Advertising – Page 9 – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

Copywriting Tip: The Advertiser is Not the Hero of the Story

When you sit down to write an ad, you have a chance to tell a story. Who is the hero of the story? It’s not the advertiser.

radio and tv advertising: the customer's customer is the hero of the story — photo by likstudio/dpc

In his e-book How to Tell a Story, Donald Miller lays out a very effective structure for a marketing piece:

A character [the hero] as a problem, then meets a guide who gives them a plan and calls them to action.

That action, Miller explains, either results in a happy ending or a sad ending. For example:

In the movie Star Wars, Luke Skywalker wants to fight against the evil empire, but he also wants to know if he has what it takes to be a Jedi. He meets a guide named Yoda who gives him confidence, a plan, and training to go out and defeat the enemy. The happy ending happens when Luke destroys the Death Star and preserves the Rebellion to fight another day.

In the stories you are constructing for your clients, the advertiser is not the hero – the advertiser is the guide. The advertiser’s customer is the hero.

A man wants to buy a car but has lousy credit. He meets a guide – your car dealership client – who helps him get a car loan at an affordable rate and payment, and and puts him on the path to rebuilding his credit. The happy ending occurs when his new car pulls into his driveway.
A couple is frustrated that their home is too hot in the summer, it’s drafty in the winter, and their energy bills are too high. They meet a guide – your window dealer client – who shows them how new triple-pane windows will make their home more comfortable and bring their energy bills down.
A woman looks in the mirror and doesn’t like what she sees. She meets a guide – your aesthetic medicine client – who shows her how the clinic’s whizbang laser will make her look 10 years younger with no surgery, scars, or downtime.

A way to get started: begin your first draft by writing the words “This is a story about…”

Then answer the following questions:

Who is the hero? Write a brief description of your advertiser’s target customer.
What problem is the hero experiencing that your client – and the guide – can help solve?
What’s the plan – what product or service will the advertiser offer to solve the problem?
What is the happy ending that this plan will produce?

Now you’ve got an infrastructure to design your campaign.

One other note to keep in mind: when you are marketing yourself and your medium to potential advertisers, you also have a story to tell.

You are not the hero of the story – you are the guide.

[reminder]What’s the best story you’ve written for an advertiser?[/reminder]

Want To Make More Money? Raise Your “Evangelista Number”!

We have this expression, Christy [Turlington] and I. We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.

— Supermodel Linda Evangelista, interviewed in Vogue Magazine, 1990.

bigger sales means more money — photo by pathdoc/dpc

Evangelista may have been joking, but there is a serious principle behind what she said.

If you are a salesperson and want to make more money, you’ve got three options:

Sell to more customers
Increase the number of transactions to existing customers
Increase the average dollar amount of each transaction

All three of these options have merit, but the fastest and most efficient way to increase your income is to increase the average dollar amount of each transaction.

How do you do that? Increase your Evangelista Number.

Ask for more in every proposal.

Here’s an exercise to get you started:

Assemble every direct proposal you made over the past three months (skip the RFP-driven agency ones — direct is under your control). Add up the total dollars you asked for, and divide it by the number of proposals you made.

An example with easy math (your numbers will be different):

Let’s say that over the last three months you did 50 direct proposals.
The total you asked for was $175,000.
This means that your average proposal “ask” was $3500 ($175,000 divided by 50).

If you’re happy with the money you’re making, you can stop right here. Just keep doing what you’re doing, and you’ll make what you’ve been making.

If you want to make more, ask yourself… what if you increased your average proposal size from $3500 to $5000?

What if you made $5000 your Evangelista Number?

To do this, you need to make a commitment to yourself — you won’t start a proposal unless you can ask for at least $5000.

If your workload stays the same, you’ll do another 50 proposals over the next three months. But your total “ask” will increase from $175,000 to $250,000 — a 42% increase.

This doesn’t mean you won’t accept an order for less than $5000. There will still be negotiation.

But instead of negotiating down from $3500, you’ll be negotiating from $5000. More often than not, the number you wind up at will be larger than it was before.

Over time, you’ll see another benefit: more loyal customers, and more repeat business. That’s because customers who spend more with you will see stronger results, and that makes them much more likely to renew.

A warning: to make this work, you’ll need to shed the customers who can’t even consider a proposal at your Evangelista level.

This is a good thing — those are the customers who are least likely to get good results. They’re the ones who say, “I tried [name of your medium] and it didn’t work.”

Let them go, and use the time you save to find bigger fish.

So there’s your exercise for the week. Figure out your average proposal “ask”, decide how much more money you want to make, and set a new minimum.

[reminder]How do you decide how much to ask for?[/reminder]

Why “Find Us On Facebook” Is a Sales Killer

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not – you’re the product,” Bruce Schneier

photo by aleksandr/dpc

In the rush to use social media, advertisers are cramming the Facebook logo everywhere.

They post it at the end of television commercials next to their own logo. They put in print ads and on billboards; “Find us on Facebook!” is included in radio commercials.

It’s even on store signage, directed at customers who have already found the store in real life.

This is a bad idea.

On the surface, it seems like a good one. After all, millions log onto Facebook at least regularly — why not let them know that the store’s got a page?

Why “Find Us On Facebook” Can Backfire

When your customers go to Facebook, you have no control over what they do next. If they are going to look for you online, you want them on your own site, not on Facebook.

I once heard Dan Kennedy, during a teleseminar, explain the fundamental difference between a store’s website and its Facebook page.

When shoppers land on your web page, he said, it is as if they have walked into your store. You have control over where they go and what they do. You can show them your merchandise, engage them in an online chat, and move them down a funnel that ultimately results in a sale.

As long as they are on your website, they see what you want them to see.

Inviting them to find you on Facebook, Kennedy pointed out, is like walking them out your back door into a carnival in the parking lot. There’s a puppy doing tricks on one side, crazy political speeches happening on the other side.

You have a booth at the carnival. So do all your competitors.

A customer could go to Facebook to look for you, and spend the afternoon watching cat videos instead.

What if they “Like” you on Facebook? Doesn’t that give you a chance to communicate with them on their news feeds?

Not much — Facebook’s changed their algorithm so that the vast majority of your business page fans will never see your updates unless you pay them. Organically, Adweek reports, a page will reach about 2.6% of its fans with a post.

There’s nothing outrageous about this — Facebook’s a business, they have put lot of money, time, and study into building this platform. It’s not your platform, it’s theirs.

“Owners make rules, not tenants. And Facebook owns the lot.” — Michael Hyatt

You aren’t the customer… you’re the product.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a Facebook page or a social media strategy. Your customers are likely to spend time on Facebook, and there’s nothing wrong with having a presence when they look for you.

Your mass media advertising — radio, television, transit or outdoor, direct mail, etc — should drive your prospects to an environment you control. That’s your website, not your Facebook page.

Send them to your store, not the carnival.

[reminder]

A Beautiful Ad That Didn’t Work… and An Ugly One That Did

“They kind of forgot to sell the car.”

The Dog Strikes Back_ 2012 Volkswagen Game Day Commercial

Remember this commercial from the 2012 Super Bowl? Watch the ad and then answer the one-question quiz below.

Volkswagen, like many advertisers that year, released the ad on the Internet a week early to get people talking. The reviews in the media after the game were extremely positive.

The ad ranked #2 on the USA Today Ad Meter. Shirley Brady of Brandchannel called it “Another big win for Volkswagen” in the Washington Post, and predicted greater recall for the featured model than VW had accomplished the previous year in the same slot.

Here’s the quiz: without going back and watching it again, which model is the ad about?

I’ll Give You a Hint: It Was The Beetle

A few days after the game, I met with a Volkswagen dealer in Hawaii. I asked him what he thought of the ad.

He wasn’t impressed.

He told me that several days before the Super Bowl, Volkswagen had sent out an email blast offering Volkwagen owners special incentives to come in and test-drive a Beetle. The dealership also sent out its own email to its database making the same offer.

“How many people have responded to the offer?” I asked.”So far… zero,” replied the dealer.

I asked him if anyone had mentioned the ad in the showroom that day. “If you mean any customers… no. I think Volkswagen kind of forgot to sell the car.”

If the advertiser’s aim was to entertain, the ad was a success. But if they wanted to generate customer interest in the new Beetle, that dealer’s evidence pointed to failure.

What about sales overall? In February, 2012 Volkswagen sold 1,303 Beetles. An ad in the 2012 Super Bowl cost $3.5 million. Setting aside production costs and any other advertising VW did for the car, this works out to $2686 per Beetle sold.

If you think about it, there’s generally no correlation between how much something cost to make and how interesting it is. — Seth Godin

If the ad works, it is a great ad no matter how many rules are broken or how bad it may look, smell or taste. If the ad is not working, it is wretchedly bad no matter how clever the production. — Don Fitzgibbons, The Guru’s Rules for Local Advertising

Here’s The Ugly Ad that Worked

This one’s from a group of fast food restaurants in the Southeast. All it did was work.

https://youtu.be/H5x1CGUHbgE

This commercial would not do well on the USA Today ad meter. But that’s not how the advertiser kept score.

This ad had one job — to move more hot dogs during the middle of the week. It performed magnificently, delivering an almost-immediate double-digit lift in hot dog sales on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

The restaurants gave up some margin on the hot dogs and made plenty back on all the fries, sodas and custard people bought with their dogs.

You can go after awards if you want, but don’t forget to sell the product.

[reminder]

Why Rotators Are Not Your Friend

The most expensive ads you can buy are the cheap ones that don’t work.

advertising is like hammering a nail into a board — Photo courtesy of BillionPhotos.com/dpc

I often meet with business owners who are new to broadcast advertising. Many times their first experience with radio or TV is with some sort of rotator package.

Often it’s their last experience as well, because the rotators didn’t work.

Rotators are also known as “Run of Schedule”, or ROS. They are commercials that are not guaranteed to run at any particular time — the station decides when they air, from 5 in the morning until 12 midnight, seven days a week. In return for giving the station maximum flexibility to schedule the ads, the client gets a significant discount on the price of each commercial.

The mind of your prospective customer is like a seasoned piece of hardwood. Your message is like a nail. The rhythmic strokes of the hammer represent the number of times your message — your unique selling proposition — is heard by the prospect.

Your goal is to drive the nail through the board and then clench it on the other side. Messages that are clenched are remembered for a lifetime. Tap, tap goes the hammer. But during the night the claw pulls the nail back out of its little hole! The following day you find nothing more than a faint indentation in the board. The nail is no longer in it. Your message is forgotten.

Using the hole you started the previous day, you position the nail again. Tap, tap goes the hammer. But again falls the veil of darkness, eyes close, and the claw does its work once more. Day after day, this scene is repeated; but ever so slowly, the hole gets deeper.” — Roy Williams, from The Wizard of Ads: Turning Words into Magic and Dreamers into Millionaires

Rotators seem like a terrific way to put your toe in the water and try a medium out — use the whole station, get a huge reach, and save money on the rate.

So why don’t they work?

It goes back to Roy Williams and the hardwood. Let’s say that at the same dollar amount, you have two options

10 commercials in the morning news.
–
Or you could buy 25 rotators. They might run any time Monday through Sunday, 5am until midnight.

In the morning news, you hammer the nail ten times into the same hole.

With the rotator package, you smack the nail twenty-five times, but in between each whack you take the nail out and move it somewhere else on the board.

The first option drives the nail in deeper. Much deeper. Even though each whack costs more money, the return on investment is much better.

“Concentration is the key to all economic success.” —Peter Drucker

Rotators can be helpful when added to a concentrated schedule of commercials. By themselves, they’re a drop in the ocean.

Whatever medium you choose, pick frequency over reach.

[reminder]