More power to you: 4-wd dm letta from BT is lol

The first sentence in a sales letter is important. Especially when it’s the only one.

I’m launching a brand new course tomorrow at the London College of Communication that focuses on the mysterious world of direct mail. I cut my copywriting teeth creating direct-response ads and sales letters, so it’s a subject close to my heart. As a result, I’m always looking out for innovative new creative approaches and techniques. “Junk” mail is unlikely to go in the bin at home. The chances are that it will head to the filing cabinet or scanner.

I’m indebted to my former colleague Alice (who blogs amusingly here about her preparations for the London marathon) for a convention-defying letter that will be great fun to show in the class. It was sent out by BT in December to promote their text service that allows UK customers to send and receive SMS messages on their home phone.

What exactly made this letter different and worthy of comment? Well, direct marketing science tells us that long letters generally perform better than short ones. That’s why you see letters running to two, three and four pages in many commercial and charitable mailpacks. You need time to explain the central benefits of your product, outline your offer and overcome any potential objections. You’re not there in the room with the customer to answer questions, so everything they need to know should be written down in black and white.

But BT apparently didn’t agree. They decided that two pages would be too much. In fact, they decided that two sentences would be more than they needed. Their extraordinary letter had only one line after the salutation, which sat in acres of white space. It said simply R U OK? Some more white space followed and led to the sign-off from Jillian Lewis, the company’s Customer Services Director.

Now, admittedly they cheated just a little. There are a couple of short paragraphs in the place where textbooks would normally tell you to put a PS. The copy starts: “There are times when you just want to send a short message home rather than have a long drawn-out conversation. With BT Text you can now send and receive texts on your home phone.” The net result is that the sales letter reads more like a traditional press ad, with the truncated body copy acting as a headline. It’s very brave. And it works a treat.

I do, however, intend to teach my students some of the more traditional conventions of letter writing. After all, it’s good to know the rules before you choose to break them into very tiny pieces.

© Phil Woodford, 2006. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a freelance writer and trainer. He works as an associate lecturer at the University of the Arts London. www.philwoodford.com

Why Bodyform's advertising strategy isn't working.

I obviously wasn’t the only person to notice this poster opposite Kingston train station in the suburbs of London. It’s a bizarre execution for Bodyform, which parodies a Conservative Party election poster from 1979.

Think about it for a moment. The 2006 ad is pretty lame if you don’t have a fix on the original reference. (To be honest, it’s pretty lame even if you do, but we won’t go there for the moment.) The Tory ad commented – somewhat ironically, given later events – on the supposedly high levels of unemployment under Jim Callaghan’s administration. So the only people likely to remember it will be in their late 30s at the very least. Probably more likely to be in their early 40s. Visit the Bodyform website and you’ll discover that – logically enough – the primary target audience is actually young women.

I daren’t ask the age of the creatives at BBH who came up with the campaign, because I’ll probably be told it was a couple of 21-year-old female placement students. They just happen to have a passion for British political history. And a habit of missing the target.

© Phil Woodford, 2006. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a freelance copywriter and trainer. He lectures in advertising at the University of Westminster in London. www.philwoodford.com

The hired gun can't fire blanks

Once in a while, I’m going to use these pages for a little reflection on the whole process of creativity. Perhaps it’s a little self-indulgent, but the more that I teach copywriting and creative writing, the more I find myself pondering some of the fundamentals. My recent move into self-employment has focused my mind even more.

Although I’ve undertaken a range of freelance writing and training assignments in the past few years, there’s always been a day job – most recently as joint creative director of a London agency in the niche field of recruitment marketing and employee communication. Working in the agency environment four days a week, I got very used to the personalities and processes. Although the pressure of work can sometimes feel relentless in the advertising business, I was very fortunate to have a great many good colleagues that I knew and trusted. It felt comfortable. They knew how I was likely to behave and I had a pretty good idea of what they were thinking too. Sometimes, when you were brainstorming creative concepts, the old truism of being able to complete one another’s sentences really did apply. And there are undoubtedly big advantages to these kinds of relationships. People aren’t afraid to express their ideas, for instance. It’s also easier to pick up other people’s work when a job goes round the houses.

But advertising creativity is an oddity. It’s one of the few areas of working life where two people – usually an art director and a copywriter – are asked to work as a pair. Often it’s done on an ad hoc, mix-and-match basis. Sometimes, particularly in the larger consumer agencies, the relationship is permanent. It’s difficult to think of many parallels, apart from maybe American cops like Cagney & Lacey or Starsky & Hutch. These paired relationships can have their downside as well. You can get to know the people you work with too well. Sometimes this means that you don’t challenge yourself or your partner quite enough.

It can often be good to encounter somebody new who works in a completely different way. They can pose unusual questions and uncover unlikely angles. It’s a phenomenon I encountered at the start of the year when I walked into an agency as a hired gun. I’d never been there before and was teamed up an art director I’d only met previously on an awards judging panel. This guy is very good. But I’ve worked with a number of good people over the years. The thing that really forced me to raise my game was the fact that we’d never worked together before. He was seeing what I could do. In the nicest possible way, testing me out a little. Inevitably, I was doing the same. And the net result, I think, was some really nice conceptual advertising. As a freelancer, I can’t afford to fail, so my grey matter is getting an extra special workout right now.

My advice, for what it’s worth, to any aspiring copywriter or art director is to work with as many different people as you can. A little cosiness can help you magic up some really good creative work. But a little edginess is perhaps more likely to produce something great.

© Phil Woodford, 2006. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a freelance writer and trainer. He lectures in advertising at the University of Westminster in London.