Earlier this month, news broke that a beer company in Canada accidentally named itself “pubic hair.”
Actually what they did is they named their brewing company Huruhuru, which they believed means “feather” in Maori and which they thought sounded cooler than a kiwi egg sandwich. But it turns out no.
A man named Te Hamua Nikora, who looks somewhat like a Maori Rodney Dangerfield, explained on Facebook that huruhuru actually means pubic hair in his language. He also added, “Some people call it appreciation, I call it appropriation.”
What to say?
This is the kind of spanking you can get when you get too clever and want something new and never-heard-before.
I bring this up because I was asked a related question yesterday. I was giving a consult call about my style of writing advertorials (a first for me) and one of the people on the call asked:
“Any online resources or people we should follow that are really sharp on the advertorial side of things?”
I’m sure there are people out there, probably somebody like me looking to make a name for himself, who will tell you all kinds of tips and tricks and best practices for writing advertorials.
But the fact is, advertorials are a long-form piece of copy, intended to sell to cold traffic. Almost everything about how to do this this was figured out over 50 years ago. In other words, rather than looking for huruhuru secrets of advertorials, just go back and read all the standards of the direct response canon.
That’s not to say there is never anything new under the sun. It might really be true, as Incomparable Expert Jason Leister has written, that the direct marketing industry was a historical anomaly, “a period of arbitrage where trust was JUST high enough and information distribution was JUST new enough that things worked.”
What I mean is that a lot of profitable copywriting today isn’t going out to cold traffic any more, but to warm. And that kind of copywriting is a genuinely different beast, with different rules and best practices. But that’s a different kaupapa, for a different wā.
Are you warming up to me? If you’d like to hear from me more regularly, and see how I write to a warm audience, then sign up for my daily email newsletter.