THE MAKEOVER MAVEN: Paving the Road to Vagueness

Cruel World, an online career service, succumbs to the siren song of cleverness with a misguided attempt to attract prospects

THOSE RUMBLING SOUNDS you heard in the financial world last year were caused by 130 dot-com firms falling from the sky and crashing to the earth like meteorites. Admittedly, their failures can’t be attributed solely to bad offline advertising, but let’s just say it didn’t help.

In many cases, these companies never understood that they were in the direct response business and could benefit or suffer based on how well they observed the laws that affect a person’s response to advertising.

More specifically, they never realized they were running the Internet-age equivalent of inquiry advertising. The follow-up in this case was a visit to their Web site for more information, a purchase or enrollment.

If they’d known this, these businesses might have accepted the immutable formula for such advertising: Ad cost per sale equals ad cost per inquiry multiplied by conversion percentage. If you pay $100 for 100 inquiries and your follow-up turns 10% of them into customers, your marketing cost per new customer is the cost of inquiries times the percentage of conversions, or $10. (To this should be added the cost of turning the inquiry into a sale via follow-up mailing or phone call. But I’ll disregard that here, because the cost per prospect of providing more data and soliciting an order with Web advertising is negligible.)

You’ve always known that. You’d think everybody would. But they don’t. Not if they don’t have a direct marketing background.

So in recent years, as DM and mainstream advertisers – and their agencies – began to merge, too often the latter’s lack of creative discipline won out over the former’s stern demands for marketing accountability. The result has often been an appalling waste of advertising dollars.

The subject of this month’s makeover, an ad for an online job service called Cruel World, is a good example. If those who created it, approved it and paid for it had realized it was actually inquiry advertising, they might have had second thoughts. Especially if they’d considered that marketing cost per inquiry can range anywhere from $1 to $1,000 or more.

Let’s say that out of every 100 readers of their ad who decided to log on to the Web site, 20% decided to take the half-hour needed to fill out and submit the member profile information. In addition, suppose that Cruel World’s cost per inquiry from this ad is $1,000, which is not inconceivable. Now we’re talking about a cost per enrollment of $5,000! Wow!

Furthermore, say that my makeover produces a cost per inquiry of only $5 and the same conversion percentage. Now the cost of an enrollment drops to $25. Quite a difference. So is it really so hard to believe that a hardheaded direct response approach to a company’s offline advertising could make a significant difference in its overall chance of success?

The Cruel World ad headline, “The road to success is paved with asphalt,” is a generic headline that leads nowhere. I’m not even sure what it means.

The copy, set in the teeny-weeny wide-measure sans serif type which is de rigueur in today’s fashionable art-direction circles, simply says, “Introducing the most targeted, confidential, industry-specific career site on the Web. Think of it as a cushion in the school of hard knocks. Cruel World. Work Happily Ever After.”

The first sentence tells us a little bit, but not much. The second promises about as much fun as a trip to the dentist. Then the advertiser’s name is announced – a silly affectation borrowed from radio and TV advertising. The slogan, “Work Happily Ever After,” is not too bad. (Although a company that can guarantee it is really good. What if they’d gotten you a job in one of those 130 dot-com firms?)

My makeover is actually addressed to two audiences: people who need a job and people who already have a job but wouldn’t mind a better one. In my headline, I focused on the latter, on the theory that active job-seekers would also read themselves into it. And the paradoxical notion of the job finding the person promises an ease of success that the copy then spells out and supports with a persuasive traditional argument.

I modestly suggest that my makeover would produce 100 times more site visits. If I were immodest, I’d increase that to 1,000.