In my email yesterday, I wrote about a tricky anti-tobacco campaign, “Tobacco is whacko.” I played on that phrase and explained how you can make your appeals “cool-o” and “sexy-o”. To which a friend lovingly wrote me:
“Cool-o. Sexy-o. This is the corniest email you’ve ever sent. You old man. Watching too many Joe Biden speeches?”
Let me take a Joe-like ramble and say:
Marketers and copywriters are often told to study only the successful advertising. The controls. The winners.
But I have personally found a lot of value by looking at stuff that flopped. Particularly if it was done by somebody who should have known better.
In my view, flops shine more light on valuable techniques than situations when everything goes perfectly.
So for example:
Maybe — though I admit nothing — the jokes in my email yesterday were lame-o and corny-o.
And yet, if you look at what exactly I was doing, you will be able to identify a powerful email copywriting technique I use all the time. Often to very good effect.
Rather than killing a bad joke even more dead by explaining what exactly I have in mind, let me just get to today’s point:
Read more bad advertising.
I’m not joking.
Ads that flopped might turn out to be the cheapest, though corniest, education in effective writing and marketing techniques you can get.
Of course, not all bad advertising is created equal.
Like I said, you want to look at stuff that flopped, but was written by somebody with sufficient other success. Somebody who was reaching for a technique that works in general, but for whatever reason, didn’t come out right-o that particular time-o.
If you want an example of that, pull out your copy of Joe Sugarman’s Adweek book.
Joe was great copywriter. He sold hundreds of millions’ worth of stuff with his infomercials, catalogs, and magazine ads.
But not every piece of Joe’s copy was a success. And his Adweek book includes a bunch of failures, where Joe’s copywriting techniques, including some he doesn’t highlight explicitly in the book, become obvious.
And if you still don’t have a copy of Joe’s book… well, what are you waiting for? Get it here, daddy-o: