Smart Car copywriters borrow from another iconic ad campaign

I recently wrote about how several modern car manufacturers, including Smart, have been borrowing from an iconic VW Beetle campaign. Based on the web banner above, that's not the only place that the copywriters on the Smart Car account have been finding inspiration.

The Smart Car folks are also taking a page from 7-Up's classic "uncola" campaign. Want a different kind of soda? Get the uncola. Want a different kind of car? Get the uncar.I will say there's a subtle difference, as the 7-Up campaign used its "un" word as a noun to refer to the product. Smart, on the other hand, uses "uncar" as a made up verb that accompanies other "un" words that allude to consumer benefits.

This approach actually puts more focus on the consumer instead of the product and on actions vs state of being. And research has shown that messages focused on the audience that use action verbs (not passive being verbs) tend to be more effective.

So, the copywriters are certainly borrowing, but at least they're putting their own spin on it. Is it too close for comfort? I'll let you decide.

Fiat takes copywriting hints from VW

The Fiat 500 may be relatively new compared to the VW Beetle, but the copywriters on the account are certainly channeling the famous Doyle Dane Bernbach ads from the early '60s.

Touting the wisdom of small. Slightly irreverent. Apparently challenging the status quo (even though there are plenty of small cars on the road today).

And the design- a simple, modestly sized product shot, unassuming type and plenty of white space.

VW and Mini have shown that the approach can work. I'm interested to see if "think small" can carry a third car to success, though it might be hard with TV ads like this.

UPDATE: "Small" has actually supported four car models. I forgot Smart is currently running this ad, probably because I assumed it was for the same tiny vehicle.

The sour side of in-store copywriting

Just wanted to share this nugget of in-store copywriting for Vlasic pickles I saw at my local grocery store. It's appropriately playful, and though not completely life-changing, makes you stop and think right before making you smile (assuming you like pickles). That's more than most in-store advertising will do.

Plus, kudos to media on the placement.

Reviewing Long John Silver's fresh tagline

Long John Silver's latest tagline is:

Sea food differently

Obviously combining the ideas of "see food differently" and "sea food" into a single thought, this tagline scores high for economy of words.

The tagline is often used in TV and radio spots in the first person by employees, or actors playing employees, that declare "I sea food differently." The first person usage conveys the idea that Long John Silver's is not only a different dining experience, but that the company's unique way of doing things permeates every corner of the company, or what executives might call a "top-down" adoption of the corporate vision.

All in all, I think this tagline is a win. It's short. It holds multiple meanings and something about it seems fresh, which can be hard to do in the often stale fast food category. My compliments to the copywriter.

Quicky: Playing hard to get

Companies rarely like teasers, at least true teasers, which is unfortunate, because they tend to create a lot of buzz, circumvent traditional audience mental blocks and engage potential customers in ways that make them much more likely to open their wallets for you.

The marketing of the film Cloverfield is an example of this strategy used to great success.

Find out how they did it here

Tagline full of fiber

Taglines are a place where many companies stumble. Even when a company name is conservative or just informational, there seems to be a temptation to go a little crazy when it comes to taglines, especially when a company works in the B2B arena. This is one such example.

Company: Third Coast Produce
Tagline: "Lettuce produce for you!"

Yes, the exclamation point is really part of it. Yes, the quotation marks are really part of it. And a double pun. Need I say more? I could pick fun at it, but they probably have great fruit and veggies. While it pains me to see a line like this rumbling around town scrawled across the sides of delivery trucks, I mostly wish I had the opportunity to help companies like this develop a line worthy of all the hard work they put into their businesses.

Shorter-word thesaurus

That long, complicated word too long for your carefully distilled, inspiring tweet? Then get a shorter word to stand in its stead with the handy shorter-word thesaurus known as Thsrs.

(disclaimer: shorter synonyms generated by Thsrs may cause confusion, loss of meaning, bland prose, flabby fingers, Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia and in some rare cases, loss of cultural flavor)

Sporks up to the Copywriting Underground

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Inching closer to quieter commercials

While most advertisers love turning the volume up to 11 on their TV commercials, few realize that the practice actually makes us hate TV commercials and the companies in the more, making us less likely to buy their products and more likely to skip the ads entirely. Counterproductive, isn't it?

Well, more progress has been made toward quieting down TV commercials to a reasonable level as the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, or CALM has now passed the House Communications Committee.

I'm sure many will fight it, but in reality, reasonable sound levels on TV commercials will lead to less muting, less skipping and less hating, which one can only assume would lead to greater ad effectiveness.

Read more about the CALM Act here.

One upmanship, and the lucky number 13

You may not have though it possible, or at least not likely, but someone has topped TipTipCash.com for repetition in a :60 radio spot.

While Twisted Tea doesn't actually mention their brand name quite as many times, they manage to say the word "tea" 13 times in a mere 60 seconds. That's roughly every four and a half seconds.

But how? With approved phrasing like, "Twisted tea. It's the hard iced tea that tastes like real ice tea." Evidently top quality writing is a common characteristic in ads that repeat things too much. I just KNOW they're going to set themselves apart with groundbreaking lines like, "Try Twisted Tea, it's really refreshing."

And practically comical on top of this is the fact that a brand that looks like a slightly funkier version of Snapple is trying hard to sell an iced-tea flavored alcoholic drink to young men.

The moral
I have two suggestions. First, not a lot of 18-24 males drink iced tea or want anything that tastes like it. Second, you're definitely not going to sell it to them with the voice of a chiding middle-aged woman saying, "My husband calls it his MAN-tea." Man-tea language could help you, but not if the person saying it is making fun of her man for doing it.

9th time's a charm

Getting people to remember your company's name is great, as long as you don't say it so many times they hate you. That's precisely the case with TopTopCash.com, who injects the company name into their :60 radio spot an average of once every seven seconds.

The spot starts out bland and predictable, but bearable and the whole thing sounds like it was written to be :30 long. Just past the halfway point, it becomes obvious that one of two things, or both, happened.

First, someone clearly ran out of things to say. The entire second half of the spot merely repeats the same talking points over and over in a random and non-sensical order.

Second, it seems that someone decided the best way to fill that space was by repeating the company's name as many times as possible. More than half the mentions of the company name are in the last 15 or so seconds with revolutionary writing like, "Again, that's TipTopCash.com."

The commercial is so grading that I actually change the station when it comes on, and it's practically the only reason I ever change my radio station.

The moral
It doesn't matter how well people remember your name if they hate you, and though the guy who stands on a corner yelling his own name over and over will be known to all, he will be friend to none.

Conservative talk shows find advertisers’ limits

With reality TV and “news” programs of all political ideologies sounding more and more like fear-mongering, sensationalist pundit megaphones, I begin to believe there was not longer content you could put on TV that would scare away advertisers.

I was wrong.

Glenn Beck recently discovered where advertisers draw the line when he called President Obama a racist. Within mere weeks of making the comment, 33 sponsors have pulled their advertising from Glenn Beck’s show, including the advertisers with gargantuan ad budgets like Sprint, Walmart and Clorox.

While I am a proponent of free speech, I am not a proponent of punditry parading as news, regardless of which “side of the aisle” it comes from. In an era of increasingly shocking and outrageous television, it’s nice to know there is still a line of decency somewhere, however far, that advertisers simply won’t cross.

Arrogantly screwing yourself

I recently read an article in Adweek where Robert Thompson brought up the fact that Anna G. Esho, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives is drafting legislation to reduce the problem of TV ads being set at frighteningly higher volumes than the shows that surround them. And then it got interesting.

The tone
Mr. Thompson spends most of his article in a very sarcastic tone, telling us that the problem isn't really all that bad, that we're imagining ads being louder, that if they are louder, it's not much and it's not a problem. I'm no old man. I'm a guy in his mid-twenties that loves me some loud music and cranking up the volume on movies. So when I go from straining to hear normal conversation on a TV show to covering my ears because the volume of the commercial pod is painful, there's an issue.

Out of touch
I'm glad to say a quick look at the comments on the article will reveal Ms. Esho is not in the minority and that Mr. Thompson is clearly outnumbered by a lot of annoyed and angry folks.

Tying the noose that hangs you...or at least your buddy
BUT, perhaps the most shocking part of the article is that Mr. Thompson's solution for the problem, which is important because he previously mentions there is no problem, is for people to turn down the volume, skip the commercials or turn off the TV altogether. WHAT!?

Only from the bowels of uninformed academia that hasn't had to deal with the real world for ages could come such an obtuse recommendation. As advertisers, we don't want people turning down the commercials, we don't want people hating commercials because they're loud and our message gets lost in the scramble for the remote. We definitely don't want people TIVOing past the commercials or ceasing to watch the shows altogether. THOSE COMMERCIALS ARE HOW WE MAKE A LIVING. But since Mr. Thompson has a cushy seat in academia, he doesn't need to worry about us working folks.

The bottom line is the ad industry should be lobbying for some sort of change to help limit this problem. Is an act of Congress necessary? Probably not. But some industry self-regulation should be put into play at the least. Why? Because more annoyed people are by commercials, the more they'll skip them, the less they'll pay attention, and the quicker we can all kiss our advertising jobs goodbye.

Adjust the message, not the volume
And by the way Mr. Thompson, if you have to shout your message to get people to listen to it, you clearly don't have anything worth saying.

The confusing world of misleading ads

Yahoo recently featured an article on how to detect misleading ads. It's an easy fact to forget as an ad industry copywriter who's faced every day with the technicalities of what makes an ad misleading or false how little the public really knows about the nuances we hold so dearly (the ones that keep us out of court).

I'm glad to say the article hit on one of the most important points- pay attention to the words. The words are almost always where actual claims are made that have to be substantiated. Vague statements are usually intentionally written that way because specific statements must be proven, and if can't prove you have #1 customer satisfaction in the U.S. (which you would have to substantiate with an independent study), it's much easier to say you make The Ultimate Driving Machine.

What I think the public may not know is the legally agreed-upon safe zone called puffery. Puffery refers to subjective claims that can be neither proven nor disproven. A good example would be, "The best burger around." Best could mean any variety of things. It could refer to temperature, flavor, value, etc. Around gives you no geographical reference. Because who makes the best burger is subjective, advertisers are allowed to make those claims without substantiating them, because it's impossible to substantiate the subjective. If the company said the make "The sandwich people prefer two-to-one," like Domino's did, they would have to substantiate it with legal disclaimers. If you pay close attention to the ads, you'll see them.

The confusing, and probably unfair, part of puffery is that there are so many words deemed subjective that sound definitive. Words and phrases like best, greatest, preferred, favorite, number one sound like serious claims, but fall under puffery; essentially a legal right to be boastful in a vague way.

It gets even more confusing when you realize that a company can take one of these claims and decide to prove it within ceratin criteria. For example, an auto manufacturer could make the legal claim to be the "Number One-Selling Auto Manufacturer in the U.S." and base it on total number of automobiles sold in a given time period, say the second quarter of 2008 to the second quarter or 2008 while another manufacturer could make the same claim of, "Number One-Selling Auto Manufacturer in the U.S."but defined as total revenue instead of units sold. They could even simply select a different time period if they beat the first manufacturer in that period.

I could give examples all day long, but I'll spare you. After all, several of my college courses had entire chapters, sections or even weeks of the course devoted to differentiating what constitutes false ads, legally misleading ads and puffery. Just to give you a peek at what we learned, false is not the same as misleading, legally misleading is not necessarily the same thing as practically misleading and what seems definite is often considered vague.

It's a complicated world out there, but if you stick to the basics above, you'll be a lot better off.

Eat your words

A company's packaging presents a unique opportunity to communicate with consumers both before and after purchase. It's interesting that more brands haven't taken advantage of the fact that every item you sell can be another ad, except the cost is already be covered by your packaging budget.

Curiously enough, the fast food (and slower food) industry is the one group that seems to get this the most, with everybody from Wendy's to Starbucks putting little blurbs on their products. Even the little guys are getting involved now, like Brooklyn Fare, whose witty headlines serve to further communicate the business's personality, take a few stabs at competitors and even get a chuckle or two.

Sporks up to Aisle One

Let me blow your...mind

There's just too much to say about this Burger King ad to even know where to start. I'll let you pick apart this ad one innuendo at a time.

Don't talk about things you don't now about

I'm going to skip the whole part where I talk about how little I like most of McDonald's advertising. I believe that even with the best creatives in the world on the task, the executives at McD's would continue to demand the unbelievably optimistic and contrived spots they currently produce, but the McCafe spots are by far some of the worst offenders in my book. Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting concept- transforming something bland into something cool with use of the accent mark. However, the examples they offer up tend to fall flat. But the radio is what gets me the most.

In one radio spot, the announcer is talking about how McCafe can jazz up your life and cause you to spurt out "evocative sentence fragments like 'That's chill dog.' " First of all, "That's chill dog" is hardly evocative. Second, and more important to grammar hounds, "That's chill dog." is a complete sentence. It has a subject and verb, not to mention an indirect object and an adverb. The sentence makes sense and stands on it's own. IT'S NOT A FRAGMENT. All I'm sayin' is if you're going to thrown around grammatical terms on the radio, at least know what you're talking about.

Wannabe a filmmaker?

I've made it no secret that I'm not a big fan of the Geiko Caveman campaign. In more recent history, I find their easily and ostentatiously offended nature not only annoying, but a sad commentary on the state of political correctness in this country. The spots have been slowly veering away from having much to do with insurance at all an more an excersize in what I call advertising masturbation- somthing that feels great to the people doing it, but that not one else really wants to watch and that no one else really gets anything out of. Well, it's come to a head.

In the most recent spot, it's simply a caveman bemoaning his plight to the tune of a popular rock band. The caveman says nothing. There's nothing that Geiko insures in the commercial. The logo doesn't show up a single time. There's not one word of copy. The only thing that even gives you a clue it's a Geiko spot outside of the caveman screaming silently at the sky in the rain is a wall of TVs in a store (the catalyst to his breakdown) that all show the old line, "So easy a caveman can do it." For aspiring filmmakers it's great, but I think it's gone beyond serving any marketing function at all. At least it feels good for the guys making it.

from Honda. with curious grammar.

If you thought the choice of punctuation and capitalization on that title was odd, you’re not alone. I do too, and I can’t think of a scenario where I would choose to write a headline in that fashion. However that’s exactly what a new billboard from Honda does.

I see two different schools of thought crammed into one odd and hard-to-support execution. You can use periods, you can use lower case, but you can’t use both.

1) If they wanted the periods, they should have capitalized the first word in each line. Though they may lack the standard subject/verb construction, the periods clearly make the thoughts into sentences, and starting a sentence with a lower case letter is not common usage in any medium except, perhaps, text messaging- something board was not alluding to.

2) If they wanted to go all lower case, which is very much in style these days, they should have left the periods. The fact that the phrases that make up the headline are on separate lines makes it perfectly clear that they’re separate thoughts. And if that weren’t enough, “from Honda.” is in a bright green and “for everyone.” is in grey. If someone doesn’t understand that those are separate thoughts, they’re not going to understand the car-buying process well enough to put their John Hancock on the loan papers.

In essence, it’s a very odd choice, on that I can’t find any grammatical, graphical, conceptual, legal or common-usage reasoning to support. My guess is, either someone was trying to be edgy and missed the boat or it was a Frankenstein-style compromise between two factions as to how they should visually delineate two thoughts in a four-word headline.

The summary? Not horrible, not earth-shaking but a little odd.

Checkmate

I can write in any style necessary, but from a personal standpoint, I'm bored of seeing all of these big companies take a passive aggressive approach. YOU ARE COMPETITORS. It irks me when a company actually has a concrete advantage over another and won't say it because "being negative" (aka this includes saying anything negative about your competitor) allegedly means people will stop buying their stuff. News flash: A negative for your competitor is a positive for you. A positive for you means you sell more stuff, and that's really the whole point.

Now that I've hopped off my soap box, I want to pass on to you one of the most ingenious media placements I've seen that embodies a spirit of clever competition that has been has largely been eschewed in favor of the kind of catty fake niceties normally found in teenage girls.

Thank you Audi, BMW and My Modern Metropolis.

Savings minutes saves nothing

AT&T, like many companies has jumped on the saving bandwagon. After all, saving is cool now, as is prudent spending. Opulence and excess will have to wait until the Dow gets back above 10,000 or more.

On first listen, AT&T's spot, one of a series that uses little orange ticking clocks to symbolize phone-plan minutes, seems to make great sense as a penny pinching mother admonishes her blazee son for trying to sell their unused minutes.

"You know, saving minutes saves money and we can't afford to be wasteful," she snipes, "Not every one gets to keep their unused minutes."

It makes sense until you start doing the math, anyway. In reality, you pay the same amount for your allotted minutes each month, so you can't save by using less of them. If you have unused minutes, it means that you essentially have unused goods that you've paid for. And since the cost of your minutes is fixed, the less you use of them, the more you're paying per minute. So, saving minutes doesn't save money. Saving minutes actually wastes money, and from a theoretical perspective makes every minute you do use more expensive. And if you're wondering, the bulk of Americans ends each month with plenty of minutes they neither used, nor needed.

So, kudos AT&T. You pulled a fast one that I'm sure that a great multitude of people will miss and get to pad your bottom line with their misunderstanding. Let's just hope education reform doesn't help out America's math skills and start skimming away your profits.