Tony Attwood's Blog

My own view is that humour is one of the most powerful weapons that can be used in advertising, and I have had higher responses from long running humorous ads than any others I have created.

I mention this because the Advertising Standards Authority has banned a gambling advert from Ladbrokes. Ladbrokes say it is a ban on humour.

The ASA received a complaint about one ad showing a diver and skydiver going to increasing lengths to satisfy their thirst for adventure. It ruled that the ad breached the TV Advertising Standards Code by “portraying gambling in a context of toughness and linking it to recklessness”.

If you would like to talk about this or any topic that appears on this blog, do give my colleagues and I a call on 01536 399 000

Tony Attwood

But the advert is funny – or at least amusing. No one in their right mind could suggest that it was meant to be serious. As Ladbrokes said, “Consumers know that you cannot jump from a plane using a 30g bag of crisps as a parachute.”
Bizarrely the ad was approved by Clearcast, the company responsible for the clearance of television ads before broadcast.
Tony

We have recently been having a discussion about spam and how to stop it, on the DMS news services. If you are suffering from an overflow of spam, the following might be of interest.

The discussion has reached the point where Hamilton House seems to be getting less spam, but other readers claim they are getting more and more. Here’s my response…

Obviously different service suppliers have different filter systems, and it is just possible that our internet/email service (which is provided through OneandOne) happens to be getting it right.

But I doubt this because most spam blocking systems seem to be hopeless – they either block too much or too little, and I have seen no change in the number of emails going into delete or some other place, without me seeing them. Nor an increase in the number of people saying “didn’t you get my email?”

So, as part of the exquisite service that you always receive from Hamilton House, here are the two hints on possible ways to cut spam levels.

One, reduce to as low a level as possible the number of email addresses quoted on your web sites. Most spam seems to me to be picked up from web sites – and we now quote quite a few of ours (not all, but a lot) in the format Tony at Hamilton-house.com which means the link is not picked up by most programs that trawl for addresses. This takes a while to have an effect, but do it now and by the end of the year the number will be going down.

Two, when a new stream of emails appears I note a phrase that is regularly used (such as “up date your account”, or the one about being sorry to interrupt me at this time of day) and set up a message rule that throws any email that contains this phrase straight into the delete box. Yes it does mean that if you wrote to me and put three dollar signs together in the text, I wouldn’t get your message, but most people I know don’t write in that way.

These approaches are not 100% efficient, but if there hasn’t been a downturn in the level of junk email, then I suspect that because these approaches have been applied for some time now they have gradually had an accumulative effect.

Any other thoughts on ways of cutting spam without taking out the interesting bits, very welcome.

Of course this does affect the way one writes email adverts in such a way as to make them work. I’ve got quite a lot of info on this if you want to chat about it any time. Also there is quite a lot about email marketing on www.yesmail.org.uk

The question simply is, do you start the old process running again, or do you change things around?

One of the big problems is that many people at this time of year are still feeling as if this is a bit of a new start. The resolutions could still be current, the intentions to do things in a better way are still there.

Which means they are looking at life – and business – in a different way.

That in turns means that an advert style or approach that you have not tried before could do well at this moment if you use this as an opportunity to change.

a) Doing an email advert instead of direct mail or vice versa

b) Changing the way your blog looks – either with a new layout or a different approach to the text

c) Talking about something else in your advert – something you have not talked about before.

d) Or change the style – if you are always impersonal, try being personal. If you pack the advert with pictures, try a different approach with a mostly text orientated advert.

As always if you would like to get an outsider’s view on your advert or your advertising approach you can give me a call and I’ll be happy to talk through the general points, or if you want to forward me a copy of a particular advert I will have a look at that and call you back. You don’t have to take any notice of what I say, of course, but you never know, it could help.

Tony Attwood
01536 399 013

If there’s one big thing I have learned this year it is that blogs can have an enormous impact – or they can be a flop. It all depends on how the blog is written.

What my colleagues and I have been doing is writing a series of blogs in different ways, and then measuring the number of readers we get. To add to the test we invented the rule that we would not do any promotion for the blogs at all – people would have to find them by searching through Google and the like.

In the most simple terms the finding we have is this: it is possible to get very high audiences for blogs, without any advertising, if the blog itself covers the selected topic in a way that is different from most other web sites. The blog also has to be regular – in an ideal world daily, but certainly never less than once a week.

To go on from there, the blog has to be lively, and slightly out of the norm – if you have a fear of not saying something because someone might get upset, then quite probably blogs are not for you.

For our experiment we set up blogs in four different fields: teaching, popular music, administration and football. Our aim was to see if we could find underlying rules which applied to those four categories. Ultimately we did – although it has taken a lot of experimentation to do this. (I should add that the blog you are reading is not part of the experiment – and indeed doesn’t obey the rules we have discovered. There is debate going on in our own company as to how we now change this blog to reflect the findings!)

The football blog
www.blog.emiratesstadium.info – for Arsenal fans. There are thousands of blogs world-wide on Arsenal FC. Many of them are incredibly professional-looking, with photographs, effects, shading and every other twist and turn that modern blog programs give.

After much experimentation we found that the appearance was by an large irrelevant, so long as people could read the site. What affected the readership was the uniqueness of the over-riding theme, and the personality of the writer. So in this regard we adopted the approach that the manager of the club (Arsène Wenger) was always right. We also developed an interest in the finances of football in general, and over time evolved a series of nicknames for other clubs – nicknames that were unique to this blog.

The current readership is 50,000-60,000 unique readers a month – a figure that is on a par with the most popular websites in the field – and that achieved in a six month burst where the style and approach of the writing was changed to a constant support for the management.

The administrators’ blog

www.blog.admin.org.uk – for school administrators. We started this by delivering serious news items to school administrators, but with modest success. In April 2008 we changed this to the Diary of an Administrator – a daily account of life in the school office. This started out with a wicked sense of humour and ended up being surreal. The diary appears six days a week (the weekend combined into one entry) reflecting the working life of the writer. The school in which she works is mythical, but has elements that reflect what many administrators find (a headteacher who is more often out than in, teachers who request work be done always at the last moment etc) Currently 9,000 readers a month – which is high considering that there are only 29,000 schools.

The music blog

www.bob-dylan.org.uk The Arsenal blog suggested that even in a market that is saturated with comment one could gain an audience from a standing start if the slant of the articles was different from that published elsewhere. To verify this we have recently started the Bob Dylan blog which does nothing other than analyse Dylan songs from the perspective of the music and lyrics (as opposed to relating them to who played on the record and what happened in Dylan’s life at the time). There has been no advertising, no promotion – not even a mention in other Dylan blogs – we’ve simply written the blog about 3 or 4 times a week for the last five or six weeks. After two months we are running at around 750 readers a month. Rather interestingly, some of our articles are already appearing high up the google rankings – again rather unexpectedly given the billions of pages there are on Bob Dylan.

The schools blog

www.blog.schools.co.uk – for teachers in general. This had been sitting at around 2,000 readers a month, when it was delivering occasional pieces about school life in general. We then experimented with a much harder hitting approach in which we have highlighted the problems facing schools which are caused by government agencies with whom the school has to interact. The new theme is “the teachers are doing great things, but are let down by government agencies”. The thought was that if the findings of the other blogs are correct, this strong line would lead to a rise in readership – and indeed within a month readership doubled.

If you are interested in blogs do take a look at what we have done. If you would like to discuss the development of a blog for your company, do get in touch – we’re always happy to talk. Call me on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

According to a piece in Brand Republic, one of the bit sellers of emails (TMN) has seen a “marked reduction” in email marketing revenues.

This surprises me because at our end we (Hamilton House Mailings) are seeing a growth in email marketing. I believe this is largely due to the fact that in the last year there has been a growing awareness of how email marketing can be made to work, which has resulted in significantly higher response rates for many campaigns.

I believe that at first a substantial number of companies seemed to take the view that you could simply take a piece of direct mail and transform it into an email, while others worked on a strong visual presence within the email.

However with more and more people having systems that mean that they screen out the illustrations within in, what that has meant is that many promotional emails do not carry any sort of positive look – because all there are, are “x” marks where the picture should be picked up from the web site behind the email.

The way around this – and this is what we have seen much more of this year – is to work on very exciting subject lines and headlines that are clearly not going to be affected by any filtering system that the recipient has in place.

My colleagues and I are always happy to talk about such matters both on the creative side and the supply of email lists. There’s details of our email lists on www.yesmail.org.uk – where we cover business lists, consumer lists and educational lists.

Tony Attwood

Given that I don’t buy pharmaceuticals from companies that advertise via junk emails, and I don’t know why anyone does, I wonder why the companies bother to send me so many emails.

In fact they bother, because even a response rate of one sale per 12.5 million is enough to make them good money.

Earlier this year researchers from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego did a study of spam by hijacking the Storm network that itself uses hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail. Storm is said to have over 1 million machines under its control.

On the basis that they were only going to find out what it is like to be in the business by being in the business, the researches created several proxy bots to act as conduits of information between Storm and the 75,000 hijacked home PCs that send emails, sending out their own fake spam.

Two campaigns were run. One copied the way Storm works spreads using viruses and the other advertised a fake pharmacy selling what you’d expect it to sell.

The fake pharmacy looked like Storm’s site but always gave an error message when potential buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details.

469 million junk e-mail messages were sent over all resulting in 28 sales – a response rate of less than 0.00001%. That would have given an income of around $100 a day. With the size of the full Storm operation that would make $7000 a day.

Because this is less than is reported in the more hysterical sections of the press it is possible that further attacks like this which could harm the spam operators.

Reassuring to know that people aren’t quite as silly as we are sometimes led to believe.

Tony Attwood – if you would like to talk about any aspect of direct marketing, give me a call on 01536 399 000

Although I track the number of hits this blog and other blogs I write get each day, I have never bothered to track what happens to the content after I have put it up.

And so it came as a surprise when one day I found an entire blog of mine reprinted on another site, without any acknowledgement to me.

Now it seems this is not uncommon. According to Biz Report (full reference at the end) Attributor Corporation in the US tracked online content from 100 publishers to see what happened to it.

It turns out that the content is used and re-used – so that most readers have more chance of reading it on another site, than reading it on the original.

There are ways around this. Most sites don’t carry copyright notices, and this can help. But more than that, the more idiosyncratic a site, the more likely it is not to be copied. Of course you might want your material copied – but the problem is that the people copying are unlikely to give you any mention or credit, so it tends not to do you any good.

But that does not make blogs pointless – a significant level of work comes into my company as a result of the various blogs we have – and I have read research that shows that blogs are more cost effective that google ad words as a form of on line advertising.

This blog is a reprint from a daily digest of direct mail news – you can subscribe to that free of charge by sending an email to direct-mail-secrets-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

More information on the story:

http://www.bizreport.com/2008/11/thousands_in_revenues_lost_due_to_pirated_content.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=18112008

This year we’re cutting the costs of direct mail that we mail in January providing we can prepare it during December. The key point is that these mailings don’t have to go out during December – they can be held over for mailing until January – all we need is to have the materials to be able to fill the envelopes etc.

Where we receive the materials between 24 November and 12 December, we give a 20% discount on the envelopes and labour. If we supply the address list for either a business or educational mailing there is also a 20% discount there. Postage is obviously at the normal rates.

There’s a limit to how many of these jobs we can accept over this period – we offer the discount to try and spread the load between December (which is normally quite light for us) and January (which is often very busy.)

If you think you will have materials that you want to send out in January and which will be ready for us to process in late November or December, please do ring our sales team on 01536 399 000.

When you’ve mailed people several times and they still haven’t bought anything from you, there is always the temptation to mail the same stuff again. After all this time they might just be ready to buy – just as lots of other people have done before them.

As a tactic it can work – but it suffers from diminishing returns, and ultimately you get to the stage where you have mailed the potential customer half a dozen times or more and they still don’t reply.

What’s happening at this point is that the recipient is seeing the email or the direct mail piece and within a second is thinking, “oh its, XYZ Ltd, seen that, not relevant, in bin” and that is where it goes.

The only way to get around this is to write something utterly different – not just a simple change of phrase, but a whole change of direction.

But the big problem with this solution is that it looks very scary. I say this deliberately because I have had more rejections from clients of the emails, letters and brochures that I have written for them, which are seeking to solve this particular issue (that the reader has already seen the promotions many times) than anything else I write.

“But it doesn’t talk about us,” says my client. “This isn’t the image we put across,” “we don’t write like this,” and so on. “I don’t think we could say that,” they say, and I ask, “why not?” and they say, “It’s just not us.”

And the point is always – “how much do you want these sales?” I don’t lie in these pieces, I don’t promise things that are not true. I don’t make wild claims. But I just go “somewhere else” and that can bring in the sales. But if somewhere else is too scary, then ok, don’t go there. You can always save money by not mailing the people you have mailed already, because the chances are they are not going to buy if you send them the same stuff again.

What made me think of all this was the text I wrote recently for Perform, the theatre company. They, I am glad to say, didn’t reject my radical change of approach, and tried exactly what I said. Today I got an email from their MD, Will Barnett, which said that organisations “who have been ignoring us for years are suddenly picking up the phone…”

It’s always nice to know one can still do it.

So overall I’d say, yes it is possible to sell to those who have resisted in the past – but it takes a bit of rethinking. If you are stuck with this problem of reaching people who have heard from you many times before, do give get in touch. A good way to start is to let me see what you have done before (just email Tony@hamilton-house.com) and give me your phone number and details of the people you are mailing, and I will call you back.

This was the question put to me at a meeting of the East Midlands marketing elite as we gathered for our monthly meeting at the Toppled Bollard – Corby’s best known hostelry.

I launched into my speech by proclaiming that the originators of brilliant direct marketing campaigns generally employ 50 per cent genius, 40 per cent guts, 20 per cent irrelevance and 10 per cent dyscalculia.

My point is that with direct marketing it is easy to slip into the middle course so that one never takes the risk of either offending a reader or being accused of wandering “off message”.

But the problem is that such an approach tends to result in a certain level of blandness. This doesn’t matter when the product or service on offer is exciting, stunning, remarkable, overwhelming and better still, unique. But sadly we don’t always have such items to advertise.

When the product is one that is up against others of the same ilk then (I believe) we need take a different line – a line that of itself grabs attention, and makes the reader think, “?!?!” or words to that effect.

Certainly I can say that the most effective adverts I have written have wandered off the central highway, and had those who commissioned them shaking with a mix of disbelief and fear as they contemplate showing my work to their bosses.

Of course it is quite possible to write direct marketing adverts without going to such extremes, but still, a little frisson (which my dictionary helpfully defines as “an almost pleasurable sensation of fright”) doesn’t go amiss to my mind.