One of the top six Internet service providers may be blowing a chance to maximize response to its print advertising.
Most direct marketing print advertising is pretty darned good, for one simple reason: It has to be. Otherwise the advertiser can’t afford to run it again. It’s a question of survival of the fittest.
But when it comes to direct response ads that don’t pull for an order, it’s often quite a different story.
There always has been too much vague, fuzzy advertising that calls for a response but doesn’t use proven direct response copy techniques. This seems especially true in the business-to-business field. One suspects in such cases that the advertiser doesn’t really record the number of responses and calculate the advertising cost per response, but simply asks for a response because it seems like a good thing to do.
Today, traditional inquiry advertising with direct mail follow-up is dying out. In the new age of Web site advertising and e-mail, it doesn’t make sense to spend $1,000 or more to print and mail more information to 1,000 prospective customers. Instead, you can direct a reader to your Web site, where the same sales information can be made available at a printing and mailing cost of zero.
So inquiry advertising is being largely superseded by a new kind of DR advertising, inviting the reader to respond not by going to the phone or the mailbox, but rather to the advertiser’s Web site.
I would place Web site traffic-building ads in the same category. These advertisers aren’t merely striving to favorably affect your brand preference, as a Marlboro Man ad does. They want you to act, to respond, by getting on the Internet and typing in the advertiser’s home-page address.
These Web site promoters are in the DR business, but too often don’t know it. They think they’re in the image business. So they go to the wrong advertising agency, or ask for the wrong kind of creative, or the agency gives them the wrong advice. And they end up wasting a good deal of their ad money without realizing it, running ads that try too hard to be clever and not hard enough to be persuasive.
When it comes to choosing from virtually identical jeans by different designers (don’t ask me why jeans need a designer),Joe Prospect may decide on Tommy Hilfiger because the image advertising has made him feel that those jeans are the most fashionable. But when it comes to choosing among services, he’s going to be won over by the one that either persuades him or proves to him that it does the best job of meeting his needs.
Those are harsh words. But in this space each month, I want to show you what I mean by presenting a weak direct response ad of this sort and then showing you how I think it could be made over into a stronger ad using DR principles.
The ad I’ve chosen for my first makeover is the one shown on page 61 by MindSpring, now the second largest Internet service provider.
MindSpring is one of those rags-to-riches Internet success stories that Wall Street loves. A young computer expert named Charles Brewer gave up a promising career in the software industry and started MindSpring in his studio apartment in 1994, using modems and routers he installed in a borrowed basement. Through his fierce devotion to service, which he continued to inculcate in his staff as it expanded, MindSpring grew rapidly and was able to use its capitalized value to make a few important acquisitions along the way.
Today, MindSpring has 1.8 million subscribers and a value of roughly $2 billion. But success hasn’t gone to its head. The company still has the same fanatical devotion to personal customer service. And it still is getting almost 25% of its new customers through word of mouth.
Obviously a great company. Yet the print ad shown here seemed to be an ineffective, excessively “creative” piece that didn’t do justice to the company and didn’t make me want to subscribe. The hard-to-read headline – We treat our customers with respect. (This may feel awkward at first.) – is whimsical without being accurate. I can’t imagine feeling awkward when treated with respect. The body copy has little information and is set in small, pale, unreadable caps.
I visited the Web site, and sure enough, MindSpring has a terrific sales story to tell. But you never would’ve guessed it from the ads. It’s ironic that at a time when information in advertising is making a big comeback, in the form of very conversational, informative Web pages, the print ads devoted to getting you there are so devoid of persuasive information.
Now it’s true that MindSpring’s ad is only partially intended to build traffic for the Web site. A big part of the company’s print ad audience is made up of newbies who don’t even have an Internet service provider yet and therefore can’t visit the site to find out about it. So from these folks, MindSpring invites a response via a phone number to call. But what a feeble motivation to call is provided.
MindSpring’s chief competitor is America Online, which has about 16 million subscribers compared with MindSpring’s previously noted 1.8 million. And because AOL is so unrelentingly aggressive, I figure that MindSpring has got to go toe-to-toe with AOL, both by competing with it for newcomers and by fighting for AOL’s existing customers.
And I figure that to sell ’em, you gotta tell ’em. So this is what I’ve tried to do in my MindSpring ad makeover, using sales information the firm has stored away on its Web site but is not using in its print ads.
In your professional opinion, which ad do you think would pull more responses? Tell me if you think I’m wrong.
Undoubtedly, there will be some who will say that my makeover is too “copy heavy” – that “nobody reads anymore.” (That will be surprising news to Amazon.com.) But I was taught as a novice DR copywriter – and later I taught others – to start where the reader is.
In this case, our reader, Mary Hopeful, is either an AOL customer or wants to get on the Internet and is probably considering AOL because many of her friends use it. In either case, she’ll be weighing the pros and cons of signing up with AOL.
So my copy deliberately addresses both the strong and weak points about AOL that are in her mind. “Oh, AOL subscribers get lots of unwanted commercial e-mail (including porno) and MindSpring subscribers don’t? That’s good…but I like that Instant Messenger feature that AOL has, where my friends and I can have a pajama-party talkfest online. Oh, I can still do that with MindSpring? That’s good too.” And so on.
Remember, in this case the print advertising is a means to an end, but so is the Web site itself. The end is to get people to subscribe. And if the print advertising effectively does part of the job of selling that end product, it will better motivate readers to take the next step and find out more.
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