Mark Laporta

Author Archive for Mark Laporta

Sep

Tease, Tell, Lead, Compel

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: communication strategy, copy style, copywriting, message platform

One obstacle faced by advertising copywriters is widespread, passionate disagreement about what the job entails. Within the same agency, from team to team, or week to week, copywriters are asked to uphold any number of conflicting standards. That they must also obey a long-standing edict to write “poppy” headlines and “snappy” copy, makes this a challenge worthy of Rumpelstiltskin himself.

Why? Because neither of these adjectives has intrinsic meaning. It’s a case of:

You say promotional,
And I say interruptive!
You say authentic,
And I say too soft!
Stronger!
Outdated!
Intriguing!
Confusing!

Let’s call the approval process off!

Action words…
Now, assuming they can squeeze a concise definition of these attributes out of their colleagues, copywriters must still reconcile such abstract standards with the task of communicating to a new generation—who see classic 1960s advertising lingo as a dead language.

Besides, copywriting isn’t about adjectives—or fundamentally about words. A copywriter’s job is to instill motivation through a coherent thought process that can be articulated in immediate, emotional terms. As such, it’s a tough, acrobatic feat requiring maximum flexibility. Restrain a copywriter with arbitrary rules of style and you might as well ask a trapeze artist to execute a straddle whip in an evening gown.

In fact, great copy is much more than a string of words leading up to a codified call to action. Great copy is, itself, a call to action and anything conspiring to drown out that call impedes communication with your audience. Instead of focusing on rules, adjectives or magic headline formulas, copywriters need to focus on the answer to a basic question at the start of each project:

how do we get x to do y?

Everything else is a distraction, born of the absurd notion that certain hypnotic phrases have the power to overcome human will—leaving aside the question of whether that’s an ethical pursuit.

But there’s another delusion, snuggled inside that one, that works just as hard against your prospects for success: The idea that the goal of every communication is necessarily to sell something on the spot. While it may make sense from an ROI perspective, this kind of thinking ignores human nature.

…and the Art of Seduction.
That’s because human nature thrives on seduction—especially when it’s formulated as an affirmation that we’re special, unique and endowed with our own private chip off the block of divine beauty. So unless you’re banking your entire brand strategy on a Crazy-Eddie-style discount marketing scheme, you’ll need to introduce the art of seduction into your practice.

Keep in mind, however, that what qualifies as seduction changes with time and context. In the 1980s, for example, Crazy Eddie’s campaign succeeded despite the odds by having it both ways.

On one level, the announcer’s manic delivery could be read as an engaging parody of a promotional style that sophisticated shoppers abhor and abjure. As such, it flattered more than a few thousand metropolitan egos. On another level, of course, it worked as pure snake-oil marketing. The point is, an approach like that isn’t written, but conceived from one seamless thought process.

You start with a clear picture of what you want consumers to do and, just as important, how you want them to be affected by your presentation. You may want to:

Tease—because you want consumers to grasp your brand value as part of a larger marketing ecosystem. This has made Apple billions.

Tell—to build the case for a new way of accomplishing a goal that may have nothing to do with commerce, as in a political campaign.

Lead—consumers to reshape their perception of a product, say, from “extravagant” to “essential,” an equation anyone who bought an SUV built like a Bradley armored vehicle in the 1990s is familiar with.

Compel—by creating inescapable emotional appeal, especially in, but not limited to, cause marketing.

By identifying a communication strategy based on clear creative goals, you now have a yardstick against which to measure the copy emerging from it.

This approach takes pressure off individual phrases—whether headlines or bullets—to drive the selling message home. It also scrapes away generations of encrusted marketing-speak. Don’t worry, you won’t miss it. In 2013, advertising isn’t about selling either the steak or the sizzle, but the positive frame of mind that sharing a steak with friends can bring to everyday life.

Try doing that with a roomful of balloons—or a headline announcing your prices are INSANE. Instead, put your dog-eared Marketing 101 phrase book in a drawer and let your creative team earn trust, loyalty and brand advocacy over the long term, by letting a coherent messaging strategy take precedence over vague generalities about copy style.

Aug

The Content Conundrum in Consumer-facing Pharma

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: digital marketing, healthcare marketing, pharmaceutical advertising

Even with appropriately targeted content, one question remains: How do you anticipate what your audience will decide is worth viewing, hearing or reading? While a precise answer is sure to remain elusive, it’s clear to me that the message-starved laundry list of factoids that shape most consumer-facing pharmaceutical Web sites offers us a model of what not to do.

Keeping in mind the rigorous and, at times, arbitrary constraints under which all pharmaceutical advertising is conducted, I’m still convinced we can do better.

As always, the place to start in evaluating your content strategy is with the consumer’s mindset. In this case, we’re talking about people whose diagnosis will have a major impact on their lives. So, the more devastating the news, the less you can expect a consumer to browse through 40 pages of Web copy, diagrams and expert testimony.

Seen from that perspective, much of the content on consumer-facing pharma sites is more than superfluous. It actually works against the business goals of the brand. For if there’s any sense at all to marketing drugs to people who can’t buy them without a prescription, it’s to get consumers to do one of two things:

Comply with their doctor’s treatment regimen (that is, take the drug in question)
Ask their doctor to prescribe the drug in question for their condition

If I dare state the obvious, it’s only because there’s very little in the content strategy of the average consumer-facing pharma site that contributes to either of those goals.

Part of the problem stems from the desire to create a site accessible to everyone—regardless of their education level or familiarity with the scientific principles underlying medical jargon. The result is a site overflowing with data intended to orient the disoriented to the bad news they’ve received from their doctors. Such sites typically include a superficial tour of the disease state, an overview of the what, how, where and why of their condition.

Understanding undermined.
Trouble is, as redacted by lawyers and resected by medical editors, this text quickly dissolves into a slurry of medical terms that merely creates the illusion of understanding. It’s a dreary, affectless exercise, pitched at a Mr. Wizard level of assumed knowledge—except, that is, when a product claim turns on the mention of a highly technical issue.

So it is that a site that feels the need to explain the phrase “immune system,” a topic fit for 6th-graders, may think nothing of throwing around vocabulary busters like “erythropoiesis,” or “immunomodulatory.”

Regardless of whether a glossary is included, anyone lacking a 6th-grader’s understanding of the immune system is too deficient in science education, as are a large number of Americans, to learn anything from a dumbed-down article about, say, the mechanism of leukemia.

Why? Not for lack of intelligence, but because the number of new concepts introduced by such articles is unreasonably high; even if your readers know the “meaning” of each word, they’re unlikely to grasp what the copy actually means. So, after reading at most a paragraph of your branded communications about Drug X, your target audience will have no choice but to fall back on what it already knows:

Doc says I’m sick and I gotta take some medicine, or else.

That’s because most people confronted with a complex medical issue are only prepared to deal with it on a practical level. Whether the disease affects blood, bone or brain, their main concern is how their diagnosis impacts everyday concerns. Will they be able to work, they wonder, should they go on disability, will they have to remodel their homes or make other accommodations to adapt? And what, by the way, should they tell their families?

As I see it, if the goal of digital pharma advertising is to create an aura of trust and a motivating sense that “the brand cares about me,” addressing these concerns upfront is more to the point than nattering on about B-cells, T-cells or tumor necrosis factor. And yet natter on, we do.

It’s this lack of understanding of the human condition that drives many-a brand to address its audience in such a stilted, condescending tone. “It’s normal to be worried,” you can read on countless Web pages. Maybe, but what’s not normal is talking to people as if they were an uncanny mix of jaded doctoral candidate and bright-eyed 9-year-old—a demographic abstraction with no basis in reality.

Aug

Beefy Big Data & A Question of Substance

By Mark Laporta 1 Comment

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: Big Data, content development, Data-Driven Advertising, Relevance

The phrase “data-driven advertising” refers to the use of data gleaned from consumers’ online activity to deliver customized content to Web sites they are known to visit. Such content can take any number of forms, including advertorials, banners, interactive polling—some content staying constant, some swapped out for increased relevance to a particular user’s interests.

At issue, however, is whether the result is a message that actually targets a user or simply syncs with “what’s relevant” in a statistical sense. So if my cookies show I’m interested in glassware, you’ll go ahead and zap glassware-relevant content to my browser. But what will ensure you’ll sell me on the idea of buying your “Chardonnay Value Pack” now?

While data-driving is a recent phenomenon, claims for its effectiveness reach cult status in some circles. Results for data-driven ads are compared favorably by its supporters to results for “static ads.” But, as always, my question is, “Which static ads?” After all, the vast majority of static ads are so inadequate that any well-conceived alternative is bound to perform better.

Considering how complex data-driving mechanisms are, it’s easy to see how a confusion of cause and effect got started. But let’s be clear: it’s not data itself that turns the tide, but good campaign strategy delivered affectingly through data-driven means. Your data-driving strategy is of no consequence unless the thinking behind the delivery method actually connects with consumers.

Factvertising? Show me the money.
Obscuring the discussion of data-driven advertising is the term itself. Advertising has always been driven by data—in the form of observations made by creative talent. If the classic “Where’s the Beef?” campaign struck a chord in 1984, it had everything to do with the creative team’s ability to capture a previously observed personality type.

The consumer outrage expressed in the campaign is on display everywhere, no more so now than in the 1980s. But it took a creative imagination to repurpose this observation about human nature to support Wendy’s brand-value claims.

Essentially, the only thing that’s changed in the new paradigm is the source and detail of the data. Added to that, of course is the extra baggage of ideology, the idea that data-driven advertising is inherently better. But, as I see it, if Big Data is to have the predicted impact on consumers, we’ll need less mechanical applications than the “poll and comment” model on display at a microsite near you.

Synonymous with insight? Not so much.
One tenet of data-driven advertising is a commitment to develop creative concepts based on carefully- mined data. While that may make intuitive sense, the crux of the matter is what you mean by “based-on.” Should a data-driven headline contain a direct quote from a focus group attendee, or should the campaign’s creative environment capture the spirit, the atmosphere and emotional climate of the comment?

I vote for the latter. What matters is not what someone says, but the place their statement holds in their inner world. A consumer who says “I love Oreos” has something much more specific in mind than the statement itself suggests. Even the statement, “I love Oreos because they remind me of my childhood,” is only slightly less vague. We need to drill deeper to grasp the implications of that cookie. Was it the crunch, the filling—or the smile on Grandpa’s face as he sneaked you an extra one when Mom wasn’t looking?

How relevant? It’s relative.
Finally, let’s think carefully about the concept of Relevance. No matter how you slice it, relevance can only be defined contextually. So if data-diving tells you that a.) I like science fiction and b.) I’m looking to refinance my mortgage, you should think twice before sending me a message about mortgage rates while I’m trying to enjoy an episode of Battle Star Galactica on Hulu.

I mean, come on, I’m watching the show to relax; I’m not in the mood to think about interest rates or points, not to mention the hassle of fussing with the paperwork. Talking to me about refinancing in that context is like shouting into the wind. It is, in a word, irrelevant.

Ultimately, our current fascination with Big Data must be tempered with humanism, the sensitive, home-grown observations about human nature that creative artists have made for centuries. What motivates people? Look up from the spreadsheet, they’d tell you, and glance into the mirror. What you see there is the answer to every question about what drives people to respond to marketing stimuli.

Jul

On the Front Lines of World War C

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: content development, Web portals

In the first five minutes after the Internet Big Bang, the impulse to build a Web portal and create a personalized mini-net probably made some kind of sense. In today’s context, on the other hand, that impulse is absurd. Now that digital space is on a course for infinite expansion, filtering Web content through a portal is like trying to repackage the Pacific Ocean as a series of labeled pickle jars.

In its current incarnation, the typical Web portal is a surreal amalgam of local news reporting, soft-core porn and reruns of America’s Funniest Home Videos. As such, it amounts to nothing less than the Springerization of digital space, at a time when that venerable precursor of Reality TV has been completely eclipsed by outrageous goings on in Congress.

Of course, there’s plenty more than Yahoo.com to make you shake your head at your screen. But why should corporate entities, purporting to uphold Standards, continually dish out recycled material their audiences can post on their own? Or am I to assume that an article entitled 5 Regional Burger Chains We Wish Were National is rife with entertainment value because, obviously, the average consumer has only a limited opportunity to see fast food vendors up close?

Tour bus to Nowhere.
While I get the idea that users might enjoy having a guided tour of the Web, what’s missing is any discernible sense of direction, let alone selection. At Yahoo on 7-19-13, a story about Satanists vies for attention with a voyeuristic account of a grieving mother and rumors about Brad and Angelina because, again, users have no other access to rumors about famous couples rumored not to be rumors.

If I seem unaccountably irritated by this phenomenon, that’s only because it’s just as much a form of environmental pollution as the industrial smog that threatens to dissolve the city of Beijing by 2014.

By serving up a non-stop diet of drivel, portal Web sites of this stripe cloud the issues we need to confront as a global society. The more we’re supersized with infauxmation, the harder it is to see everyday life clearly, let alone topics like education, climate change, healthcare reform or, excuse me, social justice.

Seen from that perspective I can’t justify the persistence of sites managed by AOL, AT&T, Verizon, Excite or MSN, to name only American examples, that contribute to a peculiarly 21st century form of mental illness. That is, the inability to distinguish between reality and Reality.

I watch, therefore I am.
Look no farther than the 2010 Tyler Clementi tragedy to see this phenomenon in action. While the sociopathic cruelty exhibited in this case has many roots, one of them is surely the incessant viewing of dehumanized, contextless news stories.

I have no doubt that the person who “shared a video” of an intensely private moment saw it as nothing more than a valued contribution to Reality. In today’s world, he may even have seen it as a creative act, as the start of a brilliant film career in an age when “everyone’s a publisher.”

Sure, I know there’s more to it than that.

But if you’re not appalled by the proliferation of mental sludge in digital space, consider the impact of this schlock-n-shock pollution on the ecosystem your branded content inhabits. Ask yourself this: If you wouldn’t park your car within two feet of a toxic slag heap, why would you post your advertorial within two clicks of “Jennifer Lawrence reunites with ex-beaux?”

Trouble is, with the explosive mania driving the shared content trend, you have no idea what consumers have seen by the time they click through to your Web presence, not to mention what might appear right next to your rollover banner.

Brand-eating content.
In light of that, you’d think AT&T, for example, would recognize a simple truth: The same logo that appears on its Official Site also appears on its portal—creating a direct link between “Can you name these freaky stars?” and “The Nation’s Fastest 4GLTE Network.”

And it gets worse. When you consider how often a newsertainment story gets followed, retweeted, and Digged, it’s clearly the onset of “World War C”—as zombie content threatens to devour the last shreds of brand differentiation. After all, when everything consumers encounter online gets tossed into the same value-neutral bin, you can hardly expect them to know the difference between your latest cross-promotion and “Snoop Lion teams up with Chelsea Handler.”

Jun

Holding a Mirror to the Great Creative Idea

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: Creative Development

Across every advertising discipline, the quest for a Great Creative Idea (GCI) takes on epic proportions. The ultimate prize—to be known as the author of a GCI—is the dream of every gutsy intern, every plucky staffer and every macchiato-sipping, iPhone-wielding, 505-creasing creative director in the business.

Trouble is, no one has the slightest idea what a GCI is.

It is, apparently, something you stumble over in your Nike Air Maxes on your way to Starbucks. At least I assume so, in the absence of a universal definition—of either “great” or “creative” or “idea.”

As I see it, this lack of unanimity is endemic to a general decline in our fortunes. From the creative consultants of the ’60s, we’ve devolved to a hoary clan of 21st century ad-mechanics, a trend as despicable as it is reversible.

If you’re with me so far, let’s have a look at what GCI might mean to someone who still believes an ad agency can be more than a Jiffy-Lube station for obsolete response drivers.

Wrong end of the telescope.
Part of the problem of identifying a true GCI stems from the gnarled thicket of confusion about advertising structure. As I see it, a GCI operates only at the highest level of your imagination. It’s a thought process, lying in the deep background of whatever your audience eventually sees or hears.

As such, it doesn’t necessarily “sound cool” or “look amazing”—for the same reason you’d never think to wear your pancreas on your shirt sleeve. The function of a GCI is to build structure, not surface appeal. By the same token, a GCI isn’t a toy box of tactics. Your great idea for a video game that guides consumers to an appreciation of product benefits? That, amigo, is a tactic—and a tired one at that.

The same can be said for ideas with a more generic descriptor. Proposing, for example, an e-mail marketing campaign as a GCI is flat-out misrepresentation. A campaign of any kind can only be an execution of a GCI.

Chasing a mirage.
Equally wide of the mark are creative concepts that masquerade as GCIs by being alluringly ambiguous, or neurotically naughty. Let’s be clear: If your idea rises or falls on the use of a single gimmicky image or pun-infested headline, it’s not a GCI. As infatuated as you are with your comp, you’re chasing a mirage—a delicious illusion of greatness that’s just out of reach.

That’s when it’s time to recalibrate your vision. Realize that the only valid measure of your “totally sick idea for a viral video” is the thinking behind it. And until you can parse out a clear articulation of the message your proto-idea conveys, your GCI still needs a few more hours in the oven.

The over (and under) view.
None of this talk about background structure, however, implies that surface features are unimportant. Some of the most painful moments you’ll ever spend in a conference room are those watching a colleague roll out an idea that has no chance of practical realization. There’s no budget large enough or advancement in particle physics sophisticated enough to pull it off.

So while the main characteristic of a GCI is its ability to provide a creative framework for a series of communications, that framework must have its roots in the real world. And its most important real-world root is sustainability. A true GCI creates the means to roll out branded messaging over the long term. That’s because it grows directly out of a simple congruency: the intersection of a brand’s core value and consumer needs.

CGI process in perspective.
Now if coming up with a GCI sounds time-consuming, that’s only because today’s tight timelines, fast turn-arounds and found-efficiencies cut the creative process off at the knees.

Hence the familiar spectacle of a frantic call-to-brainstorm for a Monday morning presentation that arrives on your desk at 4:55 on Friday. It’s the surest sign that advertising has run aground on its ill-fated voyage from its homeland. What was once a culture of observation about modern society and the drivers of human motivation, has devolved into a dreary check list of “what works.”

So the next time it’s your turn to walk the presentation plank in the conference room ask yourself this: Is your Great Creative Idea a sustainable framework for delivering brand value—or a ghostly imitation of something you saw on Vimeo at 1:00 am last Tuesday?

Jun

Digital Marketing: Looking Back to Look Forward

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: content syndication, digital marketing, Web development

As I see it, enough time has passed in the evolution of digital space for us to re-evaluate some of our earliest assumptions—starting with a thorough review of basic concepts embodied in standard terminology. Take, for example, the phrase “Web site.”

From the outset, there was plenty about Web sites to make marketers giddy. For the first time, they could give consumers a guided tour of their brand without the expense of sales training or glossy print runs.

Better yet, Web sites allowed users to be self-guided and go directly to the content they found most compelling. Next thing you know, marketers were tracking and analyzing user-paths abetted by the burgeoning growth of search engine technology.

Age of innocence.
It was the age of Click Here, when Web sites were created to produce clicks, worn as badges of honor by savvy brands who “got” the Internet. The only thing missing was a reliable, active pull.

Looking to real-world analogues, marketers turned to Web banners, hoping they’d perform as well as billboards and POP displays. Ill-conceived, Web banners endured a childhood of abuse and an adulthood of dysfunction so severe—their sizable potential was squandered in less than a decade.

Meanwhile, search engines, whose potential was realized in the late 1990s, offered only a passive pull, no matter how stealthily search rankings might be jiggered.

To the rescue came social networking. Marketers believed they could drive traffic just by reaching consumers in their virtual hometowns. Soon, “Join us on Facebook” was seen as the universal solvent. So, in addition to Web sites few people visited, marketers created Facebook pages few interacted with.

The result is stagnation, evident in today’s flat, boxy, affectless digital landscape.

Age of “standards.”
It’s this result that should motivate us to rethink the way we plan, create and build a Web site—abandoning the standard, sequential process:

Map an information architecture
Flesh it out with “creative”
Fill it up with “content”
Stud it with promotions
Clone it onto social sites

…in favor of an organic co-development of your brand’s digital presence. In this paradigm everything that’s now conceived as an add-on feature designed to give the campaign legs would be carefully melded into a seamless entity. Not with a superficial carryover of look and feel, but with a coherent thought process that gets beyond “click.”

Now, one obstacle to this approach is the scatter shot way many brands divide their agency assignments—one agency for Web design, another for SEO, a third for social media marketing, another for banners, and a fifth for content distribution, under the guise of media placement.

Add to that the mechanical adoption of general advertising motifs developed by a sixth agency and the tango of tangled authorities requires the patience of a Bodhisattva to sort out.

Age of organic growth.
But assuming leadership trumps niggling politics, you’d work from the premise that a Web site is not a thing, but an organism. The home page? Merely, by analogy, the face of a complex, fascinating creature.

From this perspective it would be unthinkable to launch a Web site and then “socialize it” months later. Before authorizing a single pixel of stock art you’d need to work out interlaced strategies to:

Drive traffic
Create social interaction
Syndicate content to sites users frequent

…and understand how these components must influence site content. That’s “content” in the broadest sense, including a comprehensive editorial calendar for rolling out new material and repackaging it for syndication. The result would be a circulatory system for your digital presence to clarify, unify and strengthen your message to consumers.

Bear this in mind, however: Each environment your message appears in requires special handling.

If, for example, the attraction of social space is the infinitely renewable connections it creates, it only makes sense that content cloned from other media, including a “strong call to action,” will not be effective.

You need instead to create content idiomatic to social space—in which you tell, not sell, your story and invite comment. Similarly, content you distribute must match its surroundings. The solution lies in allowing your work to grow organically from a unified thought process with specific goals and specific benchmarks for success. The result is dynamic, lively, human communication.

Why does this matter? Because the first of your competitors to get this right will have the privilege of eating your brand for lunch. A digital presence truly responsive to consumers, engaging them successfully through multiple pathways and always—always—delivering fresh value? That, my friend, is the path to your door

May

Walking Away from the Grid and the Rail

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: content strategy, digital design, digital marketing

In 2013, when the Internet is still routinely force-fit to specs made for print, out-of-home, retail or broadcast, it’s easy to fall asleep every night believing a Web site is simply an electronic newspaper.

Excuse me, but what a waste.

As CPUs muscle up, pixel densities climb, sound systems deliver stadium acoustics and the promise of artificial intelligence looms on the horizon, digital space is going through a reality change. As these ramped-up technologies converge on our touchscreens, we now have the opportunity to walk away from mechanical grid-plus-right-rail formats—and evolve an inherently digital idiom.

Ironically, the same consumers we’ve convinced to trade-in their traditional worldview for a digital screenview are now more immersed in digital communication than we are. While we continue to crank out flat arrays of boxes, consumers are swiping from screen to screen with a grace reminiscent of simian brachiation. And lest we forget, gamers around the world are now logging billions of hours battling boredom with ‘bots. As I see it, that leaves between 90 to 95% of all Web sites woefully behind the curve.

Viewscreen: On.
How do we address this mismatch between the idioms users respond to and the idioms we speak in? As I see it, we must develop a new visual vocabulary in which text, image, animation and video would narrate the brand story in a series of engaging experiences.

So, if the marketing team at Volvo (as of 5-24-13) wants to tell consumers their product is “designed around you” they might think to demonstrate what that means, and not expect consumers to “see for yourself” by stumbling into the showroom. At the moment, the intriguing idea of a car designed around consumers merely serves as a lead-in to a dissertation about “Dynamic Stability and Traction Control (DSTC).”

Posting documentary-style videos on a You Tube channel is not enough, not least because users have to leave the site to find them. Besides this site-hopping message deployment merely adds remote boxes to the standard grid. A Facebook page, when linked to from a Web page, is still just one more carton of promo for users to ignore.

What if, instead, Volvo illustrated that thought in an immersive digital environment? The story behind “Designed Around You” would help users appreciate the engineering, aesthetic and social challenges that drive the process of building a car—and help them grasp why Volvo adds value to their lives.

Bullets in abeyance.
Now, this approach in no way obviates the display of factoids or order buttons. But the site would be oriented toward creating a seamless, dovetailing branded experience with multiple access points.

One thing this approach does obviate: throwaway copy devoted to promotional nonsense. In a branded experience environment such copy is a distraction—a little like the advertising vignettes broadcasters wove into the first generation of TV sitcoms.

Besides, times have changed. In a tight economy, the phrase “Don’t Wait—Order Now” continually begs the question “Why?” If you think the answer is a series of bullet points, you’re on your way to another digital makeover and another parade of customers who arrive at your showroom with no idea why you’re better than the competition.

Not, mind you, because they don’t have enough facts, but because you’ve failed to endow your brand with memorable emotional resonance. And that resonance, in today’s world, is what a growing swath of Americans associate with immersive, digital entertainment.

Encouraging trends.
You can already see baby steps in the adoption of a new digital idiom. Certainly the goings on at OK Studios suggest a point of departure. Here flash programming helps ratchet up the engagement level—but that’s not the whole story.

The site also delivers pages composed of surprising imagery and loose-limbed copy, working in concert to create a branded mood / voice. And while you could argue OK Studio isn’t hemmed in by the necessity to hawk merchandise, it’s easy to see how an e-tail component could be handled in this idiom.

As a cursory Google search will tell you, these are trends and tendencies explored by a number of adventuresome Web designers, including, unfortunately, cartoonish “3D” approaches that interfere with consumer engagement by adding extraneous layers of “realism” to the interface.

But enough. At issue here is not what programming technique to use. The point is to find a way to communicate in digital space that’s truly idiomatic to the medium. It’s something that needs to evolve at its own pace, but does require one inciting incident: The decision to walk away from the Grid and the Rail.

May

Messaging Coherence & the Marketing Ecosystem

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: communication strategy, messaging platform

In a perfect world, brands would launch with a fully worked out messaging platform, a strategy for communicating with the target audience on many different levels. While the perfect world stubbornly refuses to materialize, imagining its properties is sometimes a fruitful way to make real world solutions less blunt-nosed, less bottom-lined and, frankly, less bird-brained.

To be clear, by “messaging platform” I mean the total composite takeaway you want your audience to absorb and—just as important—believe. In its purest form, some part of that takeaway would permeate every communication. Why only part? Because, as we all know, there’s barely enough space-time available in any one advertising or promotional format to convey even one straight-forward motivating proposition.

TV? Zap! Envelope? Rip! Magazine? Flip!
As a consequence, it’s vitally important that everything you do say ladders up to a unified messaging platform. By the same token, your message to consumers will become garbled in no time, unless its entirety is implicit in every snippet you push out through advertising, promotion, PR or social media. In essence, your messaging platform must, by analogy, be fractal.

Accomplishing this is much easier than it sounds. All that’s required is a firm grasp of the difference between a communication and a communication medium. That is, the realization that a successful communication doesn’t arise spontaneously from a collection of MBA-approved introductory gambits, catch phrases and calls to action any more than it arises from painstaking stock art searches (“I’m not crazy about her outift”) or trend-hopping font choices.

Start with a train of thought…
Effective communication arises from a coherent thought process brought to life by creative talent. It’s that thought process—an intermingling of strategy, empathy, observation and theatrical flair—that’s the basis for a successful messaging platform. Whatever you want consumers to take away, you’ll need to touch all these bases. Otherwise, all those late nights sequestered in a conference room with day-old pasta-salad and warm Diet Coke are for nothing.

As I see it, coherence in this sense contributes much more to the success of your campaign than secondary factors like ownability, style or voice. Yet, so often, marketers mistake the wrapping paper for the present. The result is millions spent on highly polished advertising that reflects a marketer’s motivations very well—and the motivations of consumers not at all.

…reflecting what your audience actually values.
Now, that’s not to say that consistent messaging boils down to repeating the same phrases each and every time. That kind of consistency is, as the poet says, “…the hobgoblin of little minds” and is rooted in anxiety. Like a traveler clutching a phrase book, marketers who fear to deviate from a set script for each campaign transmit only one message,

“We’re not interested in talking to you. We just want you to buy our stuff.”

It’s a realty no exercise in Consumer Friendly Language can hope to mask. In its worst form, this rigid tag-lining of word and image also constitutes one of the clearest arguments for the obsolescence of the advertising campaign as a communication strategy. Sure, everyone knows every brand is in the business of selling on some level. But we want the same thing from brand communications that we want from the best cashiers at our favorite retail stores—a dash of courtesy, non-intrusive concern and at least a ritualized acknowledgment of our individuality.

Much of the time, however, branded communication—especially in digital space—is a tad too reminiscent of Kristen Wiig’s Target Lady cashier. Like so much digital palaver, Target Lady’s chatter is all and only about herself.

Protect the marketing ecosystem.
What you do want to be is consistent about is what matters most: giving consumers information they can use to decide on their own that it’s time to buy. In a perfect world, each communication would focus on a different aspect of your value. By saying one thing clearly, one thing memorably, one thing that vividly engages consumers’ emotions in each communication, you’ll build a composite picture that makes an indelible, motivating impression.

Regrettably, many brands sacrifice coherent messaging by equating “message” with “offer.” Sprint.com, for example, squanders the emotionally-charged broadcast campaign “I am Unlimited” by making it fight for space with “Save $100 when you switch” and a flotilla of other offers. By splintering its message, Sprint diminishes the product category, thereby damaging the entire marketing ecosystem. Certainly, if I were Sprint or Samsung, I wouldn’t want consumers to equate my product to picking up a two-pound bag of yellow onions at the corner supermarket “Now through Thursday.”

Apr

The Path to an “Audible” URL

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: site traffic, user path

“When a tree falls in a lonely forest, and no animal is near by to hear it, does it make a sound?”

As any graduate of Wikipedia University knows, some form of this question has been kicking around in Western Philosophy’s attic for at least 300 years. While I don’t subscribe to this line of logic-spinning—the attempt to make the unknowable knowable by couching it in paradoxes—I have to admit the question has an undeniable relevance to digital messaging strategy and Web design.

You need only install Google Analytics to realize the awful truth. Proof of your site’s existence will be constantly challenged by the statistical evidence: Your URL is only as audible as your site traffic allows.

Naturally, the premise behind any Web site is the assumption your brand has a clearly defined prospective audience. Nevertheless, your “volume” is largely determined by the steps you take to drive traffic. Whether through social networking infiltration, distributed content or banners—you must pave the way to your URL with content that reaches digital venues your audience frequents.

And yet, you may still find your Web site’s fall is heard by only a paltry few.

Branching out from tradition.
To tip the odds in your favor, realize that driving people to a home page is only meaningful if, once they arrive, they can find what they want instantaneously. That’s because, in the post-iPhone era, your most compelling sales pitch is due to be interrupted by incoming cat pix, retweets, timelines, tumblrs, pins, IMs or an e-mail from Mom at any moment.

In such an environment, greeting your digital audience with a confusing array of interchangeable options has a FrozFruit’s chance in Mauna Loa of achieving engagement. By contrast, a home page capable of leading visitors along well-defined user paths has far better odds of catching and holding attention.

With their focus on impulse buying, branded e-tail sites offer a simple example of user paths in action. J.Crew.com, as of 4-20-13, reflects this kind of thinking in several ways. At the simplest level, users can self-identify by choosing an option in the upper left corner: “For Women, For Men, For Girls, For Boys.”

More options, by clothing genre, reveal themselves in the main navigation, an elegant series of rollovers that call up a single, targeted image. Each of these options addresses a different kind of shopper with the full realization that the person looking for wedding-wear today may well be shopping for vacation-wear in a few weeks.

In this instance, user path clarity is enhanced by a design free of anxious, space-filling mania. Because users see one image at a time they can actually feel the impact of the image. Hence, the site speaks to specific users within the larger audience of J. Crew fans. Interior pages show similar restraint, allowing the product to speak for itself.

And that’s an essential feature of a successful user path: enabling targeted users to define the brand in their own terms. Light years away from the…

“Buy now and save up to 50% until May 31, while supplies last”

…mind set, J. Crew lets users drive themselves to the products they choose and, along the way, create their own sales pitch for the items they want most.

Rooted in manipulation.
On the surface, the difference between this site and, say, J.C. Penny.com may not be so apparent. After all, the latter offers some of the same self-defining options. Yet the two sites couldn’t be more different.

First, with its unstoppable slideshow marquee, J.C. Penny forces users to traipse through a wide swath of its offerings whether they want to or not. The only path, inevitably, is J.C. Penny’s and the copy—directive, manipulative, aggressive—wants to dictate how users should feel about the products on display.

YOU DESERVE TO RELAX IN STYLE

…screams a one-size-fits-all headline, itself only a hair’s breadth away from

YOU ARE GETTING VERY SLEEPY

As in the nightmare scenarios called up by George Orwell or Aldus Huxley—not to mention the billboards in the film adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s Minority Report—sales talk like this aims to dissolve each visitor’s identity in a dark pool of conformity.

So as you map out your information architecture, rewrite your user experience guidelines and lay down the law about fonts, pixel-widths, stock art style and word count, remember: The most compelling reason people frequent your site is the feeling they can use it their way.

Apr

Self-Adulatory Copy: Time for a Change

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising

One of the curious phenomena of modern life—in an era when traditions tumble, barriers burst and innovation insinuates into every sector of thought, feeling and action—is the persistent delusion that self-adulatory marketing copy has the power to motivate consumers.

You can see such copy at work in many places, but nowhere more egregiously than on Web sites hawking luxury goods to people of “discriminating taste.”

Leaving aside the question of whether anyone with discriminating taste could be bamboozled by marketing copy, let’s have a look at the lengths to which this false gambit is taken by Seiko.com:

GRAND SEIKO
Perfect precision, beauty and legibility
The goal that inspired the creators of Grand Seiko half a century ago was hardly a modest one. They were determined to create nothing less than the best luxury watch in the world.

…and, as we’re inevitably supposed to conclude, “they” succeeded. Trouble is, implied in this statement is the assertion that Rolex, say, or Tag Heuer, have a different goal, and are determined to create something less than the best.

And here, in essence, is the flaw in every aspect of self-adulatory marketing copy: No matter how you spin it, you’re asking consumers to believe a lie.

“The finest craftsmanship”
Whatever the truth of the matter, this kind of assertion is meaningless to American consumers. If you’ve followed the education debate in the US over the last 10 years, you know that even luxury-product consumers have no way in Hell to know, objectively, whether Tag Heuer, Rolex or Seiko makes “the best” watch.

I mean, even given a country rife with engineering-literate citizens, what’s still missing is a consensus definition of “the best.” Here again, the sanctioned use of meaningless phrases adds more mental static to a consumer messaging pipeline already clogged to the seams with bilge.

“Our product is a work of art.”
Another category of delusional marketing strategy is characterized by an indiscriminate appropriation of metaphor and diction from arts promotion—itself a doubtful model for effective promotional copy:

PREMIER
The attraction of opposites
Where classicism and modernity meet, there lies the essence of the Premier collection…The Premier collection draws inspiration from the world of architecture, and its charm from the subtle interaction of the classical and the modern. By blending these different styles, Premier expresses the elusive truth that opposites can attract, and offers a harmonious synthesis of contemporary style and enduring quality.

Now, not only is the copy vague, its underlying premise is pure fiction: The intersection between classicism and modernism, properly defined, is the null set.

Yet there’s a more general reason that positioning your product as a work of art makes for bad marketing strategy. Doing so falsely assumes our country has a unified definition or perception of art. When you take into account America’s muddled attitudes about the role of art in society, you have to wonder whether claiming the status of La Gioconda for a luxury watch is really such a good idea.

Worse, like the rest of the site copy, the self-adulatory tone leaves hardly a hair’s breadth for Seiko to demonstrate its value to consumers. Only in one instance, where the GPS locator installed in a particular model is positioned as a boon to heavy business travelers, do we have any sense that Seiko has appreciable empathy for its target audience. Yet, even here, empathy is undercut by the gushing question:

Could this be the most intelligent watch ever built?

“You talking to me?”
Hence, if you’re going to communicate in American English, you might want to consider how your message will be received. In the US, promotional copy overflowing with references to Sanskrit and “Katana, the ancient art of Japanese sword making” inevitably sounds pretentious, no matter how high the price tag.

Ironically, the watches themselves appear to be the product of a great deal of ingenuity, craftsmanship. and applied science. Given that, we have enough respect for technological and manufacturing prowess in this country to allow Seiko to sell its timepieces on their own merits.

How much better if Seiko’s marketing message actually reflected the down-to-earth engineering concerns at the core of fine watch building. There’s enough to celebrate in the brand’s technical prowess, design innovation, and knack for applied science—when discussed in real terms.

In the end, the copy at Seiko.com, by being imprecise and inelegant, is the polar opposite of the brand promise it purports to make. And in seeking to prey on the fragile egos of status-hungry shoppers, the self-adulatory prose is anything but flattering to the company’s image.