The Wizard Chronicle
How to Attract, Convert, and Delight CustomersBy: Wizard of Ads Partners Editor: Craig Arthur
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Entries from June 15, 2008 - June 21, 2008
What to Remember About the Back Seat Marketer...
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do." - Dale Carnegie
The back-seat marketer is all mouth and no responsibility. Tune them out of your strategic planning.
How Do You Measure Your Advertising's Success?
Entertainment or Persuasion"... if you can remove the product/service/client from a funny ad and the ad still works, then it's a bad ad."
I was glued to my screen. I laughed out loud. I forwarded it to 20 people (all of them in the advertising business, incidentally).
I'm just not sure how I see that it works - unless the client is measuring success by how many awards for cleverness their agency wins.
You could simply take out the title tag at the end and replace it with any product. How does any ad about which you can say that work?
To (probably poorly) paraphrase my partner, Roy H. Williams, if you can remove the product/service/client from a funny ad and the ad still works, then it's a bad ad.
I applaud strange, evocative images that surprise broca and bypass boredom's gatekeeper.
However, the bridge to you and your consumers' benefits is far more critical than the first mental images.
But, typically, bridges don't win awards. First mental images do.
But bridges build businesses.
Advertising, Copy If Everyone is Doing It…Should You?
“You have to be in here, all your competitors are. You don’t wanna be left out do you?” - Typical media sales pitch.
By Wizard Partner Clay Campbell
"Don’t buy advertising of any kind without a well thought out strategy plan. Decide what media is best for you and try to dominate it. Be the first to dominate your category in a media your competitors are not using, and it is very likely your competition will never ever catch up."
Several years ago where I live, a lucky yellow page salesperson talked a reluctant attorney into buying an ad in the yellow pages. The next year a couple more attorneys bought ads, and one of them bought a bigger ad than the attorney from the previous year. So the next year that first attorney buys a bigger ad and that year several more attorneys bought in to the yellow-page-ad-buying fever. The fourth year the first attorney bought a full-page ad and the next year about 12 more attorneys purchased display ads.
The next year there were 20 attorneys in the book, and one bought a double truck (two pages together) several others bought full-page ads and the yellow pages sales rep bought a new Jaguar and moved into a new home by the golf course. Last year in our little town of Paducah Kentucky, population 30,000, there were 44 pages in the yellow page directory of attorneys. All are competing for the business of the 30,000 folks and collectively paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to compete with each other in the Yellow Pages. This is happening in every town in America.
If everyone is doing it…should you?
I happen to fervently believe that you should try to get the best bang for your ad dollars.
Two or three years ago an attorney bought a billboard sign in Paducah. This year as you drive around there are faces of lawyers’ on billboards all over town, each one trying out “American Idol” the other. A kinda scary thought.
Let’s say all the plumbers in your town are running big ads in the yellow pages, and you’re a new plumber starting up. Should you buy a big ad in the yellow pages too? Well, I don’t know that, but I defiantly would “ipod up” to biggest and most liked radio station in town and find out if any plumbers were running ads. I would also check to see how many of the plumbers had websites.
If everyone else is doing it should you? Only if that is the best bang for your buck.
I can tell you this: the attorneys in our town notice and read the other attorneys’ billboards way more than everyone else does, because when you buy a red pickup truck, you all of the sudden notice all the other red pick up trucks.
My humble opinion is this: Don’t buy a yellow page ad because the yellow page rep says, “ You have to be in here, all your competitors are. You don’t wanna be left out do you?” If you own an insurance company, don’t buy a billboard because all the other insurance companies do.
If you are a car dealer and 8 other car dealers are running TV ads in the evening news, don’t do it. Find another way.
Most business owners are pretty sure half of their advertising dollars are wasted; but they’re not sure which half to quit. That's when you need a consultant.
Don’t buy advertising of any kind without a well thought out strategy plan. Decide what media is best for you and try to dominate it. Be the first to dominate your category in a media your competitors are not using, and it is very likely your competition will never ever catch up.
If everyone else is doing it should you?
Answer this: If 25 fishermen were fishing in Minnesota in one lake, and none fishing in a nearby lake, would you go fish in the one with the 25 others, or be the lone fisherman in the other? Advertising options available to take your money today have become like the lakes in Minnesota: there are about 10,000 of them.
From the Editor: Clay is the Author of "Get BIG Results from Your small Ad Budget." If you are a small business owner this is a must read. Better yet why not hire Clay to help you get big results from your small ad budget.
Advertising, Strategy The Difference Between Advertising, Promotions, Publicity, PR, and Sales
"If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying "Circus Coming to the Fairground Saturday," that's advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that's promotion. If the elephant walks through the mayor's flower bed, that's publicity. And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that's public relations. If the town's citizens go the circus, you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they'll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions and ultimately, they spend a lot at the circus, that's sales." - Unknown
Shorter is Better
The Wizard's Laws of the Universe, Lesson One
Impact is equal to mass times acceleration.
1. The size of an idea is its mass.
2. The shorter the sentence that delivers the idea, the greater its acceleration.
How big is your idea? How quickly can you express it? These are the factors that determine the impact of what you say.
Capture a big idea and express it in few words.
This is the opening paragraph of a famous website about persuasion:
You want more revenue. More revenue requires more people taking action. But people only do what they want to do. You have to give them what they want in order to get what you want.
That wasn’t badly written. It contained a big idea but let’s see if we can tighten the word count and accelerate the impact:
Want more revenue?
Revenue requires people taking action.
But people only do what they want to do.
Give them what they want.
They'll give you what you want.
All we did was:
1. Eliminate 1 appearance of the word "you" to turn an assumptive statement into a question.
2. Eliminate 2 appearances of the word "more."
3. Eliminate "You have to" to open with a verb, "Give."
4. Break the long, final sentence into 2 short sentences.
Impact was accelerated by cutting seven words and trading five long sentences for six short ones.
"Give me liberty or give me death."
"Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee."
Ever notice how short phrases hit harder than long ones?
In the spirit of today’s message, I think I’ll stop right here.
Advertising, Copy