#54 How The Wall Street Journal Took Me to the Cleaners

 ISSUE #54 — Tuesday, April 30, 2019

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2019/04/54-how-wall-street-journal-took-me-to.html


Posted by Denny Hatch

 How The Wall Street Journal Took Me to the Cleaners

“Dear Denny Hatch,

“Your WSJ Digital Package is about to renew.”

     What the hell kind of lede is that?

     Digital Package????

     Gee, I thought I was a savvy subscriber to the world’s premier financial publication that would enhance my career, teach me about money and investing and guide me to a safe harbor in retirement. 

     The circulation dweebs at The Journal are telling me what I’m really going to miss is my “Digital Package.”

The Importance of the Signature

It was freelancer Malcolm Decker who wrote: “On a letter, your signature is your handshake.”
     Here’s how the Journal circulation people signed off:

                                        Regards,
                                        WSJ Customer service.

     Golly, as a longtime member of the WSJ family, don’t I rate letter from a real person—maybe a VP of circulation or something?
     It doesn’t need to be a real signature. But just the name of somebody—an actual, real live person at The Journal—who cares about me?
     For example:

“The Most Successful Advertisement

In the History of the World”

That’s what I called Martin Conroy’s 1974 “Two Young Men…” letter that brought in $2 billion+ in circulation revenue to The Wall Street Journal for over more than a quarter century.
     Here’s is Conroy’s closing paragraph:

     Now imagine what would happen to the results of this $2 billion, 25-year masterpiece had it ended thusly:

Could WSJ Customer service have written that letter? Or stood behind the guarantee of interesting, reliable and always useful? Quite simply, the real name of a real person signing a letter counts big time in terms of believability and trust. The name of someone I could complain to if I had a problem rather than the nameless, faceless, inhuman WSJ Customer service.

Two weeks ago, when I was hit with the cold, perfunctory renewal effort you see at the top of this post, I thought: “Okay, I’ll renew.”
     I clicked where I was told, and here’s what came up:

OMG! A Nasty Surprise!

WSJ's real message to me was two parts:
• (1) “Hey, Denny, we sneakily up our prices 5% every 9 months!
­• (2) “Up yours!”

• Lord knows when—and how little—I was paying when I first subscribed.

• Under the “Auto-renewal” system, I never saw a bill or a beautifully crafted renewal effort. Just a charge in mouse type amidst dozens of others on a monthly VISA bill.

• At what point in the future would the Journal up me into paying $1,000 a month?  

• How much was I costing The Wall Street Journal? Not ink. Not paper. Not printing. Not folding. And not delivery. 

• This was an annual $467.88 fee for teeny nano-spritzes of electricity.

• With 50+ years in direct marketing, I am acutely aware of product pricing, cost-of-goods sold and allowable order costs. 

• WSJ is operating on a 100-million-times mark-up.

Is The Wall Street Journal worth it? Nah!

When I saw what I was paying, I reassessed my intercourse with WSJ.
     Okay, my sad-sack insecure ego liked receiving it.
     I felt I was getting inside information, just like the big kahunas on Wall Street, in corporate corner offices and on room service breakfast trays at Mar-a-Lago.

Intense Media Competition for My Attention

I no longer read print newspapers. They are cumbersome and physically messy. They destroy forests. Type is tiny and I have always had lousy eyesight.
     Every morning online I skim/scan/read the juiciest items in Apple News, The New York Times, Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer.
    The Wall Street Journal sucks hind tit with its also-ran coverage of world affairs, politics, stories of rich people’s mansions, wardrobes, transportation, food and amusements.
     Maybe once a week I’d click on a story.
     Quite frankly, my reading list—plus TV addiction (MSNBC, Fox News, CNN)—enable me to keep up with the catastrophic conditions of city, state, country and world as well as the deluge of dysfunctional, duplicitous douchebags destroying the planet.

WSJ, I want to be romanced!

For 30 years as a direct response copywriter my client base was made up mainly of magazine and newsletter publishers. I was proud to know them and privileged to get inside the heads of editors, readers and prospects to help make everybody’s lives better.
     Many copywriters hated the tedious work of creating renewal and billing efforts; I found them a delicious challenge—reprising the benefits of a familiar old gigolo and making him seem young, vibrant and sexy again.
     My wife, Peggy, is a true master of renewals and billing efforts. She loves them!
      So when I changed credit cards—and the “Auto-renew” business model fizzled out—WSJ’s circulation creeps were forced to lurch into action.
     Alas, they had nothing in their arsenal to persuade me to renew beyond the threat of being cut off from the “WSJ digital package.”

If You Want My $467.88 a Year

You Damn Well Re-sell Me!

     • How many reporters do you have working for me in how many countries?
     • Make me feel like a member of your family of star journalists and Op-Editors—a real insider!
     • What were the breakthrough stories and personality profiles you brought me over that past year?
     • Pound into my brain the splendid benefits and exclusive features I can’t get elsewhere!
     • How about offering me a digital cookbook or special reports as a “thank-you” for renewing?” Maybe a WSJ tote bag or coffee mug?
     • What are WSJ's plans for the coming year and how will you change my life for the better?
     • Scare the hell out of me that if I do not renew, I will be woefully unprepared for coming financial Armageddon and will become a bag-person on the streets!
     • Quite simply, WSJ folks, I don’t like you and I don’t need you.
     • You have been picking my pocket for years and you spoke to me with all the charm, warmth and enthusiasm of HAL, the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.
     Bye-bye, boneheads! 

Takeaways to Consider

• No marketer should allow ham-handed circulation clerks, lawyers, bean counters and programmers to directly interact with customers, prospects and employees.

• I strongly suggest every person running a business put a world-class copywriter on retainer—a sensitive and literate pro that can work with you on sales and promotion messages. Additional duties: help make sure all your internal and external communications—from the executive suite to the mailroom—are doing their intended jobs.

• The real name of a real person signing a letter counts big time in terms of believability and trust—the name of someone I could complain to if I had a problem rather than the nameless, faceless, inhuman "WSJ Customer service."

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Word Count: 1091

 

#53 The World’s Greatest Financial Services Copywriter

Issue #53 — Tuesday, April 23, 2019

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2019/04/53-worlds-greatest-financial-services.html

Posted by Denny Hatch

The World’s Greatest
Financial Services Copywriter

Louis Engel (1909-1982): “Creative Genius

Who Brought Wall Street to Main Street”

The most unbelievable newspaper ad ever published!

Louis Engel was Advertising and Sales Promotion manager for the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane. It had two offices in Manhattan as well as one each in Newark, NJ and Stamford, CT.

     Engel’s fame—and his greatest achievement—was a single full-page black-and-white newspaper broadsheet advertisement published in The New York Times October 19, 1948.

• With 6450 words jammed onto the page, it was the longest ad in the history of The New York Times.

• Not a single photograph, drawing, table, chart or graph was used anywhere to break up the monotony of black-and-white words, words, words.

• The page was not created nor designed to pull inquiries. However the following short paragraph was included at the end as an afterthought:

These terms are defined in a booklet, “How to Invest”, which we have just published. A basic guidebook for all security owners, this new publication develops in greater detail the story of how this stock and bond business works. It reviews the basic principles of sound investing, such as analysis of market trends, the diversification of holdings, and the management of a portfolio. We will be glad to send you a copy.
 

NOTE: To see the ad full-size and read Engel’s text:

https://swiped.co/file/about-this-stock-bond-louis-engel/

The Results: Astounding!

• One month after publication 5,033 requests had been received—4,000 of them the first week. 3,534 came by mail, 947 by telephone and 552 from visitors to one of the Merrill Lynch offices. Total number of items requested: 20,000+.

—Julian Lewis Watkins, THE 100 GREATEST ADVERTISEMENTS

• “What was most amazing,” Engel recalled, “was that we got hundreds and hundreds of long and thoughtful letters.” Some respondents were profusely appreciative. One person wrote: “God bless Merrill Lynch… I have been wanting to know this all my life… I owned stocks and bonds and I never really knew what I owned.”

• The firm ran the same advertisement, or slightly revised versions, in newspapers across the country, not only during the next few months, but indeed, for years thereafter. The total number of responses exceeded three million, and those returns translated into millions of prospective customers for the firm’s eager brokers. With that one concept alone, Engel proved himself a promotional genius. His subsequent aggressive campaigns, which were typically both educational and eye-catching, set new standards for brokerage firms and other enterprises in the financial services sector. 

—Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP)

The Secret of Engel’s Success: Brilliant Copy

Plus Forcing the Reader's Eye to Keep Moving

A number of years ago I wrote and published WRITE EVERYTHING RIGHT! Of the 81,000+ words, I believe the five most important words are these:

“Avoid gray walls of type.” —David Ogilvy

Here’s what I’m talking about:

These lazy editors have turned the “joy of reading” into grim hard work.

     For starters, imagine if you’re in the middle of one of these tedious texts and you are interrupted—ringing phone, doorbell or nature calls.

• When you return, you have recreate in your mind the thread of the writer’s argument.

• Finding your place means skimming, scanning and scrambling to figure out where you left off.

• The design give you no touch points to help you remember where you were.
 

Note Louis Engel’s design and layout—upper deck, headline, lower deck and subhead in the box—all designed to telegraph the importance of the message and preview what is coming.

How Engel forced reader’s eye to keep moving

In addition, Louis Engel strategically inserted three subheads, a call-out and no less than 18 crossheads (mini-headlines) to introduce individual paragraphs and sections.

     If interest flags for a moment anywhere in the piece, the reader’s eyes will flick to a mini-hed nearby and interest is recaptured.

     Further, if the reader is interrupted by a phone call or doorbell, touch-points throughout make it easy to see where to resume reading.

My Opinion:

All authors should consider using the visual techniques of copywriting professionals such in as this ad by Louis Engel to make their prose more inviting and readable. And I’m talking all authors:

• Presidential press secretaries, academics, lawyers, and judges.

• Business people creating memos, reports, letters and white papers.

• Writers of articles, non-fiction and maybe even fiction.

• Out-of-work professionals polishing their résumés.

• Since 2004, 1800 U.S. newspapers have crashed and burned. One reason: in the world of Tweets (280 characters) and Texts (160 Characters) the vast majority of readers today can only deal with bite-sized paragraphs.

• To save the newspaper industry, I urge publishers to always think of the 277 million texters and the 326 million Tweeters in the U.S.—literate folks who are used to communicating in bite-sized paragraphs. I urge newspaper editors and designers to employ the devices below described by Ed Elliott and David Ogilvy throughout their publications. The alternative: always keep their résumés up-to-date.

Ed Elliott’s 28 Devices Can Turn a

Skimmer into an Interested Reader

• Table of contents.

• Headlines and subheads.

• Photography, especially of people and action.

• Tables, charts, graphs.

• Illustrations clarifying or reinforcing the text.

• Captions under every visual. People read captions as they skim.

• A word or subhead that is bigger, bolder, blacker, or has a different color than other elements on the page.       

• Enlarged numbers, possibly followed by an enlarged or bold lede.

• A word or line set off at an angle or in a box or a burst.                 

• Text inside an arrow or a ruled box.   

• Anything that interrupts a page-by-page pattern of columns.

• Text with a light screen behind it.       

• Pull quotes.

• A paragraph set off in bold or with a double indent.      

• Handwritten indications.   

• Bulleted text, especially with bullets that are larger or different from other bulleted text.

5 Ways to Get Maximum Readership

• TEXT SIZE: Ten or eleven points is optimum for readability; maybe one point larger for older readers.

• COLUMN WIDTH: 35 to 55 characters is a good target range. 

  Ten or eleven point is generally most readable on a column width of about a third of a page. Larger than eleven point should probably be about a half page wide. Columns wider than a half page are not quickly read.

• ALIGNMENT: Rag right is often better than justified. It creates a text shape that allows an area for the eye to rest. It can also appear more inviting, less imposing, more personal.

6 Design techniques to AVOID

• AVOID: text without sufficient contrast to its background. Examples:

         —A background screen that is too dark.

         —Paper color that is too dark.

         —Text that is too light—printed in a color other than black.

• AVOID:  text printed over—or reversed out of—a busy or distracting background.

• AVOID: text reversed out of a dark color.

• AVOID: flush right or centered paragraphs.

• AVOID: text that is too condensed.

• AVOID: character spacing that is too tight.

• AVOID: running a headline across a 2-page spread. Can't be quickly skimmed so can get ignored.

Ed Elliott, Direct Marketing Designer/Art Director/Creative Director, Specializing in generating response to lengthy messages.

Takeaways to Consider

• NOTE: In 1953 Little, Brown & Co. published Louis Engel's book, How to Buy Stocks. It sold over 7 million copies across 8 editions through 1994.

• What separates the great advertising copywriter from other writers is a laser-like focus on achieving two aims—grabbing attention and keeping the eye moving all the way to the end.

• “You cannot bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it.” —David Ogilvy

• “People will not be bored in print. They may listen politely at a dinner table to boasts and personalities, life history etc. But in print they choose their own companions, their own subjects. They want to be amused or benefited. They want economy, beauty, labor savings, good things to eat and wear.” —Claude Hopkins

• Same thing with a letter, e-mail, memo or article. If the reader gets bored in the middle and never reaches the punch line, coda or call to action, the writer has failed.

• “It takes hard writing to make easy reading.” —Robert Louis Stevenson

• “Neatness rejects involvement.” —Lew Smith

• “Ugly works.” —Bob Hacker

• “Avoid gray walls of type.” —David Ogilvy

• “After two or three inches of copy, insert your first crosshead (mini-headline) and thereafter pepper mini-headlines throughout, They keep the reader marching forward. Make some of them interrogative, to excite curiosity in the next run of copy.” —David Ogilvy

• “An ingenious sequence of boldly displayed mini-headlines can deliver the substance of your entire pitch to glancers who are too lazy to wade through the text.” —David Ogilvy

• "Short words! Short sentences! Short paragraphs!"
—Andrew J. Byrne

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Word count: 1428

#52 “Your First 10 Words Are More Important Than the Next Ten Thousand”

Issue #52 – Tuesday, April 16, 2019

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2019/04/52-your-first-10-words-are-more.html

Posted by Denny Hatch

“Your First 10 Words Are More Important 
Than the Next Ten Thousand”

What triggered this post were two of many bizarre news releases that recently landed in my Yahoo in-box. The first paragraphs are weird.'

Amandari Karaca

To Denny Hatch

Apr 5 at 11:27 AM

Hi, Denny – Any interest in why AI is the new Sterling Cooper for online retailers? As one-to-one hyper-personalization kicks in, content creators must take a cue from Mad Men if they want to create authentic customized experiences for users...
 

= = = = = = = = = = = =

Tom Careless

To Denny Hatch

 Apr 12 at 6:24 AM

Hi Denny,

Hope you are well, I thought you might be interested in the below news?

In response to rapid transformations in the way people consume content and interact with media across multiple devices, Globo has undergone a radical face-lift of all elements of its brand, including the logo, typeface, and company signaling [sic]...

= = = = = = = = = = = =

If the purpose of a news release is to provide something valuable for me to pass on to my readers, these sad sack efforts fail miserably. I don’t have a clue who they represent, what they are talking about or how any of it is relative to my readers. 
     This is Smartypants M.B.A. mumbo-jumbo gibberish.

All writers are in the business of selling.

Your one single objective is to sell the reader in going on to the next sentence, the next paragraph and all the way to the end of whatever is being written. This is true of every literary form—letter, résumé, memo, white paper, business plan, article, press release, advertisement, non-fiction book or novel.

The place to start selling is the lede.
What's a Lede? 

The introduction to a news article is called the 'lede' and is usually in the first paragraph as in an essay. The 'lede' is a deliberate misspelling of 'lead' to prevent confusion in the days when printing was done with lead type. The lede not only tells what the story is about, it also invites the reader to read further. —St. Petersburg College Libraries [First Known Use: 1976]
 

Many writers start off by clearing their throats, rolling up their sleeves and rubbing their hands together. By then the reader is on Page 2, with nothing to show for the time spent.

     Create a lousy lede and chances are the reader will go no further.

     In a Capitol Weekly column, titled, “Please just give us the news and spare us the anecdotal lede,” Will Shuck wrote:
 

I am sick to death of the anecdotal lede, that annoying habit of news writers to start a straightforward story by painting a quaint little picture of everyday life.

     If the story is about a bill requiring pet owners to spay or neuter their dogs (just to pick an imaginary example), the anecdotal lead first tells us how much Janey Johnson loves Missy, her Cocker Spaniel.

     No doubt Janey and Missy are a lovely pair, but a lot of us have jobs and kids and commutes and precious little time to muse about Missy’s reproductive potential.

A Sampling of Truly Dreadful Ledes

 

Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

     This whimsical literary competition challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.

     Named for a minor Victorian novelist, the contest memorializes—and expands upon this iconic lede sentence:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the dark darkness.

—Paul Clifford, a novel by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1830)

Recent Winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest

There’s was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city, their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, NJ.”

—Garrison Spic, Washington, D.C. (2008)

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”

—Molly Ringle, Seattle, WA (2010)

Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

—Sue Fondrie, Oshkosh, WI (2011)

As he told her that he loved her, she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny demodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.

—Cathy Bryant, Manchester, England (2012)

I once sent the first couple of chapters of a novel to former colleague Robert F. Scott with a check for small sum of money and asked him for a critique. In the 1970s we had been book club directors at Macmillan.

     For the start of this novel I thought I had created some very well-written prose to set the scene. However I had a lurking fear it might be boring. My fears were justified. Bob’s suggestion:
 

What you should do with your lede is upset a bucket of gore in the reader’s lap and then spend the rest of the time cleaning it up.

David Ogilvy told of a Harvard history professor who walked into the first day of class and silenced the rowdy room with just 22 words:
 

Cesare Borgia murders his brother-in-law for the love of his sister, who was the mistress of their father – the Pope.

I was schooled in direct mail copywriting. The linchpin is the letter—an intensely personal and intimate me-to-you message designed to crystalize what this product or service will do for you—the reader.

     Whenever I sit down to write anything—fiction, non-fiction, advertising or blog, Pat Friesen’s inviolable rule of letter writing is always in the front of my brain:
 

Your best lede is to be found somewhere on the second page of your first draft.

“Get to the Point!”

It may once have been that you had plenty of time to develop a creative story line in a direct mail piece; not so today. You have to get to the point and let readers know where you’re taking them—and you have to do it quickly.

     Most readers—with the possible exception of devotees of “thought magazines”—simply won’t stay with you through a leisurely development of a creative idea. They’re the Type A people behind your car at the stoplight; they beep their horns the minute the light turns from red to green.

—Richard Jordan, Freelancer

Elmer “Sizzle” Wheeler

In 1960 I went to work for Prentice-Hall book publishers as an apprentice flak. One of our leading authors was Elmer “Sizzle” Wheeler, who had created a mystique by billing himself as “America’s Number One Salesman.”

     Wheeler’s most famous book was “THE FAT BOY’S BOOK: How Elmer Lost 40 Pounds in 80 Days,” published in 1950. We used to joke about Wheeler, but had to take him seriously. He sold ton of books on salesmanship—and the language of selling—to a regular following who bought every title Prentice-Hall published.

     Since all writers are in the business of selling ourselves in print, Wheeler’s words are worth noting.

          

Three Wheelerpoints

1. Don’t Sell the Steak – Sell the Sizzle!

What we mean by the “sizzle” is the BIGGEST selling point in your proposition – the MAIN reasons why your prospects will want to buy. The sizzling of the steak starts the sale more than the cow ever did, though the cow is, of course, very necessary.

2. “Don’t Write – Telegraph.”

“DON’T WRITE – TELEGRAPH” means get the prospect’s IMMEDIATE and FAVORABLE attention in the fewest possible words. If you don’t make your first message “click,” the prospect will leave you mentally, if not physically.

3.  Your first 10 words are more important than the next ten thousand.

You have only ten short seconds to capture the fleeting attention of the other person, and if in those ten short seconds you don't say something mighty important, he will leave you — either physically or mentally!

Takeaways to Consider

• Do not repeat your headline in your lede. A powerful hed captures the reader’s attention. If the lede is the same as the hed, the reader will say, “I’ve seen this before,” and go elsewhere. Instead a riveting hed plus a potent lede are a lethal combination.

• “Your first 10 words are more important than the next ten thousand.”

—Elmer “Sizzle” Wheeler

• “I am sick to death of the anecdotal lede, that annoying habit of news writers to start a straightforward story by painting a quaint little picture of everyday life.”

—Will Shuck

• “What you should do with your lede is upset a bucket of gore in the reader’s lap and then spend the rest of the time cleaning it up.”

—Robert F. Scott

• “Your best lede is to be found somewhere on the second page of your first draft.”

—Pat Frisen

• “Most readers—with the possible exception of devotees of “thought magazines”—simply won’t stay with you through a leisurely development of a creative idea. They’re the Type A people behind your car at the stoplight; they beep their horns the minute the light turns from red to green.”

—Richard Jordan

• “DON’T WRITE – TELEGRAPH” means get the prospects IMMEDIATE and FAVORABLE attention in the fewest possible words. If you don’t make your first message “click,” the prospect will leave you mentally, if not physically.”

—Elmer “Sizzle” Wheeler

• Short words! Short sentences! Short paragraphs!
—Andrew J. Byrne, Freelancer

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Word Count: 1665