My Secret Sauce

When your advertising is accountable...you better be good.

I know the results of every campaign we have done because as a direct marketer I test and build in accountability to prove the success (or failure) of our advertising.
Over the years I've learned what the power of incorporating good branding into direct advertising can do. I've developed and tested the techniques that allow me to "fuse" brand and direct together to create a different type of advertising.

These techniques are my "secret sauce"

Here are the ingredients:

1. Reputation - What customers and prospects are saying about your product or service.


2. Promise - The tangible attributes that your product or service deliver.


3. Vision - What customers and prospects will be or become through interaction with your product or service.


4. Response Triggers - Words and visuals that get customers and prospects to take action.


5. Memory Triggers - Words and visuals that remain with the prospects who do not react to the response triggers.


6. Individuality - A unique communication experience for each customer or prospect.


7. Accountability - A risky ingredient, but well worth it to prove success.
   

When you combine these ingredients the right way, you create my secret sauce--advertising that delivers brand and generates response.

Jon

The Annual Roska Picnic

Our annual agency picnic is fast approaching!

That means all of the trash talk emails start flying around the agency as different agency teams try to recruit or just psych-out the competition. Ed B. and I love to play horseshoes and below is our trash talk email:

Equestrian Footwear Competition
That's right folks, it's that time again.
You have a shot at beating the unbeatable, of gaining some serious bragging rights by winning a game of horseshoes against the Jon R./Ed B. Equestrian Footwear team. We've won so many games over the years that we have lost count. The only team that even came close was the Ed R. team and we came back last year and beat them so bad that Ed R. needed a sock puppet to tell his therapist what happened to him.

Spectators and challengers are invited to watch Ed B. drink gallons of beer while throwing ringer after ringer. Don't miss Jon R. insulting the competition's Mother, children and dog as he caps their last throw. Come by, take your best shot, while Jon and Ed open a can of horseshoe whoop-ass on you.

Hear Ed and Jon not only insult you and everything you hold dear in life, but as a bonus you get to hear them insult each other with disparaging remarks sure to have you cheering.

So pick your partner, get some practice and say a prayer, light a candle or dance naked around a chicken, whatever works for you. See you there!
This trash talk is brought to you by the Jon R./Ed B. Equestrian Footwear World Champion Team.

Talk to your HR department before you send trash talk emails out.

Jon

Don't Forget the Memory Trigger

“Nobody bakes a cake as tasty as a Tasty Cake!”

A great advertising man, Charlie Coffey, who I had the honor of working with for several years, once told me, “If you can’t think of anything to say about a product, sing it.”

One of his best was the Tasty Cake jingle. Once you get that little tune stuck in your head, you were condemned to replay it over and over, for the next 24 hours. Now that’s a memory trigger.

Memory triggers are a key component to incorporating brand into a direct advertising campaign. They can come in many forms, visual, music, copy and they all relate to your product, service or brand.

Take a little quiz
Here’s a list of 10 memory triggers. You tell me what brand or product they represent –

1. Blue Box
2. Duck
3. Hot Air Balloon
4. Gecko
5. Repairman with nothing to do
6. LSMFT
7. Garden Gnome
8. Rabbit
9. Cowboy
10. Zoom Zoom

All of the above are memory triggers for large, broad market brands. Their advertising budgets give them the reach and frequency to ensure that most of you will be familiar with them, (#6 is worth bonus points if you get it right). The best memory triggers relate to things that we will see, hear or encounter in our everyday lives. It doesn’t matter how big the audience is; memory triggers can make an advertising campaign better.

Memory triggers help direct advertising work better
Many of you have a finite audience and using targeted direct advertising that delivers a memory trigger that ties back to your brand will do a better job.

We are working on a direct advertising campaign right now that uses famous statues in unusual poses as the memory trigger. The visuals are very creative, easy to remember and when people see a picture of the actual statue during their everyday work or play, they will relate it back to our client’s brand on a conscious or subconscious level.

Our objective is to generate an immediate response from a portion of the target market, while leaving strong brand memory triggers with the non-responders. This will maintain or improve response from the target market during future marketing efforts.

The RPV session leads to memory trigger development
As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, clearly defining your brand reputation, promise and vision gives you the positioning statements and power words you need to focus your creative thinking. It’s not unusual for a big idea to leap out of the process and deliver a great copy line or visual. Turn that into a memory trigger and you’re creating great advertising.

Here are the answers to the quiz

1. Blue Box – Tiffany & Co., if you’re ever lucky enough to get a gift from Tiffany’s, hang
onto the box. You’ll look like a big spender when you toss a $5 pair of earrings into it
and give it as a gift. In fact, that’s probably what the person who gave you the box did!
2. Duck – Aflac Insurance
3. Hot Air Balloon – RE/MAX Realtors
4. Gecko – GEICO, the lizard is good.
5. Repairman with nothing to do – the Maytag repairman
6. LSMFT – Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco – A famous campaign from the mid 40’s.
If you got this one, you’re old.
7. Garden Gnome -- Travelocity
8. Rabbit – you get two chances to get this one right. Kix cereal, “Silly rabbit, Kix are for kids”
or the Energizer Bunny.
9. Cowboy – Marlboro Man
10. Zoom Zoom – Mazda Automobiles

Jon

The Advertising They Deserve

We get a lot of "Request for Proposal" (RFP) at the agency.

It’s the first stage of how a prospective client begins a search for a new advertising agency. They will send out a RFP to a group of agencies that they think might be a good fit with them. When the response comes in, the client will review and select several of the agencies for a meeting. Sometimes that will lead to a hire and sometimes it leads to a full agency pitch between one or two other agencies.
What a lot of potential clients may not realize is that a good advertising agency is looking at them, just as hard as they are looking at the agency! As much as a company wants a good advertising agency, a good advertising agency wants a good client.
We recently received a RFP from a company that had an unusual request in it.

Describe your ideal client and working relationship

Now you might think that this is a very common request in a RFP, but I cannot remember the last time that I have seen a request like this and it leads me to believe that this company might be a very good client. I thought I’d share our response with you --

There is a famous saying by David Ogilvy about the advertising business,

“Clients get the advertising they deserve.”

Your first impression when reading Mr. Ogilvy’s quote might be to take it as a negative comment. But let’s assume it was never meant that way and put a positive spin on it.

“Great Clients get great advertising”

When you’re a great client, everybody in the agency wants to work on your account. Creative staff put in extra hours to deliver their best work for you. Account Executives find excuses to be at your place of business. HR hints to a hot new talent they are trying to recruit that they “might” get to work on your account and Project Managers send you emails with little smiley faces at the end.

Do you want to be a great client? Just wanting to means you probably already are, but I’ll give you some inside tips that can make you even better and you’ll see the results right away.

Be the cheerleader
Your positive attitude is contagious! Great clients know that their agency will come up with the “big idea” and you’re there to help them in any way you can. One great client sent 20 pizzas to the agency with a thank you card after a successful launch. We’d take a bullet for a client like that.

Share your ideas
Let’s be honest, every idea is not a good one, but like President Reagan loved to say, “There’s got to be a pony somewhere in this manure heap.” Great clients join with the creative team and we all share in the success.

Be realistic with your schedules
If we go for it, we go for it together. Great clients make sure that their agency has everything they need to get the job done. They return phone calls and emails and if, God forbid, we miss the date by a day, thank the team for trying and for the great work.

Be open with information
We are at our best as an agency when we’re working as an extension of your marketing team. The only way for this to happen is when we know as much about your business as possible. So share as much as you can – your goals, plans, priorities, and hurdles – and invite us to your company picnic! The more your agency knows, the more they can contribute to your success.

Great clients get great advertising

Jon

Fishing Where the Fish Are

I used to fish in a lot of Bass tournaments.

It was a lot of fun, flying across the lake in my 20 ft bass boat, pushed along by a 200 Horse, fuel injected Merc engine. But I never caught a lot of fish because I could never figure out where the fish were! I read in a fishing magazine that 80% of the fish were in 20% of the lake. The problem was that they were very big lakes.

Advertising has the same challenge. 80% of your customers are in 20% of the country, or marketing channels, or media.

I once gave a presentation before an audience of around 1000 marketers and I asked if anyone in the audience had a $100 million or more ad budget to work with, no hands were raised. “What about $50 million,” I asked, and two people raised their hands. I didn’t see more than ten hands go up until I dropped below $10 million and the vast majority of hands rose when I hit $3 million or less.

When you have a limited budget, and I’ll make a safe bet and say, ‘That means you.” you cannot afford to waste one dollar on advertising to people that will never buy your product or service. You must fish where the fish are.

Now I may not be a very good fisherman, but I’m a pretty good marketer and I’m going to tell you how to find out where your prospects are.

A best customer profile
You start by clearly identifying the characteristics of your best customer, we call this a “Best Customer Profile” (BCP). How old are they? Gender? Where do they live? How much education? Do they have children? How old? Pets? Hobbies? Income? Etc.
The same technique is used if you’re a business marketer. Look at your business customers and identify your BCP.

You then start looking for prospects that match your BCP. In our agency we have mapping software that allows you to overlay all of the different best customer values and
you begin to see the areas where your prospects are that match up with your BCP. We call these areas “Opportunity Zones”. They are where you want to focus your limited marketing budget to get the most bang for your buck.

Here’s an example of how this technique worked very successfully for a client.
In 1997 we launched PetFoodDirect.com (PFD), a dot.com start-up that sold pet products. PFD had a marketing budget of around $5 million.

At the same time Pets.com launched a competitive operation with a marketing budget of over $100 million. Pets.com hired a big, broad market advertising agency and started spending money like a drunken sailor on a Saturday night. They created the Sock Puppet mascot and ran TV spots all over the country, including Super Bowl ads.

We did our homework.
23% of all the pet owning households in the USA, with a household income of $50,000 or higher, and a wife and two kids are located down the I-95 corridor between Connecticut and Carolina. And guess what? 80% of all pet product purchases are made by females. We knew what our Best Buyer Profile was and we knew where our best prospects were.

We targeted 100% of our marketing efforts on those pet owning women who lived in that small part of the country and had the money to pay for the product.

Long story made short, PetFoodDirect.com today is the largest, web-only pet product site in the country. Pets.com went bankrupt after a few years and the last I heard, the Sock Puppet was shilling loans out of an alley in Las Vegas.

Fish where the fish are.

Jon

Copywriting Tricks

Trick #1- Buy this book.

The best copywriter in the business is Herschell Gordon Lewis. His book, “On the Art of Writing Copy” is the finest education your money can buy.

I consider myself the third best writer in the business and there are two rules that I follow when writing good advertising copy:

1. Know exactly what you want the reader to do or take away before you start writing.
2. Write like you talk.

Another trick that I use when a writer brings me their first draft to review is to cross out the first (and sometimes the second paragraph) before I even start reading. And the vast majority of the time, the second or third paragraph is the best lead. That’s because when most people write advertising copy, it takes one or two paragraphs before their brain hits its stride.

Cut and paste is your friend!
When you write copy, you usually try to put your thoughts in order before you write. The problem is that your brain doesn’t work that way. Your brain just shoots out a constant flow of unrelated material. If you try to put it in order before you begin to write, you end up sitting in front of your computer with nothing on the screen. Just write it down! Don’t try to arrange it, just let it spew out as it comes along. You can then arrange your random thoughts into --

A logical progression of thought that leads to a specific outcome.

Here’s the next trick. Go back to the previous paragraph you just read, the one that starts with, “Cut and paste is your friend”.
Count how many “you” and “yours” are in that paragraph. Thirteen, there are thirteen freaking you and yours in one paragraph. And that’s great! Because to the reader,

“It’s all about me”

Your reader is not interested in you, your product or your company. They are interested in themselves and what your product and your company can do for them. Everything you write should relate to your reader. Go back through your copy and wherever possible change every I, me, we and our to you and yours.

If you run into a situation where you can’t seem to come up with the right words to use, try this trick. Pretend that you’re sitting in front of your prospect or customer and you are talking to them. What you say is what you should write.

When I’m reviewing copy, I will often write notes on the side, sometimes they’re nice, sometimes not so nice (it often depends on my mood at the moment). I have grown more diplomatic as the years have passed.

On one occasion, I was reviewing a long and poorly written B2B sell letter and after I realized that editing the letter would take too long, I took my red pen and wrote down the side;

“The ranting of someone who desperately wants to write the great American novel and has failed miserably at it”.

Later that afternoon the manuscript reappeared on my desk with the note, “F@*k you”, written under my comment. What was I to do? How was I to teach a promising young writer with a lot of spunk that he should never mess with the Creative Director?
The solution was simple. I mailed the copy, comments and all to his Mom with a note attached that said, “Look at how your son talks to his boss.”
His Mom was waiting for him at the door when he got home.

That young man, I’m very pleased to say, is today an Executive VP Creative for a leading agency and a brilliant writer. I take some credit for his Mom giving him a good whooping and setting him on the right path.

Jon

Share the Vision

If you can see it, they will buy it.

This is the third installment about RPV Sessions, (Reputation, Promise, and Vision) that we have at our agency. (see the February 14 and March 7 posts) These sessions, when done correctly, help us gain clarity on what the brand and it’s position is. We end up with a list of “power words” tailored to the brand. These power words become the base for concept and copy development that leads to big, ideas that bring tears of happiness to a client’s eyes.

Vision is the third part of the Reputation, Promise, Vision (RPV). For a quick review--
Reputation is what prospects and customers are saying about your brand.
Promise is the tangible attributes your brand gives the customer.

Vision is what people will be or become through interaction with your brand.

Here are some examples of visionary words:
Happier, healthier, prettier, safe, confidant, relaxed, stronger, popular, respected.

When you are considering the purchase of a piece of exercise equipment, how do you envision yourself?
A - All buff and toned up, with members of the opposite sex (maybe even your spouse) throwing themselves at you?
B – All sweat-stained and gasping for air as you crawl off the machine after a 30 minute workout?
If you’re looking to get laid, it’s the first vision that will get you to buy. If you’re looking for a good workout, it’s more likely that the second vision will trigger your purchase.

The right vision will get you to buy the product. And as my example above demonstrates, there can be more than one vision, depending on who you are targeting your message to.
You must be very careful to deliver on one focused vision in a marketing communication. If you try to communicate multiple visions by putting something in for everybody, you will water down your message and response will suffer for it.

Get out a Sharpie and write this on your cube wall:
We communicate to our target audience, to the exclusions of all others.

Different customer groups have different visions. If you try to be all things to all people you will fail.
Today’s technology allows us to target our prospects and customers like never before. You can write one advertisement that delivers on the vision of a specific customer group and write another ad that communicates a different vision to another group. You end up with two ads that generate a better return on your investment.

People’s visions are positive things. I’m always amazed when I see advertising that communicates negative visions in words and/or photos.
Negative ads reflect back on your brand.

Think about it. What makes you feel better?
A little baby seal with its brains bashed out?
A little baby seal playing with its little baby seal buddies?
Showing the positive results of the brand vision will always generate a better response.

If you have been following along, you now have a list of “Power Words” for your brands Reputation, Promise and Vision. Your mind is focused on your brand.

You are closing in on a big hairy, honkin’ idea!

Jon