Thom Schoenborn's Blog

Copywriters and SEO

Thom Schoenborn — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:46:00 GMT

It's time for copywriters to evolve and embrace search engine optimization. And not just re-writing headlines, but owning the search-optimized content creation process from start to finish.

The only reason writers and editors haven't been responsible for SEO in the past for interactive agencies is because SEO firms (and interactive firms) position it as some mystic science. "Meta keyword this" and "<h1> tags that."

It's not mystic. SEO is simply another function of the content creation process, one that ought to be owned by an agency's editorial group. SEO is words and content, and if your interactive agency is selling it to you as anything but, you should ask why.

Here's the high-level overview of why SEO should be in the copywriter's arsenal:

1. Search Term Research requires subject matter expertise and an understanding of the client's business and value proposition. What are people searching for? Who is doing the searching? What do they hope or expect to see. Understanding the client's business is the job of everyone in the agency, but putting the correct words to it is the writer's job. This is likely the weakest link for your writers simply because they don't have the tools for quantifying the research. "Quantifying" means knowing the highest volume searches and the terms with the most competition for pay-per-click dollars.

2. Coming up with the sitemap requires understanding of the messaging strategy, which your writer should own. It's about usability: what will people be navigating to find, and where does it make sense to find that information. Think of it as the grocery store: you know that when you're in the meat aisle, you're likely to find the fish and pork and chicken. Search terms need to be distributed across the sitemap. That means you're not doing a lot of doubling up of search terms.

3. Optimizing headlines, copy and meta info in a sophisticated way requires a crafty, creative writer. This is the least mystical part of all. Put your search term in the headline, the first sentence of body copy. Use a first sentence that will double as a good "organic ad" in the Google, and you can dang near copy-and-paste that first sentence as your meta description. Done and done. Honestly, the hardest part of this is wrestling with your art director to let you get away with long headlines on top-level pages. Re-writing/optimizing copy on the recommendation of a separate SEO expert is a waste of time and money when it can easily be written correctly the first time.

4. Internal cross-linking means using the search terms as the text link to send users to another page. In my own head, I tend to categorize this as more Search Engine Marketing than Search Engine Optimization, but whatevs. Cross-linking requires understanding of all the content, knowing tangential information for that page, and making decisions about who's on the page and how the content relates.

I'll be the first to acknowledge SEO experts and their efforts to stay current with trends and search technology. I have a very good friend who's an search engine savant, and he's gonna give me all manner of crap about this article. However, in practice, is not a difficult science to learn. Where search engine specialists can add the most value is in search engine marketing. This means collaborating with the writer to spin out new articles and content that support the terms, and finding high-value sites that will publish them.

As a smart client, finding an agency that smartly weaves SEO into their content creation process means you're getting additional value and traffic with less effort.

And as a copywriter, embracing the fullness of your role as described above and educating yourself about the search engine optimization technologies, you'll make yourself invaluable and your agency stronger. Copywriters must understand SEO the same way they understand basic interactive technologies and best-practices.

Photo Caption Contest

Thom Schoenborn — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:50:00 GMT

We got a little press from the Newhouse News service, who was looking for tips for interns.

The article shifted in focus a little from internship tips to employer tips for staying on the right side of employment law. It's still an interesting article, and I believe Pop Art has one of the best organized internship programs for our industry. We've again put together an amazing team this year, with interns from University of Oregon, Oregon State University, MIT and Boston University. We're hopeful The Oregonian picks up the story, since they're a Newhouse paper.

Sadly, they used a photo of me and new copywriting intern, Kevin Platt. So here's the contest: Rewrite the photo caption (in the comments). Funniest entry wins. Entries thus far:

Editorial Director Thom Schoenborn watches a training video with a new intern: “You’ll be working here next to the coal-fired servers,” says Schoenborn. “You need to add a scoop of coal every 15 minutes or you’ll be demoted to rubbing Dave’s feet.”
-Tom Potterf

“Now watch, in a second, this guy is going to just FLIP OUT and hit his coworker with a keyboard and then throw his monitor!”
-Scott Vandehey

Thom says, “See this big thing here? It’s a computer screen. We don’t put white-out on the computer screen. We change it by pressing buttons on the small flat thing down here.”
-Andrew Hay

What Was I Thinking?

Thom Schoenborn — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:13:00 GMT

Great book(s) review from the New Yorker about why consumers make stupid decisions. There’s a lot of “duh” statements in here — Consumers are effort-averse? Really? — but stated in a researched, academic way.

A few Halloweens ago, Ariely laid in a supply of Hershey’s Kisses and two kinds of Snickers—regular two-ounce bars and one-ounce miniatures. When the first children came to his door, he handed each of them three Kisses, then offered to make a deal. If they wanted to, the kids could trade one Kiss for a mini-Snickers or two Kisses for a full-sized bar. Almost all of them took the deal and, proving their skills as sugar maximizers, opted for the two-Kiss trade. At some point, Ariely shifted the terms: kids could now trade one of their three Kisses for the larger bar or get a mini-Snickers without giving up anything. In terms of sheer chocolatiness, the trade for the larger bar was still by far the better deal. But, faced with the prospect of getting a mini-Snickers for nothing, the trick-or-treaters could no longer reckon properly. Most of them refused the trade, even though it cost them candy. Ariely speculates that behind the kids’ miscalculation was anxiety. As he puts it, “There’s no visible possibility of loss when we choose a FREE! item (it’s free).” Tellingly, when Ariely performed a similar experiment on adults, they made the same mistake. “If I were to distill one main lesson from the research described in this book, it is that we are all pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend,” he writes.

What is to be done with information like this? We can try to become more aware of the patterns governing our blunders, as “Predictably Irrational” urges. Or we can try to prod people toward more rational choices, as “Nudge” suggests. But if we really are wired to make certain kinds of mistakes, as Thaler and Sunstein and Ariely all argue, we will, it seems safe to predict, keep finding new ways to make them. (Ariely confesses that he recently bought a thirty-thousand-dollar car after reading an ad offering FREE oil changes for the next three years.)

This research dovetails nicely with a messaging/copywriting theory shared in a staff presentation last week: that marketing/advertising copy work best when the rationalization and left-brain justification follow the emotion-inducing photo and headline.

“Lord that's a good looking car. And snappy, and quiet. Oh, baby! Ooh, and free oil changes for three years? My wife will be THRILLED I bought the Lexus!”

p.s. Let's not read too much into the fact that my wife sent this to me.

Forget Viral: Start a Wildfire.

Thom Schoenborn — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:23:00 GMT

We're all big fans of Malcolm Gladwell over here. And so when I saw this article in Fast Company titled "Is the Tipping Point Toast?" I dug right in. If nothing else, I love a good academic smackdown. The article interviews a former prof who now works for Yahoo, and who refutes the "viral" theory behind a shadowy class we marketing folks call "Influentials." Along the way, he also coins my nominee for the marketing buzzword of the year: Wildfire marketing.

But let's start with the theory and move toward the buzzword. First, Influentials:

"In modern marketing, this idea--that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends--is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you'll reach everyone else through them, basically for free."

So this former academic, Duncan Watts, basically says that's garbage. He's run some computer simulations based on influence, and basically, there's no real evidence to back up the assertion that some people count for more than others. (A gross over-simplification on my part, but you should really read the article, 'k?)

Which explains why whenever the creative team gets worked up by an interesting online doo-dad forwarded to us, Dave always points out that he'd sent it around a month ago, and none of us bothered to read it.

And here's why:

"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."

Dave's an influential, any way you slice it. He knows everyone. He's active in the Portland online, design and art scene, he's forward thinking, and he's the most social person I know.

But if our little creative society isn't ready to embrace what he's forwarding, it flops. Or at least gets relegated to the "read later" folder. And think about how often that happens: At some conference we attended last year, the CD of a very successful online marketing group said 9 out of 10 "viral" marketing sites bomb. Which leads us to the notion that Watts has:

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That's because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. "And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."

To be honest, if "wildfire" isn't a marketing buzzword by next year, I'll eat my hat. Watts actually calls it "Big Seed," but that's because he's a scientist and not a copywriter. But read on...

In the past three years, he has worked on a new form of advertising he calls Big Seed marketing (this is part of his work at Yahoo, where he is a principal research scientist). [snip] Watts and Peretti set up a regular mass-market ad buy, running banner ads on several prominent blogs and news sites. Like many ads these days, they added a button on the ad that allows people to forward the ad to a friend--a way of collecting eyeballs for free.
The technique marries Watts's two main epiphanies: Cascades require word-of-mouth effects, so you need to build a six-degrees effect into an ad campaign; but since you can never know which person is going to spark the fire, you should aim the ad at as broad a market as possible--and not waste money chasing "important" people. And it worked. The pass-around effect doubled the number of people who saw the Brady Campaign's ad. They paid for 22,582 hits and received an additional 31,590 for free. Another campaign they ran for the Oxygen network quadrupled the audience size, adding 23,544 hits to the initial 7,064.
The ultimate irony of Watts's research is that, if you really buy it, the most effective way to pitch your idea is ... mass marketing.

Wildfire has all the perfect earmarks for being a great buzzword: Smokin' creative is still necessary. Increased accountability. Bigger ad spends. Contrarian rationale. Mass market tactics. And let's face it, lower hopes (double the success) than viral (exponential success).

As for the creative side, I think the best we can do is make the product/service somehow relevant to the lives of our customers. No matter how much glitz and credibility we put behind our sales pitch, no matter how "cool" we make it for the Influentials, if the creative isn't relevant, we're just sparking wet tinder.

cluckcluckcluck Who Are You Afraid Of, Ya Big Chicken?

Thom Schoenborn — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:43:00 GMT

I bet you're not trying to be No.1. I bet you're making excuses. I bet there's someone in your company, or in your industry, who OWNS you. They've got the Midas Touch, and you're niggling about process documents and sweating out a 15 percent improvement. No? A new study on professional golfers suggests otherwise. Call it the Tiger Effect; it says in the face of a dominant force, people play for second place. They play it safe.

From Slate.com.

If money motivates, then the prospect of winning the top prize should bring out extreme effort in golf. But when Tiger is playing and you're not Tiger, you face a depressed prize schedule. If you assume Tiger is going to win, then the top prize available to you is $864,000 rather than $1.44 million. That beats the heck out of steak knives, but it's significantly less than the winner's take. Second place—among players who are not Tiger—gets $544,000 rather than $864,000, and so on. While Tiger certainly doesn't win every tournament he enters, he does frequently shift the reward schedule for most of the field.

Which made me think of this damn-the-doubters article by HP CIO John Soat, published in Information Week:

...technology managers must realize that a radical IT transformation is the only way to achieve significant and lasting results. Trying to pick and choose among various and equally pressing IT priorities -- server consolidation, application portfolio management, rationalizing IT resources -- is a recipe for failure. "Choosing is losing," he said. "You're going to guarantee you'll never get finished. The incremental fashion just doesn't work."
A deep dive into a company's technology infrastructure will help open a technology manager's eyes. Some of the 1,240 IT projects Mott cataloged at HP during a 30-day review weren't slated to be finished for 20 years. "If it takes 20 years to finish, it can't be that important," he jokingly pointed out.

So I guess the question we have to ask ourselves when we hedge and compromise: who are you afraid of? Is there a force in your industry or company so dominant that whispers tell you, "Lay up in front of the bunker. Don't lose your lock on 3rd place. You'll look like a chump if plunk it in the sand."

Last story: I met with this guy who used to work at a major footwear company, and he told me a story about their rise to power. "You could create a huge splash, change the conversation, blow a titanic hole in your budget and be rewarded with a promotion. You could come in at half the budget while barely make a ripple, and be exiled to the warehouse."

The culture of his company said the halo effect of radically better work wipes away your sins. I think it's a culture to which every marketing organization should aspire. No? Who are you afraid of?

Portland Food Donation Cornucopia

Thom Schoenborn — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:28:00 GMT

So Fred Meyer's got this coupon where you get a free, frozen turkey when you buy $100 worth of groceries. And we ALWAYS spend $100 on groceries, especially the weekend before Thanksgiving.

But we don't actually need a turkey, right? Nor do we have room in our tiny freezer. But a free turkey is a free turkey, so we took it. We figured we'd be able to find some organization who'd love it.

Bang! A Google search for "Food Donation, Portland" turned up Metro's "Fork It Over" food donation program.

Once there, click on the Find a Food Rescue Program link:

You fill in a quick form with your address and the type of food you have to donate. You get a staggering array of charitable organizations. The site tells you where the food rescue program is, their phone number, and if they’ll send someone by to pick up the food.

Is this a ground-breaking application? Not really. It just impresses me when a government site is genuinely useful and filled with great information. And best of all, there were easily 50 programs within 10 miles of my house.

After making a few calls, I picked "Outsider's Outreach," which is run by a neighbor. All volunteers. He has all the freezers and fridges and food crammed into his tiny garage. From there, he and all his volunteers provide three meals a week to homeless folks "out in the field," as he said. Translated: they set up a banquet under a freeway overpass. He was genuinely thankful for the turkey, and would love a few more.

The Danger of the Em Dash

Thom Schoenborn — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:22:00 GMT

When I write, I use em dashes. A lot. At one point in my career, my creative director returned an article to me in which I'd used an em dash in EVERY SINGLE PARAGRAPH of a 700-word article.

Clearly, I had a problem.

Em dashes (or the long dash, like this: — ) are remarkable little devices that allow you to stop the flow of a sentence and redirect it elsewhere.They also can let you set off a thought in the middle of a sentence, not unlike how you'd use parentheses. Only, with an em dash, it's not a sidebar thought; it has a little more weight and importance. Em dashes also make handy replacements for semi-colons (if your 9th grade English teacher made that handy little punctuation mark seem too difficult to be bothered with).

And here's why I believe I have my problem with em dashes: I often think as I am writing. And I think a lot faster than I write. And sometimes, before I'm even done with one thought, I'm onto the next one. But because I can't filter my thoughts too well, I will actually interrupt myself in writing.

This is embarrassing. Interrupting myself when I talk? That's just how I roll. But interrupting myself in text? That's just silly, and it smacks of bad editing.

If you find yourself over-using the em dash as I do, chances are we're both half-explaining something before abandoning it to explain a pre-requisite. In other words, our organization is probably crap. Perhaps, instead, try to re-cast the paragraph in the more logical order*.

And then, hopefully, you too will be able to write an entire blog post without a single** em dash.

* If you're ever trying to write something to confuse the reader, use lots of em dashes. Start and stop thoughts willy-nilly. In dialog, this is a great way to imply the speaker is scattered.

** That example em dash from the third paragraph doesn't count, you freakin' blog Nazi. Besides, look at it! It's an emoticon. See? Colon + Em Dash + Right Paren = smiley face. Jeez, do I have to over-explain every joke? (No. Just the bad ones. -Ed.)

Facebook Etiquette

Thom Schoenborn — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:49:00 GMT

One thing I've loved about Facebook is finding old high school friends. People I haven't spoken to in ages, right? So when there's a "friend request," Facebook wants to know how we know each other. So I check the box "went to school together."

But then there's these other boxes, right?

"We hooked up."

"We dated."

And, in some cases (extremely rare, sadly, but that's another story for a different blog), that might be true. So, here's my Facebook etiquette question: Is that something I want to rehash with a married high school friend with three kids and who is only just "catching up"?

I mean, does Facebook even share that information with them? I'd be freaked out if I got a friend request saying, "Tina says you hooked up and it ruined her life and she'd like to get in touch again." Yikes!

And if Facebook doesn't share that hookup information, then... what are they collecting it for? The ultimate social networking map? "I totally networked that guy Friday night, and he hasn't called me since..."

So does anyone actually check those boxes? And what does Facebook do with that information? Am I just old?

On the Value of Teamwork

Thom Schoenborn — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:17:00 GMT

"Hey, we've got this comp due to the client in 30 minutes. Think you could knock out a headline for us?"

(If you found this funny, you're a total ad nerd.)

Impaling Copy on Your Brand Pyramid

Thom Schoenborn — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:04:00 GMT

Probably one of the best things clients get from typical brand pyramid exercises is the "who would your brand be?" But how do you use that information for copywriting? One of our interns this summer loved theater, and she simplified it well: Branding means writing in character.

I love this copywriting short-hand because our culture's weird fascination with celebrity makes it easy for writers and clients to mimic a person in the culture, and to act out that personality when they're writing a brochure, presenting to customers, or sending an email.

When You Need More Than a Character
Writing in character is a simple way to make a lot of wording decisions. But when you're searching for how to present a concept — not just word choice but an actual approach — it requires more than pulling on a wig while sitting at the keyboard. That's when it's nice to refer back to the elements upon which you built your brand pyramid.

Functions: What we actually do or create.
Attributes: What we need to bring to the table to do it.
Rational Benefits: How this provides to the person who's on the other end.
Emotional Benefits: How they feel when they choose/use our service/product.
Brand Personality: What people should think about us.

Using Brand Pyramids for Copywriting
OK, now look at where your brand pyramid intersects with copywriting. Typically, in your brand style guide, you'll have sections about tone, style, audience, message and voice. But what do those actually mean? Here's how I use and define them.

Message: What you're trying to communicate. Usually, you'll find this in the rational benefits or functions section of the brand pyramid. The rational benefit is actually where you want to end your copy, in my opinion. Someone much smarter than me said that people tend to make purchasing decisions based on the emotion of the ad (sexy, whip-smart, pity), then they literally need to rationalize that whimsical decision with some sort of logical fact ("oh, it gets good mileage, too!"). But if you lead with the logical fact without emotionalizing it somehow, you're sunk.

Tone: The emotion you're trying to elicit or convey. Sometimes you need to convey one emotion to elicit another, like writing with sadness to elicit pity. Other times, you write with such glee and excitement that you're trying to sweep up the reader in the same. Anyway, be sure to reference the emotional benefits of your brand pyramid.

Style: Style is the approach. It's the voice. It's the wig. It's the character. It's the brand personality. It sums everything up. In the theatrical way of thinking, imagine how Jon Stewart will make a joke about the president, compared to how Jay Leno would.

Audience and Medium: Who will be reading it, and in what medium doesn't really have anything to do with the brand pyramid, but it is the cornerstone of great copywriting. If you don't know your audience, you're lost. It colors everything you write: a day laborer has different emotional and rational needs than a manager. A banner ad on a weather site (daily check in, ignores everything but EXACTLY the information they need) has to have more blinding, blinking, blaring sex than a banner ad on, say, a site that's heavy on educational content where you can use more contextual information.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Case Study: Portland Beer Blog

Thom Schoenborn — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 05:14:00 GMT

Search engine marketing and copywriting make uneasy allies. SEM means writing for a machine, for an equation, for a filter. Copywriting means expressing human desire, passion, creativity for people. Yet when you can combine the basics of search engine marketing with creative copywriting, your clients win. Big time. And I’ll address this at the end.

But first, to illustrate this, I did a little experiment this last weekend with the beer making blog that’s updated by a few folks here at Pop Art. We planned this past Friday to drink our way around the world at the Portland International Beerfest, then do a beer review. I wanted to see firsthand how a linking strategy and keyword density strategy would work. Short answer: It worked really, really well.

Granted, it’s not like there’s a ton of competition over the Portland International Beerfest search term. But we drinkers and brewers tend to write a lot, and being the sort who are willing to pay $9 per six pack, we’re probably well-educated with a good income. Plus this is Portland, home of craft brew. My point is that this ain’t like competing over a zillion dollar search term like mesothelioma, but it’s a decent test.

Here’s how it went:

Friday: Drink. Eat. Get a lift home. Read for a bit. Zonk out.

1 HOUR WRITING, 1 HOUR MARKETING

Saturday: Get up, drink some water, eat some eggs, write the review. Terms to focus on: “Portland International Beerfest” and “list.” I figured “list” would be good because folks might want to know what’s on tap and in the bottle there. I made sure the search terms are in the title and H1 (the Title box in WordPress, depending on how you have it set up). Made sure they were near the beginning of the first paragraph. Then I sprinkled them together throughout, and dropped ‘em one more time for good measure at the end.

I waited an hour or so, then Googled it (sans quotes). “Portland International Beerfest.” Third page. “Portland International Beerfest list.” First page, last listing.
Sweet.

I then went in to the beer blogs that I normally read and comment on, as well as the forums where I’m a member, and posted links back to the site using the terms inside the anchor tag. Like this: “I just posted a review of the Portland International Beerfest list of awesomeness.”

Then I took some aspirin and went back to bed.

PROVING DAY

Monday: Headed into work, and did a quick search for my terms. Lo’ and behold, we were on the front page, fourth item, for “Portland International Beerfest.” And when you tacked “list” on there, we were No. 1. Killer. Our SEM wizard, Blu — who nearly won the Stein Hoist contest Friday with a whopping 5 minutes, by the way — gave me a thumbs up.
CREATIVE COPYWRITING AND SEM

Whoop-dee-do, though, right? Search engine marketing works. Duh. But getting it to work elegantly with branding? That’s where you earn your big bucks if you play it cool.

See, it’s easy for copywriters to get incredibly flustered with SEM. You’re basically given terms — often unwieldy and lacking poetry or rhythm — and told where to put them. Which can be very limiting, if you look at them that way.

SEM MAKES LEADS EASIER

I prefer (for my own sanity) to view them as building blocks. “Portland International Beerfest list” could be used in so many different ways in a lead sentence, all of them interesting. Being constrained is just another way of saying you’re focused. Wasn’t there a da Vinci quote about that? Anyway, here’s a few examples:

The Portland International Beerfest list of awesomeness (my choice: hangovers do not breed creativity)
I saw the Portland Internationational Beerfest list and said, “It’s like Christmas in July!”
The Portland International Beerfest list couldn’t be less global: it might as well be the Portland European Beerfest list. There were maybe 10 non-European ales.
One look at the Portland International Beerfest list told me I’d better bring enough cash for a cab ride home.

All of those work. They’re all interesting, decent lead sentences.

WORKING SEM INTO TITLES

I think headlines and titles are a little more difficult, because you’re already fighting hard for character real estate. But, just like leads, it’s all about attitude. When you’ve got long terms, like my example of Portland International Beerfest, you’re extremely constrai… Er, I mean, you’re extremely focused. So live with it.

Are you going to be able to pull off an Ogilvy special? “Lemon”? No. you’re not. But you’ll get your site higher on Google, letting customers find information they want, and hopefully generating goodwill for your client. And for 99% of the jobs out there — jobs where you’re conveying information rather than going gung-ho for branding — that’s something to hang your hat on.

And c’mon. You’re on the creative team, right? Then be creative. Throw out an insanely long headline, a la Leatherman or Redfeather Snowshoes. Plus designers love playing with type, so give ‘em a thrill. Here’s a few examples:

Portland International Beerfest List of Awesomeness
Portland International Beerfest List of Le Crappiest Ales in France*
You’d Be an Idiot to Miss the Ales on Our List from the Portland International Beerfest

Get the point? Sweet. So there you’ve got it. I’m sure there’s a million strategies and tactics I’m overlooking — remember, I was hungover while I did this — so I look forward to your comments about search engine marketing and copywriting.
* Believe me, I tried them all, they were booooooring. Note: Chimay was not present.

You Can’t Please All the People All the Time (And Here’s Why)

Thom Schoenborn — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 05:08:00 GMT

And now, an IM conversation between Dave and myself.

Dave Selden: 10:11
very interesting article here:
http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html

Dave Selden: 10:11
I really like the “mind doesn’t know what the tongue wants” part
the fact that you can’t design a universal ketchup and please people
you have to design several ketchups that sub-groups can rally around

Thom Schoenborn: 10:14
reading:
“Try my ketchup!” Wigon said, over and over, to anyone who passed. “If you don’t try it, you’re doomed to eat Heinz the rest of your life.”

Dave Selden: 10:14
seriously
sarah and I don’t eat ketchup
I guess we would buy ketchup if it tasted better
not something I really ever thought about

Thom Schoenborn: 10:14
ketchup in australia is awesome.
no sugar.
just tomato and vinegar

Dave Selden: 10:15
wow

Thom Schoenborn: 10:15
with their bacon, which we call canadian bacon?
kick-ass.

Dave Selden: 10:15
ha
maybe I will make that next
british bacon is also awesome

Thom Schoenborn: 10:16
for sure:
“You know why you like it so much?” he would say, in his broad Boston accent, to the customers who seemed most impressed. “Because you’ve been eating bad ketchup.”

Dave Selden: 10:17
“If you are four—and I have a four-year-old—he doesn’t get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases,” Keller says. “But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It’s the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize.” As a result, Heinz came out with the so-called EZ Squirt bottle, made out of soft plastic with a conical nozzle. In homes where the EZ Squirt is used, ketchup consumption has grown by as much as twelve per cent.
Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived.”

Thom Schoenborn: 10:18
Interesting.
I like the concept of the multiple versions of perfection:
“Instead, working with the Campbell’s kitchens, he came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. [snip] When Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like. If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people’s preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last was the most important. Why? Because at the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the supermarket.”

Dave Selden: 10:20
totally

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
You can’t please all the people all the time, basically.

Dave Selden: 10:21
yeah

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
“If I make one group happier, I piss off another group. We did this for coffee with General Foods, and we found that if you create only one product the best you can get across all the segments is a 60—if you’re lucky. That’s if you were to treat everybody as one big happy family. But if I do the sensory segmentation, I can get 70, 71, 72. Is that big? Ahhh. It’s a very big difference. In coffee, a 71 is something you’ll die for.”

Dave Selden: 10:21
totally

Thom Schoenborn: 10:21
in college, my magazine prof was the founder and editor of Guitar magazine.
about 10% of their subscriber base were bass players
they had, like, two sections of each issue dedicated to bass players.
and when they cut one of those sections, ONE SINGLE PAGE of editorial, they lost something like 8% of their subscriber base.

Dave Selden: 10:23
funny
that’s a lot

Thom Schoenborn: 10:23
in many ways, it’s about knowing not just what people like about your product — because people tend to like a lot of things about what you offer —
it’s about knowing about how passionate they are about those things.
which is a little different than this subject.
but they’re related.
We should just copy and paste this IM convo into a 72dpiiintheshade post.

Dave Selden: 10:24
do it.

Measuring Creative

Thom Schoenborn — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 05:06:00 GMT

I attended some event in which a group of Wieden+Kennedy dudes talked about a survey they’d done to prove the value of their creative. So they asked a bunch of media buyers and marketing folks what they thought NIKE’s annual media spend was. The average guess was ridiculously higher than it actually was. To translate: advertising experts believed NIKE was spending about twice as much as they actually were because the ads were so memorable and fantastic.

The point is that creative executions which are daring and evocative can work twice as hard as mediocre executions for the same price. Throw that little anecdote into your next pitch. Tell ‘em you read it on the Internet…

Anyway, it’s also a great excuse to link you to this non-NIKE commercial, which is %&#@$%&ing hilarious. (Thanks, Ben.)

Lesser-Known Proofing Marks

Thom Schoenborn — Wed, 23 May 2007 04:22:00 GMT

Older. But funny.

Via Geist

The Five Secret Rites of Daily Consumerism

Thom Schoenborn — Tue, 22 May 2007 04:25:00 GMT

Our Director of Making Money and Being Smart, Chris Tacy, sent around a link to this summary of a BBDO research study about daily rituals and the emotions they reflect.

You really ought to read it, then come back here. It’s frickin’ awesome.

For one, it’s a reminder that when consumers choose things, they tend to choose first on emotional reasons, then later rationalize those choices with product features and benefits. So as marketers, we have to appeal to the emotion of the benefit or feature — it’s not that the skin cream eliminates free-radicals. That’s the jargon they’ll use to rationalize their decision.

Rather, the emotion of them choosing that skin cream revolves around a subconscious decisions around “Do I want to look as cute or sexy or young or girl-next-door as that model? Am I feeling like my husband needs to notice me? Did I look old when I went clubbing this weekend? Is that why I didn’t get carded at the door?”

There’s about a million emotions in there: insecurity, desperation, and desire to name a few.

So the next time your client wants to build a yes-no chart to compare the product features to the competition, let them know that it’s a great idea to cement the purchase! And that the first step in truly setting themselves apart from the competition might be a similar chart about the emotions elicited by the competition. For example:
OUR BRAND EMOTIONS

Money-focused
Hip
Excitable
Confident

THEIR BRAND EMOTIONS

Wise-ass
Artistic
Confident

You’ll note that the emotions don’t fit well into a binary, yes-no chart; i.e. if we’re smart, then they’re stupid. Rather, emotions vary ad infinitum (analog) within a product category. So it’s more likely it’s that we’re street-smart and they’re intelligent. Or that we’re sexy and they’re glamorous.

Subtle difference like that play out in the tone of the art: the photos, the video, the voice talent, the typography and even the writing.

In my experience, bigger brands, and especially consumer brands, are really good at this. They get it. Smaller brands and B2B brands sometimes need convincing that their customers are driven entirely by rational thought.

So the key take-away is learning the context of emotion your product will be purchased or used in.

As an aside, the thing that makes me lust over this study is all the crumbs. The Ad Age article hits trends and big markets, but I’m tingly with curiosity about all the little details: how could my client exploit the niche markets?. For example, the study talks about an increasing number of women putting on make-up in the car. What are the other top places? At the bus stop? If I’m a business owner, what would be the pros and cons, the risks and rewards of building up a loyal following in a smaller, niche market and try to expand it?