Wizard of Ads Partners

"Impact in advertising today is 80 percent strategy, 20 percent copy. This makes it nearly impossible for good copy to compensate for weak strategy." - Roy H. Williams

But, everybody engages web sites

By Wizard Partner, Dave Young

It's a bold statement. When I first heard Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg utter it, my brain rejected it. They put it on a slide and my brain set it aside to chew on later.

Here's what it means: People who think that the internet is just print in a different medium are wrong. (Is your brain rejecting that statement?) Here's my little 'a-ha' demonstration

You are reading a book: read - read - read - backup to re-read a difficult passage - read - read - lick thumb to turn page - read - read - read - and so on.

You are reading a newspaper:  scan - scan - read - read - scan - read - turn to page 8A - read - back to page 1 - scan - read - turn page - scan - continue.

I am reading a newspaper: find the comics - scan - skip - read (just the funny ones - why do they call the boring ones 'comics'?)

You are reading engaging a web site designed by someone who believes that web sites are just like print: scan - scan - read - look for nav link - look some more - click - scan - wrong page click back button  -find another nav link - click - scan - read - click - back to search engine.

You are engaging a web site designed by someone who believes the web is different: scan - read - click - scan - click - scan - read - read - click - scan - click - type - click - type - click - wait for UPS truck to deliver merchandise.

Does that help?

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It's as easy as A.B.C.

By Roy H. Williams

You’re attracted to art
1. when it stands for something you believe in,
2. when it shows you a reflection of your own core values, or
3. gives you a glimpse of your inner face.

You're drawn to a brand for precisely the same reasons.

A cultural icon is a contemporary archetype, mass-appeal public art, the symbol of a worldview. Cultural icons embody the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. They reveal the mind of the time.

Learn to read the choices of your customers and you'll be able to better serve them.

The cars your customers drive reflect choices they have made. Their clothing and accessories reflect additional choices. What do these choices tell you? They decorate their homes and offices with choices that virtually shout their innermost thoughts and feelings. Are you paying attention to any of this?

"Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters." - Maggie Tufu, The Engines of God, page 398

A well-served customer is not easily stolen.

Bill Bernbach once said, “Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being."

We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are.

"I am irresistible, I say, as I put on my designer fragrance. I am a merchant banker, I say, as I climb out of my BMW. I am a juvenile lout, I say, as I down a glass of extra strong lager. I am handsome, I say, as I don my Levi's jeans." – John Kay

Do you want to write persuasive ads, speeches and sermons? Use words and phrases that reflect your customer's core values. Connect to his or her worldview.

A knowledge of trends among your customers in
art (music, hairstyle, clothing, jewelry, etc.)
brands (cars, bikes, computers, magazines, etc.) and
heroes (the cultural icons they admire)
will be the only clues you need.

Your business has only 3 or 4 customers living at thousands of different addresses. Your marketing should be crafted to reflect the preferences of each of them.

The concepts I've shared today will help you better understand persona-based ad writing, an important element in Persuasion Architecture®, the marketing technique perfected by New York Times bestselling authors Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg.

Captain Jeff Sexton is a master of persona-based ad writing. He'll be one of your instructors when you come to Austin to learn how to Write for Radio and the Internet.

That class, August 26-27, is just 4 weeks away. Are you coming?

Business isn't going to get better until you get better at attracting it.

Come.

Aroo.

Roy H. Williams

6-Word Stories

"For sale:
baby shoes,
never worn."
– a famous 6-word story commonly attributed to Ernest Hemingway but it’s not likely he really wrote it.

"With bloody hands, I say good-bye.”
– a 6-word story by Frank Miller        

"Longed for him. Got him. Shit."
– a 6-word story by Margaret Atwood    

"machine. Unexpectedly, I'd invented a time"
– a 6-word story by Alan Moore        
     
"Tick-tock tick-tock tick-tick."
– a 6-word story by Neal Stephenson

Come to the Wild Fiction Workshop August 6-7.
We'll publish you.
(And your story gets to be longer than 6 words.)

And the winner is...

"In the average one-minute speech, the typical student uses 2.5 statistics. Only one student in ten tells a story. Those are the speaking statistics. The "remembering" statistics, on the other hand, are almost a mirror image: When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remember the stories. Only 5 percent remember any individual statistic."

Page 243, Made to Stick, Why some ideas survive and others die - by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

Are you making your ads and presentations memorable by telling stories?

Keep these five tips in mind when developing a campaign to cement your brand image.

By Roy Williams

"Brands are built on consistency, and the roots of consistency are patience and attention to detail. It's going to take a lot longer to build your brand than you feel it should."

Before we get started, let me warn you: This is going to hurt a little. Creating branding ads that resonate with your audience is certainly not the easiest thing you'll ever do. However, following my tips will help you simplify the process.

Having read hundreds of mission statements, I remain convinced that they're worthless as a source of brand essence. If you peel back the idealism and happy talk, you'll find that what companies say in their mission statement is quite different from what they actually do on a daily basis. This is also why most branding ads don't work. To be successful, your brand must be built on what you actually deliver.

Look at your policies, procedures and daily management practices: What behaviors are you measuring and rewarding? Examine your purchasing and pricing practices; these impact your brand far more than anything you might say in your ads. Finally, look at your décor and lighting through the eyes of your customers, and listen to the sound of your store through your customer's ears--you'll begin to glimpse the truth of your brand. Examine the soul of your company through your daily actions, not your beliefs, and you'll soon write branding ads that will ring like a bell.

The keys to successful brand writing are these:

1. Find out what your customers are saying about you. Bad ads are filled with phrases you like to say about yourself. Good ads are filled with what your customers say about you when you're not around. To be successful, your branding ads must sharply echo "the word on the street" about your company. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, got it right when he said, "It has always seemed to me that your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does." You'll discover the truth behind your brand when you can explain why customers come back to you.

2. Substantiate your claims. Overstatement is passé. Today's customers are equipped with a sensitive hype-meter whose needle jumps at the slightest sign of "big talk." So be sure to offer proof to back up what you say, even if that proof lies only in the customers' past experience or in their long-held assumptions. Branding isn't just about the facts: People buy brands with their hearts as well as their heads. Brand loyalty is built on the fact that our purchases remind us--and tell the world around us--who we are.

3. Double the verbs; whack the adjectives. Search for evocative words. Sniff out overused phrases. Stimulate customers' minds with thoughts more interesting than the ones they were previously thinking.

Count the verbs in this famous branding ad I wrote a few years ago: "You are standing in the snow, five and one half miles above sea level, gazing at a horizon hundreds of miles away. It occurs to you that life here is very simple: You live, or you die. No compromises, no whining, no second chances. This is a place constantly ravaged by wind and storm, where every ragged breath is an accomplishment. You stand on the uppermost pinnacle of the earth. This is the mountain they call Everest. Yesterday it was considered unbeatable. But that was yesterday. Rolex believed Sir Edmund Hillary would conquer Mount Everest, so for him they created the Rolex Explorer. In every life there is a Mount Everest to be conquered. When you have conquered yours, you'll find your Rolex waiting patiently for you to come and pick it up at Justice Jewelers. I'm Woody Justice, and I've got a Rolex for you."

4. Link your "first mental image" and "last mental image." The psychological principles of primacy and recency mean that in any list, the first few words and the last few words will be the easiest to remember. Great ads focus on a single point and contain that point in both the opening and closing statements of the ad. When possible, link your last mental image to your first mental image, and you'll elevate customers' ability to recall your ad. The Rolex ad was focused on you and your accomplishments. The watch was merely a symbol of those accomplishments. "You are standing in the snow...I've got a Rolex for you."

5. Be consistent. The consistent use of the same colors and fonts is often called "branding," but true branding extends far beyond a visual style signature. The brand essence you've translated visually must now be translated into an auditory style signature in your radio and TV ads, as well as throughout your store. Does the auditory style signature of what your customer hears while "on hold" agree with the balance of your brand essence?

Brands are built on consistency, and the roots of consistency are patience and attention to detail. It's going to take a lot longer to build your brand than you feel it should. Here's the bottom line: If you think you're going to be able to measure brand progress at the end of 12 short months, you're dreaming. Brand development isn't measured in months, but in years. Twenty-four months is the soonest you can hope to begin seeing fruit from any brand orchard you might plant today.

Hey, I told you this was going to hurt a little. (Notice how the last mental image-pain--is linked to the first mental image in this column?)

Good luck with your brand.

By Roy H. Williams

If I told you our experiment was constructed specifically to test radio versus newspaper, I’d be lying.  Like most discoveries, we stumbled on this one by accident.

Here’s how it happened: Lifestyle Centers of America is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to lead you and me to a healthier, happier life through better nutrition, physical activity, and helpful new habits. My team was recruited to give them marketing advice. We accepted the challenge.

Our first assignment was to craft a message that would drive interested persons to a brand new website. We decided to test our messages using a series of quarter-page newspaper ads.

(Article continued after newspaper ad below.) 

The first thing we did was locate a newspaper that would deliver a quarter-page display ad to 89,000 subscribers for only $900. Total circulation would be much higher, of course, due to newsstand sales and pass-along readership, but we were looking strictly at paid circulation for the Sunday edition. If you’ve ever looked at newspaper rates, you’ll recognize this to be an extremely efficient, low-budget buy.

The second thing we did was craft a message for our client.  My secret hope was to see 300 to 400 unique visitors show up within 48 hours at PlantFiberDiet.org, our virgin website.  We got 71 visitors. I didn’t blame the newspaper. I blamed my message. “Tweaking” wasn’t going to get me where I needed to go, so I scrapped the whole concept of the ad and created a new message from scratch.

Two weeks later, that second message got us 217 unique visitors within 48 hours; a definite improvement, but not enough to make us happy. But I knew my message was stronger than the results were indicating. That’s when I said to one of my media buyers, “Find me a radio station that will let us air 36 sixty-second ads in one day – two spots per hour, 6A to midnight – for 900 dollars. If the program director limits us to only one spot per hour, hang up and call someone else. When you’re driving traffic with a 1-day schedule, there’s no such thing as too much frequency.”

No surprises so far, right?

Now pay attention because this next part is where most people would screw up an otherwise valid media test. To be reliable, the test has to be dollar for dollar, message for message, time for time. If we spent 900 dollars in one day with one newspaper, we needed to spend 900 dollars in one day with one radio station. “Dollar for dollar, time for time.”

Too often, advertisers want to take a one-day newspaper budget and spread it out over several days on the radio, or worse, spread it out over several radio stations. To be a fair test, we had to spend all the money in one day on one station.  But radio needs repetition, so I refused to buy stations that would have delivered huge reach but with lower frequency.  My 36-ad schedule was non-negotiable. Call me nuts if you want. I’ll tell you how it ended in a minute.

Take a look at the newspaper ad.
Listen to the radio ad by clicking the audio bar at the top of the page. (A new page will open when you click the link. Once the ad is finished click the back button to return to the story on this page.)

You’ll notice the messages are identical.

We created the radio ad by asking Joe Hamilton to read the newspaper ad into a microphone. Joe’s not a professional voice talent. He’s just the guy whose photo was in the newspaper ad. We had a better-than-average newspaper layout and below-average radio production.  Newspaper was given every advantage. We even waited 2 weeks for the newspaper traffic on our website to die down to zero visitors per day before launching our radio schedule. We didn’t want to radio to have the benefit of residual traffic generated by the newspaper campaign.

The result of spending $900 in one day on one radio station? Our first test yielded 4,308 unique visitors within 48 hours. This seemed too good to be true, so I told my media buyers I was worried they’d gotten a radio buy that wasn’t typical. “Find me a deal the average buyer could buy, any day of the week, for the same price we’re paying.”

We then waited another 2 weeks until residual traffic died down to about 150 unique visitors per day, then ran the second radio campaign in a town 1000 miles from the first campaign.

As I had expected, our net result from the second test was lower than the first city where we’d gotten far too good a deal. After deducting 150 visitors per day, the first 48 hours yielded only 3,033 unique visitors for $900. This was 30 percent less than our first test, but still 14 times more visitors than our best newspaper results.

Newspaper and Radio were given an identical message with an identical budget spread over an identical amount of time.

Radio delivered 14 times the results.

Radio beat newspaper.

We're continuing the test in additional cities, pitting the local newspaper against against a radio station in the same town. Dollar for dollar, message for message, time for time.

I'll keep you informed.

Maybe.

By Wizard Partner, Dave Young

Your website must...

1. Be findable in the search engines
2. Have persuasive copy
3. Be designed for easy conversion

 

The non-SEO solution for Search Optimization
If you write your site in the language of your customers, talking about what's important to your customers, you'll likely need very little help from an SEO specialist. Because, if you are using the language and phrasing of your customers, your organic search results will do quite well.

One of the best ways to start getting good organic search results for this type of traffic is to start blogging. If you're diligent and smart about your phrasing, you'll start seeing results quite soon after your new content is indexed.

In addition, you'll need to follow good technical practices to make sure your site is easily indexed and the search engines can find your pages. 

Persuasion
Having a persuasive site is much more difficult that it would seem at face value. Not all of your visitors are persuaded by the same information. They have different values, they have different needs and they have different levels of patience to let you tell your story. Persuasion Architecture is our preferred method to design a persuasive strategy for your site from the very beginning.

Conversion
Have you made it easy for your visitors to do what you desire them to do on your site? Do you have strong and easily-understood calls to action?

The above is simple... but not easy.

PS From the editor. Dave Young is our Online Persuasion Specialist.  You could spend months, possibly years experimenting with Persuasion Architecture, or you could simply hire Dave's team to do it for you. Your results will happen much faster. (If you are an Australian company, contact the Australian office of Wizard of Ads at infoaust@wizardofads.com.)