“What Was That Number Again?”
Crimes Against Advertising, and
How to Prevent
Them
by Neil Hedley
Published by Neil Hedley at Smashwords
This book is available in print at most online retailers.
Copyright © 2012 Neil Hedley
All rights reserved.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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DEDICATION
I’ve been lucky enough to find people who inspired me to become a better writer. They include Larry MacInnis, Bob Humenick, Chris Tyrovolas, Mike Kryton, David Ogilvy, Seth Godin, Dick Orkin, Darren Wasylyk, and many others.
May you find the people who inspire the creativity in you.
Every word in this book was written as if I were reading it aloud to my beloved Tatiana, the person who taught me more than anyone else, to believe in myself and have the guts to try. She taught me that if you leap, the net will appear.
Thanks for making this leap with me, honey.
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CONTENTS
2 In The Beginning Were The Words
7 The 4th Member of The Trinity
8 What Defines A Great Radio Commercial?
13 How To Write A Great Jingle
14 Writing For Theater Of The Mind
15 How To Write Straight-Read Commercials
16 How To Write Funny Radio Commercials
17 How To Write Funny Radio Commercials, Part II
18 How To Tell The Client They’re Wrong
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In October of 2010, my friend Amanda O’Reilly suggested that I write an e-book, sharing the expertise that led to my setting a record for charitable fundraising events on the radio. While intrigued, I never followed up on the idea because I didn’t see much of a market for it, and didn’t think many people would buy it.
Fast forward to Friday, June 3rd, 2011. Tatiana and I were having lunch with three relatively new friends – Kathy Buckworth, Theresa Albert and Jo-Anne Wallace, when it was made quite clear I was to get my head out of my ass.
They asked why, after 30 years in radio and whatever other things I had done, I had never written a book, never gone on a speaking tour, never acknowledged to myself that in all my years in the industry, I had amassed some knowledge and experiences that were well worth sharing.
This book is the result of that cranial extrication.
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1 INTRODUCTION
Most radio advertising is bland, boring, poorly written, shoddily produced, offers little value for the advertiser’s investment, and insults the listener’s intelligence.
Seth Godin, the Godfather of all modern marketing wisdom, refers to radio and television advertising as “interruption marketing”. That is to say, we’re enjoying a particular program when an advertiser barges in, puts a kink in our enjoyment like it was a garden hose, and unilaterally decides that right now is the best time to listen to what they have to say. They’re not far removed from the drunk at the party who knocks over the cabinet with the stereo equipment in it.
Seth has become an icon in the marketing business (and deservedly so) while predicting - and usually calling for - the death of advertising as we’ve come to know it. The statistics appear to cheer Seth on; an Edison Media Research/Arbitron study showed that radio stations lose as much as 42% of their audience when an “intrusive or annoying” commercial comes on.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT
This book is not going to pretend to give you a magical formula for writing great commercials. A radio commercial is not a Twinkie. There’s no recipe. You can’t add a teaspoon of this, half an ounce of that, make sure you do ‘x’ a certain number of times and be guaranteed a great commercial. Anyone who claims that there is a formula has misled you. It’s like saying that a great romantic comedy has to have a kiss every seventeen minutes, or that a great rock and roll song has to have a drum solo within the first twelve seconds. It’s bunk.
This book is not written for style and usage devotees who are expecting graphs, charts, illustrated concepts and a million footnotes. It is largely written in the style in which I speak which can, at times, be irreverent, meandering and oversimplified. I will try to organize things into chapters with common threads, but sometimes a great story might require jumping around topics to provide the background that makes it a great story.
This book is not going to walk on eggshells, either. If you’re a professional copywriter, an advertising student, or a business owner who for God knows what reason has ever written their own commercial, you’ll likely be either challenged or offended somewhere in these pages. That’s why, later on, there’s a link to the website where you can come and tell me why you believe I don’t know what I’m talking about. In fact, I encourage that conversation.
Because although I agree with Seth in that radio’s viability as an advertising medium is under greater scrutiny now than ever before (that’s a very mild version of how Seth puts it), it’s not like the medium is going away any time soon. In fact, recent studies are starting to show that some people – both listeners and advertisers – might be starting to lean back toward radio. So as long as radio is still breathing, it makes sense to figure out ways to maximize whatever impact it still has left.
Ready? Let’s get started.
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2 IN THE BEGINNING WERE THE WORDS
I was 15 years old and living in a bedroom community just east of Toronto when, on my summer vacation, I walked into Bob Humenick’s office for the first time. Bob was the colorful Creative Director for the two stations in the building, which meant that the copy for all our commercials (even material produced by outside advertising agencies) went through him before it got on the air.
He was a giant of a man, with arms as big as my legs, and was passionate about everything he did. Bob’s passion for life and for radio would sometimes materialize in the form of laughing fits that were contagious enough to bring the building’s productivity level to zero for half a day. Once, his passion made itself clear when he picked up an IBM Selectric typewriter (those ones with the ball inside, that weighed as much as Buick) and heaved it out of a second-floor window after a sales rep had completely butchered one of his scripts at a client meeting.
Bob Humenick lit a fire in me that still hasn’t gone out 30 years later. While I had always loved to read, Bob showed me that I also could write. He inspired me through his own award-winning work, and by giving me a massive library of some of the best advertising in radio history. He taught me that a radio commercial is just as much an art as it is a science, and that you can’t truly do a good job until you understand both aspects. He sparked an enduring interest in marketing, advertising, communicating ideas and crafting the written word; and about halfway into those months we spent working together, he wrote me perhaps the most entertaining and most effective disciplinary letter in the history of employee relations.
At the time, I had been working in radio on a part-time basis for a couple of years already, but still didn’t know which part of radio was going to become my specialty (something that in some ways remains true to this day). But that first day, Bob made the one move that had more impact on my career than anything else that would ever happen. When I wandered into his Creative Department, he handed me some information he’d just received to write a commercial for a local appliance store, and told me to go ahead and write a 30-second spot. Thinking I was in way over my head, I spent the better part of a day working on those thirty seconds; and for whatever reason, Bob saw fit to get the commercial produced and put it on the air without any changes.
He then entrusted me with a huge box filled with dozens of cassettes, and several reels of tape; they were the finalists and the winners from competitions put on every year by the Radio Advertising Bureau and the Radio Bureau of Canada. Each tape had dozens of commercials on it, written in a variety of categories - national spots, local spots, 60-second commercials, 30-second commercials, spots for restaurants, spots for retailers, spots for car dealers, public service announcements, spots done in big markets, medium markets, and small markets. Bob told me the one thing they all had in common was that they were written by people who, like me, at some point knew nothing about how to write a radio commercial. He said that I had the advantage of starting young, and that if I worked hard, there was no reason these tapes couldn’t be filled with my work.
That was all I needed to hear.
Those cassettes became my best friends. For years, I would pull them out for inspiration anytime I had hit a creative roadblock, or needed something that would help me get out of a rut and raise the bar to elevate the standard of my work.
Through those cassettes, I was introduced to a Burger King jingle that was more like an alternate version of the National Anthem; the singers weren’t just singing about pickles and onions, they were making me feel like it was my patriotic duty to order a Whopper.
I heard a commercial for a furniture store in Chicago that really made me believe a guy had arrived at the store after having pushed a grand piano up the street so he could try out his crazy ideas for new jingles on them.
And once I was introduced to the work of the inimitable Dick Orkin, I was hooked for life.
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3 DICK WHO?
Legendary singer Ella Fitzgerald once said, “I stole everything I ever heard; but mostly I stole from the horns.”
T.S. Eliot has been called, “the most important English-language poet of the 20th century,” but in his 1920 work, The Sacred Wood, Eliot himself said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
There is heated debate and discussion about evidence indicating that one of the climactic moments of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech is borrowed from a speech given eleven years earlier by King friend Archibald Carey, Jr., at the Republican National Convention.
And don’t be surprised to find that there are comedians who have refused to take the stage if they discovered that Robin Williams was in the room, lest some of their best new material show up in Williams’ next appearance on The Tonight Show.
It might sound like I’m trying to somehow justify plagiarism; far from it, I’m simply illustrating that it exists in much more than just hastily assembled college papers, and is in fact far more pervasive than you might think.
Why am I taking the time to do it?
When you sit down at a piano, what do you do? Assuming you’re not a prodigious songwriter, you play something you’ve heard before, usually written by someone else (come on - somebody must have written “Chopsticks”). Without exception, the world’s great guitarists have styles that are either derivative of one other guitar legend, or mosaics of a number of influences that come together and form something new.
That doesn’t happen by accident.
If imitation is, indeed, the sincerest form of flattery, it requires one to at least be aware of the things that are worthy of it.
I believe there are several legendary figures in advertising that an aspiring copywriter needs to learn about, in order to lay a foundation for success. Writing scripts for radio commercials without knowing the fundamentals is like nailing Jell-O to the wall: if you can get some of it to stick, you’ve bucked the odds and gotten lucky. The good news is that some of the greatest work in the history of the medium is readily available, and is an excellent illustration of those fundamentals.
In my estimation, Claude C. Hopkins, David Ogilvy and Dick Orkin are the Beethoven, Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix of the advertising business. If you’ve never heard of them, my honest advice is to put down your pen, or close your word processor as the case may be, and don’t pick it up again until you have at least a rudimentary knowledge of their work, and its place in history.
There are others, of course. They have names like Bernbach, Hampel, Trout, Ries, Caples, O’Day and Berdis; if you live in Canada, you’d be well served to find the “greatest hits” reels from names like O’Reilly, Kryton, MacInnis and McCurlie. However, by shelling out a few bucks for a short book on the subject instead of enrolling in a college course, I’ll assume you’re either unmotivated or in a hurry, so I’ll start with the first three. I’ll lay out a brief summary of why I believe those three men are the Holy Trinity of great copywriting as we go along.
However, I suppose that the question becomes this: If you don’t know the work of any of the names I’ve mentioned, just whose work are you using as the “magnetic north” that guides you? Because a thirty-second radio commercial sets up a hair’s breadth of difference between a great commercial and a terrible one. It only takes a few seconds for a spot to go irretrievably off the rails, which is about the same amount of time it apparently takes up to 42% of listeners to find something else to listen to. With that being the case, you can imagine how important it is to have some kind of road map.
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4 CLAUDE C. HOPKINS
People who’ve been in the advertising business for any serious length of time almost universally recognize Claude C. Hopkins as “the father of modern advertising”. The only reason I say “almost” is that I don’t know everyone in the advertising industry the world over, and there may very well be someone in Botswana who doesn’t think he was all that great.
Hopkins was born in 1866 near the city of Detroit, and learned salesmanship out of necessity; at the age of 10 his father died, and young Claude would come to support the family by going door-to-door selling silver polish. His mother made the polish, Claude put it in an attractive package and hit the bricks. In his 1927 autobiography, titled My Life in Advertising, Hopkins wrote,
“I found that I sold about one woman in ten by merely talking the polish at the door. But when I could get into the pantry and demonstrate the polish, I sold to nearly all. That taught me the rudiments of another lesson I never have forgotten: A good article is its own best salesman. It is uphill work to sell goods, in print or in person, without samples.”
Claude Hopkins created or perfected most of the methods of modern marketing that we take for granted. Things like free samples, coupons, test markets and money-back guarantees owe their very existence to Hopkins’ genius.
Hopkins viewed advertising as “salesmanship in print”, and believed that everything could be tested to see whether it was maximizing an ad’s impact, from the words used right down to the size and style of type in an ad.
Everything Hopkins wrote was somehow measured; two ads would be run in different cities that were alike in every way, except that they had different headlines. The successes or failures of each ad were carefully noted so as to avoid repeating the things that made one ad less effective than another.
He found ways, through samples, coupons and through provocative writing, to arouse curiosity in consumers that made them want to learn more about the products he shepherded. His view of the consumer was somewhat revolutionary for the time; he believed that people’s money was important to them, and so they would take an interest in learning about the things that would seek to separate them from it. In order to get to the coupon in one of Hopkins’ ads, you often had to read several hundred words of copy. And while today, it’s considered an achievement to get 5% of people to respond to an ad that contains a coupon, for Hopkins to have a 20% response rate was not uncommon. To hold the reader’s attention for that long, and to generate that kind of impact shows that Hopkins knew exactly where his customers were, and exactly how to talk to them.
Hopkins also changed the way stores deal with products. If a particular product that Hopkins was representing wasn’t being stocked in a particular store, he would send a copy of an ad that was about to run locally, that included a coupon at the bottom. Shopkeepers knew they would have no choice but to stock the product to meet the great demand that was about to follow.
Above all else, however, Hopkins valued his relationship with the consumer. Always conscious of his modest roots, Hopkins never betrayed the trust of the public, and believed in advertising that was both genuine and generous. “From start to finish offer service,” he said, and by it meant that advertising should be written from the perspective of putting the consumer’s needs above the needs of the writer, or the agency, or even the maker of the product.
Part of putting the consumer first meant that Hopkins had little time for writers who would appear sensational or egotistical. He was fully aware that “best in the world” and “lowest prices ever” had little impact on a skeptical buyer.
Remember that in Hopkins’ time, those kinds of claims were the norm. This was the era of the patent medicine trade, after all, when newspapers were filled with ads for products that claimed to restore hair to bald heads, remove impurities from the blood and even restore life to those who’d suffered a sudden death.
Another product’s ads claimed it could “Cure All Diseases”, even though it was just sulfuric acid diluted in water with a little red wine for color.
While we’re at it, let’s not forget that in the late 1800’s, a new medicine that would cure impotence, headache, morphine addiction and dyspepsia hit the market, called “Coca-Cola”.
Instead of raising false hopes and making incredible claims, Hopkins gave consumers the truth. He led one company in a price war with a competitor to declare in an ad that their own markup was so small, they only had a profit margin of 3%. He led another to justify the price of a car by making consumers aware of the hidden costs in the process of manufacturing it.
Hopkins was a master of building relationships with consumers by offering them information, education and understanding. When he took over the Schlitz beer account, Schlitz was the #5 beer in America, and beer advertising – regardless of brand – was mostly based around the idea that “our beer is pure; you should be drinking our brand.” As Hopkins puts it,
“They put [the word ‘pure’] in large letters. Then they took double pages to put it in larger letters.”
The ads Hopkins created took the reader on a sort of tour of the brewing process; he taught readers how beer was made, from the process of filtering the water to the sterilization of the bottles, to the process of selecting the ingredients. There wasn’t much in the ad to differentiate Schlitz from any of its competitors, yet giving the reader tangible information produced tangible results. Schlitz quickly rose to the #1 position in the beer wars, and became “the beer that made Milwaukee famous.”