Copywriting – Page 2 – 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]

How to Keep Your Clients Out Of Legal Trouble

It helps to ask the right questions before you work on an advertising campaign. Ignorance of the law has a way of coming back to haunt you.

Today’s Sales Training Lesson: How I Got Burned in a Presentation

Five years ago, I had a great promotion idea for an auto dealer in San Diego. The dealer was a baseball fan, his brand had a great fit with the sport, and I had a concept that was going to bring it all together.

The presentation got off to a great start, and I went through the details of the promotion flawlessly. I got to the end and asked for the commitment.

That’s when he dropped the bomb: “Nice idea, Phil. But it’s against the law to do a gift-with-purchase on a car sale in California.” Presentation over. Sale denied. It took me a while to get over that one.

It was embarrassing for me, but as an out-of-town consultant I wouldn’t necessarily be expected to know the laws of the state of California. But the account executive – a California resident – didn’t know the rules. And the sales manager – a California resident – didn’t know.

Frankly, we were lucky — somebody knew the law. It would’ve been much worse if the client had agreed to do the promotion, run a heavy advertising schedule on the station, and then gotten fined by California regulators.

Traveling the country, I frequently run into account executives and managers who don’t know the rules. In big picture terms, there are three common categories of pitfalls:

Financing Offers: the federal Truth in Lending Act has specific rules governing what you can and cannot say in a finance offer. The most common examples are credit offers for things like automobile and furniture sales. There are specific “TILA Trigger Terms” that require specific disclosures in an ad. In addition to the federal requirements, many states have their own laws regarding this.
Use of Copyrighted Material: It certainly sounds like a great idea to use one of today’s hit songs, or a classic rock tune, as the music bed for your commercial. Unfortunately, you can’t do that unless you have permission, and that permission involves paperwork and often an exchange of money. I ran into this all the time when I was a radio account executive, and it was easy for me then – I just wouldn’t let the client do it. In my current work I see this all the time. While I’m not surprised that, say, a furniture store owner doesn’t know what the rules are, I’m distressed at how many account executives, sales managers, and even production directors have no idea that they can’t do this… or don’t care.
Local Quirks: Dentists in the state of Texas are not allowed to do testimonial advertising. For other doctors this is okay, but not for dentists. As I mentioned earlier, auto dealers in some states can do a “gift-with-purchase” offer, while in other states they can’t. Each locality has its own goofy way of doing business, and you need to know your home states quirks.

[bctt tweet=”Know the rules. The right information can keep your client out of legal hot water.”]

Dan O’Day recently told the story of a radio market manager who knew it was against the law to use a hit song in an ad, and decided to “take his chances”. As O’Day pointed out: “That guy wasn’t taking just his chances. Everyone involved in a violation of someone’s copyright can be held liable — including the huge radio company that owned this guy’s cluster…and that had very deep pockets.”

Help Your Clients Keep The Advertising Legal

There are places you can go to learn the most important rules:

1. Local or state industry association or trade groups. Ask your client what groups he or she belongs to. Examples: for auto dealers, there may be someone you can talk to it at the New Car Dealers Association for your area. Most states also have a Real Estate Association.

2. Media organizations. For example, if you work in radio or TV, there is usually a state Association of Broadcasting.

3. Your own company’s legal department. This, of course, assumes that your company has one. But most of the big ones do, and they would prefer not to be sued. Talk to your manager and see if there is someone at Corporate who can help you.

4. Government regulators. There is probably someone at the state or local level in charge of consumer fraud issues. Your client may know who that is. Sometimes it’s as simple as asking.

A radio, TV, or digital sales rep is not an attorney, and no one expects you to be one. But you want to avoid nasty surprises whenever possible. A little knowledge can go a long way.

UPDATE 4-10-15: It is important to point out that I am not an attorney, and I’m not qualified to give legal advice. This is not legal advice. It is just… advice. If you want actual legal advice, the best thing to do is talk to an actual attorney.

[reminder]What’s the oddest legal quirk in your market?[/reminder]

5 Awesome Must-Read Blogs For Ambitious Media Salespeople

The best salespeople read constantly. Books, newspapers, newsletters, online courses… and blogs. We live in an age where there is an enormous amount of great information available for free about business, marketing, advertising, and sales.

Here is some required smartphone reading for anyone who works in media sales or advertising:

Photo courtesy Hubspot

Great Advertising, Marketing and Sales Blogs

Dan O’Day Talks about Radio — The ostensible subject is radio, but about 50% of the time he is talking about advertising, and what he says can apply to television, Internet, and other media just as well as radio. His Commercial Smackdowns, in which he gleefully dismantles a radio ad, are both instructive and a great deal of fun.
Jeffrey Gitomer’s Sales Caffeine — not technically a blog (he has one of those, too but rarely posts). You have to subscribe by email to get this. Gitomer, the author of dozens of sales books including Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness, has been sending out these emails since 2001. He has been known to repeat himself, which is not surprising when you think about having to write 52 of these a year for 15 years. But he lives and breathes sales, has strong opinions, and knows what the heck he’s talking about.
The Jim Doyle & Associates Blog: In the interest of full disclosure, let me point out that my day job is as a consultant and sales trainer for Jim Doyle & Associates. But I was a paying customer of this company before they hired me – when I was a radio account executive, I paid out of my pocket to be part of Jim’s sales coaching program. Jim himself wrote Don’t Just Make A Sale… Make A Difference: How Top Achievers Approach Advertising Sales. He, Tom Ray, Pat Norris and John Hannon all provide content to the blog. If you sell radio, television, print, online, billboards, or any other media, this stuff works.
Monday Morning Memo Every Monday, Roy Williams (the Wizard of Ads, not the basketball coach) pontificates about advertising, marketing, persuasion, and anything else that he wants the world to know. Sometimes, he wants the world to know how smart he is, so his blog does occasionally go off in the weeds. But more often than not, he has excellent advice on how to enter somebody’s mind and convince them to do or think something. His book Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads: Turning Paupers into Princes and Lead into Gold is required reading for anyone who works in advertising, or wants to.
Sam Richter’s Know More Blog Richter is the author of Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling, a terrific book on how to research prospects online. He offers a variety resources, some for free and some for money. He is a blog tackles a variety of topics, from sales techniques to to search for information to the value of social media.

[reminder]What’s your favorite advertising, marketing, or sales blog?[/reminder]

How to Say No to Blah: Can It Pass The “So What” Test?

Timing is a funny thing. The other day I read the Miles & Co What Are You Bragging About? blog post, in which Lynn Peisker finds a hotel chain’s chest-thumping less than compelling. Peisker asks this question:

Does your messaging truly reflect your above-and-beyond-brand of Shareworthy Service, or are you promising what every customer simply expects?

radio advertising sales tip: get rid of the blah — photo by chrisdorney/dpc

The very next day I received an email from a television advertising salesperson on the West Coast. She was looking for a creative idea for a roofing company. She had asked the client what made his roofing company different, and got this answer back:

“We will complete the job to the customer’s satisfaction. We are here before, during and after the job.”

That’s the company’s unique selling proposition? They’ll complete the roofing job to a customer’s satisfaction? That’s an awfully small hook to hang their hat on.

Looking for something more, I went to the company’s website, where I learned that they are “Roofing Experts”.

Blah.

.
Customers expect a job done to their satisfaction. They expect a the people who work for a roofing company to be roofing experts. Any of their competitors can make exactly the same claim.

Advertising Sales Tip: Say NO to Blah

If you are an advertising salesperson tasked with coming up with a strong campaign, you have a responsibility to say NO to blah. need to dig for something more.

What else can your client talk about? Do they offer a guarantee that’s better than anyone else in town? Offer a product, or installation technique, that’s unique to the area — and better than the alternatives?

What does your client do that nobody else does? What can they offer that nobody else can? Find the answer, and you’ve got your campaign.

[reminder]What’s the most interesting claim you’ve ever been able to put into an ad?[/reminder]

How to Be The Expert: Become Known For What You Know

Here’s how: learn something valuable that your colleagues and competitors don’t know.

sales tip: become a radio advertising expert — photo by waldemarus/dpc

Here’s one example:

Every state has consumer protection laws designed to shield the public from deceptive advertisers. Many small business owners don’t know the laws, and can’t afford to pay a lawyer to keep them on the right side of the law. During my radio advertising sales days, I became that expert.

One day, I saved a client several thousand dollars with that kind of knowledge. He was the General Manager of a local auto dealership. He had worked for a long time in the Portland car business, moved to California for several years, and recently returned to Oregon.

He emailed me because he was planning to launch a new used-car promotion. He had a selection of pre-owned vehicles priced at half their original MSRP, and wanted to feature them in his radio advertising.

What he didn’t know is that while he’d been in California, the state of Oregon had made it illegal to compare a used vehicle’s price to the MSRP in an ad. The official commentary accompanying that section of the law (technically an Administrative Rule) explained that MSRP is a term reserved strictly for new vehicles. Because so many factors (mileage, wear and tear, accidents, etc) affect the price of a used car, the revised law prohibited using an MSRP in any way when referring to anything pre-owned.

I knew this because a little more than a year before, I’d been the only Portland broadcast rep to drive to Salem for a seminar on the new laws. So I was able to warn my client away from a strategy that would have earned him a substantial fine from the state.

My automotive clients knew I’d taken the time to learn the rules, that I had copies of all the relevant consumer protection laws, and that I checked with my contacts at the Oregon Department of Justice if I wasn’t sure of something.

They also knew that my competitors hadn’t gone to the seminar (I’d been known to bring that up in conversation), and didn’t know the law as well as I did. So I got phone calls, and business, from advertisers who might otherwise take their money to another station.

These days, I train advertising salespeople to do their jobs more effectively, and automotive remains a huge advertising category. In every state I travel to, there’s a crying need for someone who knows the consumer protection laws and can advise their clients on how to keep their marketing legal. It’s rare that I ever see anyone try to fill that need.

Can you be that expert at your radio or television station?

[reminder]What do you know that your competitors don’t? Where can you be the “go-to” expert?[/reminder]