you gotta cut that candy sweetness with something.)

Anyway, Anheuser Busch ™ and Coca-Cola ™ have tried to enter this market for years to break the Bull’s dominance.

Apparently, B-to-the-E is the latest AB attempt. The sweetness of the product makes me think it is aimed at those younger drinkers whose number of years being of drinking age can be measuresd with a calendar or maybe a stopwatch.

The editor of All About Beer magazine says “You get a little bit drunk but it keeps you alert. ” Basically, she thinks this is as dumb an idea as I do. Rather than paraphrasing it read her beer marketing insights for yourself. Or see the allaboutbeer beer expert’s website.

The large grocery store where I bought B-to-the-E had NO six-packs for sale, only single cans. Do they know something about the product that a potential customer would want to know?

Grudgingly, I have tasted the new brew. It is supposed to have a berry, not beery, taste. Good news: it looks exactly like Budweiser ™, foamy head and all. As a beer drinker, you get that expectation of a decent — maybe fine — thirst-quenching brew. Bad news: it tastes bitter spackled over with sweetness. The contrasting flavors make it hard to pin down. Mixed news: I now want to take a nap and sinultaneously stay up all night and go clubbing. (Like my new ID? I am of drinking age.)

For me, I’m going to remain a happy consumer of any Anheuser product that doesn’t taste like soda pop. Or cough syrup.

I just discovered two books by and about Bill Bernbach, the legendary ad man whom Ad Age named the number one advertising person of the 20th century.

One is simply Bill Bernbach’s Book by Bill Bernbach and longtime creative director at Doyle Dane Bernbach, Bob Levenson.

The other is The Art of Writing Advertising : Conversations with Masters of the Craft by Denis Higgins.

Both look to be exceptionally good reading for those interested in the craft of copywriting.

Sadly enough, Amazon has categorized the phrase “good copywriter” in Higgins’s book as a SIP or Statistically Improbable Phrase. Gives you pause, doesn’t it?

If you read nothing else here, read this tribute to the remarkable Bill Bernbach.

I found several sites claiming to house the world’s best advertising headlines. One is something of a misfire. Yes, I would read — make that have read — these headlines, and their ads, probably in an advertorial in older issues of Reader’s Digest. Here’s an example:

WHICH OF THESE $2.50 TO $5 BEST SELLERS DO YOU WANT — FOR ONLY $1 EACH?

This must be from the 50’s or early 60’s. $2.50 is the full price of the best seller. Nowadays, the local used bookstore charges more for worn, old paperbacks with torn covers.

Or this one:

A LITTLE MISTAKE THAT COST A FARMER $3,000 A YEAR

This to me conjures up the original version of the 1896 Sears catalog, the one with all the pages missing.

Incredibly, the site seems to be run by a writer in his forties, and not by John Caples, the dean of American direct response advertising who passed away in 1990 at the age of 90.

You may not know the name, but he started the idea of rigorously testing direct mail copy, so that the direct mail that covers America is the most likely to make you get your checkbook. He wrote “They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play ….”

You often hear that he wrote that super pulling ad, but you don’t hear that he wrote it two months into his 50-year copywriting career in 1925. See his Tested Advertising Methods, first published in 1974 and never out of print since then.

Or get a copy of his first book, co-written by Bruce Barton (who is the second B in BBDO) Advertising for Immediate Sales, $355 in a first edition from 1936.

For more on John Caples’ life and career, see this research.

For lighter reading, catch this at Adage.com. It lists the the Top Ten Advertising Icons and it doesn’t mention John Caples or David Ogilvy or even Bill Bernbach once.

How is that possible? Ten advertising icons and they missed these greats? That’s easy. These icons aren’t real people, they are imaginary characters that represent their brands — like the Marlboro Man and the Green Giant.

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I recommend if you are looking for any out of print book on advertising or anything else, go to the Addall used and out of print (or OOP among book people) book search engine. There’s the other in-print book search as well at new.addall.com, which is more about saving a few bucks than discovering a tough-to-find classic or irreplaceable rarity.

More proof that every copywriter has a screenplay.

Years ago, every copywriter of a certain age had the Great American Novel hidden in his desk waiting to be published. (Don’t laugh — I’ve seen the manuscripts.)

Now it seems it’s a screenplay or four.

Billboards are appearing in Hollywood saying such things as Kevin Costner, I wrote Sam Bingo just for you.
jaythewriter.com

There are variations. In one, the last name is crossed out and Kline is written in.

I can’t think of any good movie where these two actors could be substituted for each other, can you? But maybe that’s the running gag of the changing billboards.

The author of the billboards and scripts is not a young Hollywood aspirant (Lizzy Weiss before she sold Blue Crush?) or some studio insider with a juicy story to tell, but Jay Taylor, a 67-year old former agency head and copywriter from Tucson, Arizona.

Yes, he has four screenplays in different genres on offer at his www.JaytheWriter.com site.

I wish Mr. Taylor all the best with getting those scripts produced. I hope his screenwriting is as innovative as this in-you-face promotion method. The Arizona Star, a Tucson newspaper says he is “about as subtle as a calliope in a tin shed.”

“Please fax me which ones you want.” is what he says on his website.

Unfortunately, he has publicity in more and more places and most of it is negative. No, it’s slamming: “the sheer audacity of a pathetic individual” “idea that anyone would waste that kind of money doing something so retarded,” that from an anonymous agent in the LA Times, quoted on the www.defamer.com Hollywood insider blog.

What kind of money, you ask? Try $75,000 to $100,000. Even in LA, spending like that on billboard ads pitching your script seems excessive. (Some of the people seeing this billboard must wonder what new sitcom it’s pushing: OK, give me the punchline. Is it “See Ray Romano laugh his way to fame in The Mailroom Fridays, at 8?”)

Still, the marketing stunt got the writer a spot on the Tonight Show recently and the interest of at least one A-list star. Is he named Kevin?

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For a gentle view of this marketing campaign, see Creative Screenwriting, current (March/April) issue. More online sightings of this marketing effort are in these blogs.

For the strange paths that some well-known movies like Seven and While You Were Sleeping took to the Googleplex, read The Big Deal.

With all the internet reading everyone does, sometimes it’s even better to read a book. For advertising, the ultimate one-volume course is the award books.

I say books because I can’t decide whether The Art Director’s Annual or The One Show is the better volume. Joining The One Club offers a range of addditional benefits including their quarterly One as well as various meetings and get-togethers and portfolio reviews sessions.

Both are excellent and will give you the best in advertising the way nothing else can. They include work in every medium, so TV isn’t slighted in these print formats.

Then too, The One Club, at least, offers Annual best commercial reels as well.

It’s fun to browse online commercials for weirdness or occasionally quality, but for plunging into the best advertising work each year, nothing beats these heavy tomes. The Art Director’s Annual current edition weighs five pounds.

If you can read tiny type, you can study more than art direction and concept, you can learn long copy too. These books come out every January.

Promise, large promise is the soul of advertising. — Dr. Samuel Johnson, author of the first comprehensive English dictionary

Blockbuster Video has apparently made promises it can’t keep in its “End of Late Fees” advertising campaign. The marketing campaign is now being challenged in the courts in 47 states, as false and deceptive advertising.

Under this new system, I know from personal experience that even the new releases (with two-day rentals) can be returned late with no late fees, but the problem comes when you return a movie after the new seven-day grace period. Then you are charged the purchase price of the video. Oww. I’ve always said if you’re not careful with Blockbuster, it is more economical to buy a movie than to rent it.

WB Doner & Company of Southfield, Michigan created the advertising campaign. It broke on New Year’s Day this year with huge in-store banners in the almost 5,800 Blockbuster Video stores across the US.

The move engendered dislike on the web almost as soon as the details were announced.* There was outrage, not at the no-fee policy for an extra week, but at the high charges imposed after that.

So my family may not be so far from the typical frequent Blockbuster rental customer. We usually rent four or five movies at at time, and then discover that when the movies are due, we haven’t watched most of them. I call this the All-You-Can-Eat syndrome, as when a buffet eater piles their plate high with foods they just can’t finish. (There is some misguided sense that the extra should be taken because it’s “free,” not fattening, gluttonous or just too damn much.)

I would love to see the amount of Blockbuster profits from late fees alone; I’ll bet it’s substantial.

Update: According to an article on AdAge.com, Blockbuster last week agreed to pay more than $600,000 to settle these claims of false advertising.

After all the dust settles, what should you do? You might want to support the originators of no-late-fee rentals: Netflix. I think their commercials by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners/San Francisco are better, too.

However, having had some clients with some unpopular products to sell, I do feel sympathy for the copywriters and art directors at Doner. After all, which is easier to sell, a Yugo or a Ford?

*Note: here the search bots failed me. It was a well-known technology columnist, possibly Stephen Manes or John Dvorak, who posted an outraged article even before the new Blockbuster plan took effect.

Try Greencinefor even more obscure films than Netflix carries. See a review of DVD rental services here.

Amazingly, I just found out who wrote Where’s the beef? advertising campaign, the wonderful 80’s Wendy’s commercials done at Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample.

According to Aaron Dickey, an Associated Press reporter writing in a newsgroup, the copywriter was Cliff Freeman and the director was Joe Sedelmaier. (I knew the Sedelmaier part already.) Cliff Freeman and Partners created a commercial that won a 2004 ANDY.

Best TV commercials

I just discovered a site with lots of TV commercials to watch. You can vote on your favorites. ( lectureon They are not in the advertising business, and you can tell because they call TV commercials ads, not spots. As you know, an ad is not broadcast. lectureoff)

On my system tonight, this advertising site seems less robust than the great ad blog and commercial repository that is http://www.adrag.com . That site is run out of Denmark by a Swedish lady. Adrag has a US branch as well. It has more than its share of weird European TV spots to watch, enjoy and maybe learn some marketing from.

With the sad passing of Johnny Cochran, most famous as O.J. Simpson’s lead defense attorney, the US Supreme Court faces a quandry. Some years ago, one of Cochran’s unhappy former clients began picketing his law office and generally harrassing him. Cochran sued and won. (In an act of overreaching pride, the client acted as his own counsel against Cochran.) The former client, Ulysses Tory, was enjoined from further harrassment with the additional priviso that never speak about him or his firm publicly, presumably even on the Internet. (I respect Mr Cochran, I really do.)

However, you cannot defame the dead, so normally, Tory would be free to say anyhing he wants now about the late Mr. Cochran. Except for that one stipulation that he “never” speak the Cochran matters publicly gain.

So it becomes a First Amendment question: is Tory’s speech being unreasonably limited?

By the way, Johnnie Cochran used one of the most memorable marketing themelines (“slogan” outside of the advertisng business) ever. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.* What was that copy line marketing? Why his client’s innocence.

In fact, as a marketing catch phrase it’s right up there with that hear-it-in-your-sleep copywriting tagline borrowed from a Wendy’s advertising campaign: Where’s the beef? which Walter Mondale used in his failed 1984 Presidential campaign. The Wendy’s copy line is from Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample in 1984. (I say that to jog the memory of whoever it is out there who wrote it. I was just going to credit to Bill Bernbach, but frankly, I can’t do that.)

Maybe this proves the adage: nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising?

*Note: Internet rumor has it that “fit … acquit” was actually coined by the redoubtable F. Lee Bailey.

With the passing of renowned poet Robert Creeley yesterday at the age of 78, I am thinking of well-known writers I’ve met. It would be a little too grim to limit this to those who have died.

Here’s a few Creeley lines from For Love: Poems 1950-1960:

What is it that
is finally so helpless
different, despairs of its own
statement, wants to
turn away, endlessly
to turn away

(I heard Creeley read while I was in college. I was also admitted into one of writing classes, but I had a geographical problem: he was in Masschusetts; I was in California, attending classes because I didn’t get into his class quickly enough to suit me. “The apparition of these faces in the crowd/ Petals on a wet black bough.” Damn, I was good.*)

Excluding co-workers, I think the most well-known copywriter I have met was Tom Nathan. He taught a copywriting class in N ew York and had worked at Scali McCabe Sloves. He wrote some incredible advertising.

The one I remember most vividly is
A Volvo discovery. Rain also falls on the rear window. — showing of course, the rear window wiper on a Volvo station wagon.

Does anyone have any encounters with famous writers or copywriters? What ads, what marketing campaigns, were they most famous for? And if you are Ed McCabe, don’t tell me because I just won’t believe you.

*OK, the poem is by Ezra Pound called “In a Station of the Metro.” The link has a wonderful description of how Pound came to write this poem.