Ad Sales Blog

You only get 5 words

 As you send your next email to a client consider that the most important words you write will be in the headline, also known as subject line. If these words motivate your client to open and read your message, then the other words you write will count as well.

When writing email headlines, shorter is better. If you can boil your message down to, say, 5 words that capture the full benefit of reading your message you are on your way to a sale.

An instructive lesson on how to use 5 words with impact is created every year at the Webby Awards. The Webbys, known as the "Oscars of the Internet" give out awards for the best Web sites and has a Web centric way of time managing its "You really like me...you really, really like me" moments; acceptance speeches are limited to 5 words.

Want help picking the next five words for your message line? Take a look at the artistry, brevity, and sheer cleverness as the top minds in the Web World accept their awards. Here are the five words media organizations used to accept their Webbys from last year:

Magazine
MediaStorm - Webby: Technology changes, stories are timeless.

Magazine
Salon.com - People's Voice: The Pulitzers are history.

Movie and Film
Pan's Labyrinth - Webby/People's Voice: Check Sabrina. Thank you.

News
BBC News - Webby/People's Voice: Alan, we're thinking of you.

Newspaper
NYTimes.com - People's Voice: Honor. Grateful. Thank you. Corny.

Newspaper
The Guardian - Webby: Please free Alan Johnston now.

Radio
BBC Radio 1 - Webby: Free the archives.

Radio
NPR.org - People's Voice: Thanks to the best audience.

Television
Current TV - Webby: Current, your TV doesn't suck.

Television
The Office - People's Voice: Join the Dwight Schrute army.

Read all the 5 word acceptance speechs since the Webbys began

Adriana Huffington asks for help with her 2008 five word accpetance speech

Recommend a URL in the next ad

One way to sell more print ad space is to encourage your advertisers to add a campaign and magazine specific URL to their next print ad. It is one extra step. But here is what happens; a readers sees the ad and is motivated to search the Internet for more information. By using a campaign and magazine specific URL the advertiser can track which campaign and which magazine drove the reader to their website.

A post on Clickz by James Hering offered tips on how to use campaign specific URLs. Hering references research that indicates many do not like to enter long URLs with a lot of extra slash marks. As result, some marketers now favor campaign specific URLs, often based on the the tag line of the campaign:

Examples include:

Burger King: haveityourway.com and subservientchicken.com

Mitsubishi: seewhathappens.com

Subaru: need-desire.com

Universal Studios: iwantmyvacation.com

Lincoln Mercury: oneandonlyclearance.com

Dish Network: stopfeedingthepig.com

Audi: neverfollow.com

Now add the magazine initials or just a number to designate a specific media and your client can have it all. Is it better to use a custom campaign URL or extensions of the brand URL? Using the brand URL, of course, reinforces the brand. Which approach is better? The answer: the one that gets your advertiser to include a magazine specific reference so your media gets tracked!

Read Hearing's column on Clickz

Pushing paper advertising in Sweden

You gotta love it! Here is a print ad for McDonald's Big 'n' Juicy Burger that uses almost no ad copy and a lot of paper to communicate how their bigger hamburgers need bigger napkins to handle them. The double page spread was printed on napkin paper and ran in Sweden's Metro newspaper to promote the idea. Is paper based ad messaging dead? I don't think so!

"Dear NBC your ad stinks"

As an interactive evangelist you have to get tough with advertisers who send you lousy ad copy. In interactive media there is no place to hide when an ad does not perform. If an ad tanks on your blog, or website the advertiser will more often blame your media than their message.

B.L. Ochman, publisher of What's Next Blog, was faced with this situation and posts about the tough love she dished out to NBC who submitted poor ad creative for her blog: 

"Dear NBC - Please don't get me wrong: I love you for advertising on my blog. But I want you to get results so you'll keep coming back, and this ad sucks...

So I'd like to give you a little free advice about how to make your blog advertising more effective.

- The job of a blog ad is not to tell your story. Blog ads need to be intriguing, interesting or entertaining enough to get us to a convincing landing page where you have lots of room to tell us what you've got for us.

- Talk about us, not about you. Don't take this personally, but we don't care about you. All we care about is what you can do for us.

- What's the ROI? Tell us about what advertisers got in the last Olympics. All advertisers care about is ROI, either in orders or awareness. Give us stats. We don't care how many days are left before your Olympic coverage starts. We want you to tell us, in the headline, why we should care.

- Be topical, timely, edgy, and fun. Blog readers are inured to traditional advertising. They're here, and on other top blogs, looking for something new and interesting.

- Be clear! You want to get brands to advertise on NBC during the Olympics. Tell me in the headline why I should bring my clients to you

- Don't make your ad a black hole. When that dreadful flashing stops in the ad, you're left with what is basically a black hole.

- White space is your friend in blog ads. You're competing with lots of copy that my readers came here - by choice - to get. What you have is basically a blob of copy, and since it's not easy to read at a glance, it's pretty much invisible. Less is more in blog ads.

- Don't scream in blog ads. You need to be clever.- Have a sense of humor.

- Don't be boring.

Read all of B.L. Ochman's story on her blog

Save yourself from poor client creative

Here is a bummer.

You sell an on target media program only to see your client, a small or mid-sized advertiser create bone-headed ad creative so self-serving and uncommunicative it will surely fail.

You can see the train wreck coming. When the ad campaign bombs in the pages of your magazine or web media you will loose the business, your fault or not. Speak up and you could be seen as ungrateful and critical.

Here is a great piece of research you can use to take the "consultative" path and save the day. This JWT/Ad Week survey is a perfect discussion starter, that shows how the average American sees advertising and describes the kind of advertising he or she likes and does not like.

Use it on a sales call

Show them the chart posted here and invite discussion.

The public actually likes some kinds of advertising. 74% say they like informative factual advertising and 80% say they like smart, entertaining advertising. There are also very big negatives against advertising in general.

Ask your client, in a nice way, if he or she thinks her ad creative is strong enough to overcome these general negatives. Ask your client if their ad creative is inline with what consumers find appealing.

You should have the whole study printed out and in your bag in case your client wants to see more. It's only a few pages long and has nice easy to read charts.

If your client's ad creative campaign succeeds you will have an easier time renewing the ad contract. Your time to act is before the bad creative goes to market.

Download a PDF of the full JWT survey

Stupid Marketing Watch: A Newsletter for Toothpaste?

Just because your advertiser's message is delivered in digital does not mean it works. If your advertiser is about to do something really stupid it is your job to at least suggest another course. You are the local expert on your "Reader's Point of View." You need to know how they think, what they love, and what they will see as silly marketing hype.

It seems no one had that "Reader Point of View" talk with the marketing people at Colgate recently. Ken Magill, posting on the "Direct" website today described the unfortunate result:

SmileTalk arrived in my Gmail account last week. “You are receiving this e-mail because you have signed up for the Colgate SmileTalk e-newsletter as [me]@Gmail.com,” copy at the top of the message said.

Nonsense. It was unsolicited. I’m not sure where Colgate-Palmolive got my name and address, but I certainly did not knowingly register for SmileTalk.

Even if someone forge-subscribed my address or I gave “permission” at some third-party Web site by overlooking a pre-checked box, the marketing group at Colgate-Palmolive should know better than to think anyone would truly opt in to SmileTalk.

How do I know I simply didn’t forget opting in? Because it’s a newsletter about toothpaste, for &%@$#’s sakes.

Read all of Ken Mangill's rant

Here it...smile!  

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