what to say when they say no one reads any more

I recently got a DM package from a large telecommunications concern, trying to get me to choose their Internet service and save money by bundling it with some other service of theirs.

The letter was clear and succinct, less than one page with lots of white space. The offer was strongly laid out, but the art director had managed to do a nice job designing it.

Great direct mail, right?

Nope. Complete waste of time.

It was like they'd put a billboard or newspaper ad in an envelope, or like they'd sent me an email that was one large, single jpeg. Nothing personal about their communication in a space where I expect and require personal communication.

I know why it happened. I've been in the kinds of meetings where these things get decided, and I have become vocal in opposition.

"The letter copy's long," somone says. "No one reads any more." Forgetting that 75% of the Internet is words, and I understand that it's still somewhat popular.

"Yeah, let's cut that," says someone else. "People these days are so busy they want to get right to the point. Let's get the product and/or service right up top." Forgetting that if I happen to be interested in your product and/or service, I will actually want to know about it, and this quest for knowledge will probably entail reading about it. Why not deliver that information instantaneously, i.e., in the letter, instead of forcing people to go to a computer and find your site so they can get it?

Two gross generalizations and the entire room has turned against, not just your copy, but the idea that your copy has any value beyond stating what the price and offer are.

If you're a writer, you can't wait until this point to feebly mount a defence. The moment any point like this is made, you have to, without getting antagonistic, immediately begin to assert the positives of copy. You have to remind people of the basics of DM – that most people who get your letter aren't going to look at it, no matter how long or short your copy is. And you don't care about them. It's the people who do want to know more, the people who are interested; they're the only ones you care about. And you must give them the info they need to click or pick up the phone.

And an essential part of that is a story, a way of connecting emotionally with the product and/or service. A way of making your communication personal. A way of helping people understand your product's value and getting them to understand that they need it.

If you don't give this audience what they need, you get 1% response, or 0.1%. If you do give it to them, you get 3% response. Or 10%. Or more. You go from being a very bad method for acquiring customers, to being staggeringly successful at it.

Having worked in a marketing sector for a year now where stories are essential and copy is a primary way of delivering those stories, I have a new appreciation for building a message with long copy, and telling stories. I think there are a lot of marketers out there who need to relearn this fundamental truth.

how to be a genius on absolutely no budget whatsoever

In lieu of a real post, please enjoy a taste of The Sandbaggers, a brilliant spy show from the 1970s on British television. It shows you what you can do with pretty much zero budget – great writing and actors who absolutely believe in their roles combine to create the most tension I've seen outside of Hitchcock, and these episodes whip along at a speed that Peter Hunt would be proud of.

The Ipcress File was marketed at the anti-Bond, and yes, it's cool in an unBondian way. But The Sandbaggers is the real deal – spies risking their lives in the midst of bureaucracy and politics. Pretty much, I think you'd have to say, the way it is.

No one has ever come close to Ian Mackintosh's vision on this kind of budget, before or since.

pay no attention to that man behind the curtain

In this land of marketing, so much depends on the wizard behind the curtain. Or at least, a whole lot of flying monkeys.

Case in point: we've done a couple of big presentations recently, each of which meant several hours of writing by several senior people, then meeting for at least a couple of hours with several senior people to examine the deck and go over how it will be presented. Account, media, strategy, production and creative all have to be taken into account not because we feel like it, or because we don't have anything better to do, but because all these things impact our clients' business and as professionals we have to deal with that.

Clients may not like the fact that all this takes time (and money), but the fact is they like things a lot less if all this time is not taken.

And after the meeting, in the weeks after the our big important presentation, we might not like the fact that clients take so much time to mull over what we as an agency take as large, throbbingly obvious facts, but they too have multiple experts and POVs to talk to, they too have to assemble in large groups to think through what we as agency weasels have spent an equally long time generating. Turns out they too are professionals.

that tardis for the creative department is on back order

Clichés are the enemy of what we do. They're boring to work with, sure, but they're mostly not very effective at engaging consumers in new way. As creatives we all want to get past them as quickly as possible.

But there's a funny thing I've noticed. In any brainstorm, the first chunk of ideas you have is frankly nothing but clichés. And that shouldn't be a surprise. After all, we're full of clichés; we're bombarded by them every day, online, on TV, in conversation. It takes time to purge them out of our systems; it's kind of like running the tap, waiting to drain all the sludge in the pipes in order to get the really hot water.

So, you get them out of the way and that's when the interesting stuff begins to happen. That's when the really fresh ways of engaging people begin to emerge.

But the problem is that that chunk of time it takes to drain the conceptual pipes takes just that. Time. It can last just an hour, if you're incredibly lucky, or take a full day. (And I don't mean a typical day full of other jobs and meetings. I mean, a full day of doing nothing else. I've been there.) And you can't rush it. As they say, it takes as long as it takes. And that's really difficult to achieve in most agencies. Teams have multiple jobs on the go, at different levels of involvement, and there's real juggling of schedules and mindsets that has to take place. It may be the toughest challenge creatives face these days – carving out the necessary time to do their best work.

(Note: it's instructive the only place I've ever worked where this wasn't a challenge is no longer in business. Time is money, as they say, and dedicating time is an expensive proposition.)

So, we play with our time, jumping back and forth across the fourth dimension and our priorities and deadlines, and somehow find the time to keep spewing until there's nothing left to say. And that's when it gets interesting.

reality

Had a meeting with Dave Toycen, the president of World Vision Canada, today. He's an impassioned speaker, and incredibly knowledgable across a really broad range of development issues. He was on the ground in Port-au-Prince within 36 hours of the Haiti earthquake, and in his career has seen first hand some of the worst things that we as humans can do to each other. But I think he would also say that he's seen some of the most amazing things that we as people are capable of – people who experienced the worst atrocities imaginable, and yet who still have hope for the future, and who are still working to help others and build something.

As someone said afterward, I can't even imagine the images in his head when he talks about this stuff.

His passion re-energizes the team, and his experience and insights help every member of the team know that they're not just doing another piece of DM or digital or whatever. Everything the team does has the possibility to move and get one more person to commit to helping others.

Having that kind of weight sitting on everything we do is a responsibility, to be sure, but it also gives us bitter, sarcastic ad weasels an unusual sense of purpose, and a welcome sense of reality.

on a totally unrelated topic

As the Oscars dribble on tonight, I’m doing the seemingly hipster alternative and watching The Oscar, a 1966 film about an actor who stops at nothing to win the eponymous award. I’ve read that it’s one of the worst movies ever made, but that it contains so many awful choices, it’s actually brilliant. And the stars!

Stephen Boyd! Elke Sommer! Milton Berle! Toney Bennett! Peter Lawford! Jill St. John! Jack Soo! Ernest Borgnine! Broderick Crawford! Bob Hope! Frank Sinatra! Joseph Cotten!

So far it’s living up to its rep. Sort of like Valley of the Dolls, but worse – far worse. Because the dialogue is so forced, so arch, and the actors aren’t able to do anything with it, it reminds me of a college production of a David Mamet play. (Yes, I worked on at least one of those.) I don’t know that it’s a matter of talent, at least when it comes to the actors. After all Stephen Boyd did some cool stuff with his role in Ben Hur. (He was playing the gay subtext, while Chuck Heston could not be told about such a thing.) Apparently Harlan Ellison has complained that his dialogue was rewritten daily by the producer and director, who were oh so obviously better writers than Harlan. And to call the direction wooden is an insult to knotty pine.

This is not a Douglas Sirk movie, or even Todd Haynes channelling Sirk. Sirk and Haynes both understand why they’re telling stories, why they’re filming something called a melodrama. The guys running this shoot think they’re doing important work but have no idea what is actually being captured on screen.

“One phone call, and I’m not dog meat… one phone call, and game called on account of Oscar!”

SCTV once did a parody of this thing called The Nobel. But not even those geniuses could trump the grim, wonderful reality. The Oscar is so far out of control that I need to see it again before I try to write anything coherent about it.

And if you ever wondered why Tony Bennett never had anything like the film career that Frank Sinatra had, wonder no more.

By the way, I just clicked over the the actual Oscar ceremony. Did you know that some people actually consider Ben Stiller funny?

Update on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 10:18AM by Scott

The Self-Styled Siren does a great job of conveying The Oscar's awful wonderfulness – or is that wonderful awfulness?

the people who really run your business

"Latent structure is the master of obvious structure."

This aphorism from Heraclitus (by way of Philip K. Dick) reminds me of something that I've experienced in every place in which I've worked. (Okay, let's say every organization up to 200 or so people.) And that's the fact that there are probably about half a dozen middle managers whom everyone turns to when they need to get something done. It can be an entry level person looking for advice, or a C-level executive who needs to pitch new business. The same half dozen names will probably come up in both kinds of conversations.

I suppose there's an analogue to this in Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point hypothesis – some individuals have an inordinate amount of influence because of the sheer number of people they know – but it's not so much about how connected these people are. It's about their competence and understanding of the business they're in.

I don't know how you identify them except through working with them. You have to spend time in the organization before they become apparent. And then suddenly their value will simply be obvious to you because they make things happen on a daily basis. They fix problems and keep things moving. Whatever the official workflow process is, these people are the actual process.

When one of them quits, chances are it's a far bigger loss to the organization than losing one of the head honchos. Something basic about how the place does business is lost; a bunch of relationships and experiences and knowledge and process is also gone. And because (in my experience anyway) there are only a handful of them it doesn't take much to shift the balance in a workplace. One or two of these folks leave and you go from a happy, kickass business to lethargy and confusion, a place where people are merely doing their jobs.

Conversely, if you can add a couple of folks like this to your organization, you've just increased your chances of success. They'll bring new life to your existing processes and culture. The place will work better, without any business process re-engineering or operational reviews or (ack) consultants.

If you're one of the folks sitting at the top of the org chart, I don't know how you identify these people. But you have to be trying to find them. You have to understand that they are, if not the backbone of the organization, at least the muscle, the blood, the life of it.

Update on Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 2:12PM by Scott

Re-reading this today, that may be the goofiest, most pedantic intro to a blog post ever written. You guys out in Blogland should feel free to start calling me on stuff like that.

I think we've all met one

I really like signals vs noise, the design blog run by the folks at 37 Signals. Not because I like reading their insights about creating software, but because their insights into creating software regularly have validity for a wide range of creative and business activity.

For instance, earlier this week the guys posted about the danger of "the idea guy" – the guy who's full of great concepts...

You know the type. It’s the “this thing is going to be Facebook meets Flickr, but for dogs! If we can just get 1% of the online dog market, we’ll be rich!” spiel.

...but who can't actually contribute to creation of said great idea. This reminded me of the old writing joke about the writer who's dentist has a great idea for a screenplay. The dentist has it all worked out – he just needs someone to write it for him.

Anything that doesn't involve getting your hands dirty, or some long hours, or the odd sleepless night, probably isn't a great idea. Their point in the post, and mine elsewhere, is that you actually have to some skills that contribute to the execution of said great idea. Otherwise, like the dentist, you're not just devaluing the contribution of a large group of people, you're telling them you don't actually know what you're talking about.

For art directors, the comparable situation would be the client who tells you to "just photoshop" that 10K image so they can use it as the feature on their home page.

And as a CD/manager, even though I know that some distance from the day to day is essential for sanity and strategy, I find that I can't get too distanced from real jobs and real skills. Otherwise I become the quote unquote idea guy – the guy who lets other people worry about details like writing, design, production, site design... all the stuff the actually consumer sees.

je suis désolé

Too much going on to think, let alone type. So in honour of David Gillespie's return to Australia, something to offend our resident southern hemispherite.

do android consultants dream of electric savings?

Efficiency. I'm all for it.

Except I'm not.

We've been talking about printing a couple of jobs together, projects that are dropping simultaneously and have about the same volume of information. It just makes sense, right? Who doesn't want to do better for their client and help their bottom line?

And then the reality set in. Different consumer expectations. Different impacts required. Different budgets. As you discover each hurdle you jump it, but then there's another, and another, and suddenly efficiency is simply an impediment, a word that gets surrounded by air quotes.

Twice at past agencies, the efficiency bug struck. I tried to cover my mouth and wash my hands a lot in order to give both outbreaks a miss. Not because I'm not open to new ideas, but because inevitably these kinds of efforts at ad agencies lead to wild generalizations that have very little bearing on the reality of the people actually doing the work. I've watched very intelligent and well dressed management consultants who were no older than me recommend actions that could have been gleaned by reading a couple of ROB magazines – or by talking to an art director or production person.

You can't change the basic dynamics of how creatives come up with work, or how account managers need to deal with clients. You can change the tools that these people use for their jobs – this MacBook is way more efficient than an IBM Selectric typewriter, for instance – but not their basic needs, or their need for each other. That's reality.

Efficiency – the idea of changing reality – looks good in meetings. Reality itself? Not so much.

But as that noted management guru Philip K. Dick once wrote, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."