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To Lose A Small Fortune - Without Really Trying!
Recently, I was at a conference of advertising and marketing managers.
There were about one hundred people in the room, and the attendees were from all
sizes of company, large and small. Some were working for themselves as
'consultants', and some were working for huge corporations. The conference was
one of those hard-hitting 'How to triple
the response to your adverts - in
ninety days' type of things. I try to go to as many of these as possible in
order to get any new, fresh ideas which might be doing the rounds.
Anyway, the conference was about as good as usual, but the really
interesting thing I want to tell you, is that for about half an hour, the
subject turned to advertising, and the response that members of the conference
were getting to their adverts. The thing nearly got out of control, as delegate
after delegate stood up and told their own tale of woe. One person started the
ball rolling by telling how he had taken a full colour page in 'Sewage Monthly'
(or whatever!) to sell their very expensive sewage pumps. He
had no replies or enquiries at all.
This really started everyone off, and before you knew it, person after
person was standing up and telling a similar story. At least three consultants
stood up and told how they had advertised their consultancy services (in the
relevant trade magazine), and had zero
response, and there were many delegates who had run full colour campaigns for
their company's products and services and had a mere handful of replies. The
overwhelming feeling in the conference (apart from me, but I kept quiet - I hate lynch mobs!) was that advertising
sucks. It quite simply doesn't work.
Now the important point is that these people (bless their hearts) were
all typical 'middle management' types, with little in the way of flare and
energy. They were not entrepreneurs. The guys working from their bedrooms were
the sort who had recently been made redundant from ICI (or wherever) and were
starting their own 'petrochemical consultancy business' from the spare bedroom.
They were still boring middle-management types, but now without the backing of a
huge corporation. These were not people like you and me, and they were not
trying to sell the sort of products which we are trying to sell. They were
selling sewage pumps, office furniture, fax machines, cars, consultancy,
switch-mode power supplies, left-handed grimble bearings for arclone cleaning
transfusers, etc. etc.
The point of the story is that here we are, at a tiny, insignificant,
tin-pot little conference, and there are over one hundred people in the room who
have run adverts, sometimes up to ten adverts, all
of which have failed miserably.
That's (say) one thousand adverts, just
from that tiny handful of insignificant people!
This underlines something which I have long suspected, and something I
touched upon in the last release. If you go into any doctor's waiting room and
pick up a wedge of magazines and flip through them, you will be smacked around
the head with advert after advert after advert. Every single magazine you pick
up, from 'Bat Breeders Gazette' through to 'Woman' is absolutely chock-a-block
jam-packed bulging with adverts, isn't it? Now if you were really naive and knew
nothing at all about advertising, then you might think that all of these people must be getting pretty-good responses to their
adverts. You might also think that advertising was obviously a really neat
way of pulling in orders or response.
But the fact is that over 90% of those adverts lose money. Sometimes
heavy money. Sometimes they don't get a response at all.
You want to know why? Here's why most (the overwhelming majority) of
adverts lose heavy money. It is because they fall into one of these categories:
1. There were one thousand adverts placed by talentless
middle-management types at that conference. I'll tell you why they all lost
money in a moment, but how many other people are
there like this, up and down the country? I would reckon at least
100,000. This means (say)
one million 'no-hope' adverts appearing every year. That would fill
quite a few magazines and newspapers. 2. As mentioned in the last release, we have the
'corporate awareness' boys and girls, buying top-dollar space for their silly,
'arty' adverts which attempt to raise the public's perception of
a certain company. These adverts account for tens of thousands of pages
of (usually colour)
adverts each year. All of them run at a 100% loss. It is money chucked
away. 3. Then there are the big mail-order boys. Four out of
five of their adverts are test adverts to see if a product works or not. So you
might see the following full-page colour adverts from one company:
a)
Patio solar-powered night-lights.
b)
Exercise bike.
c)
Fold away snooker table.
d)
Lightweight picnic table and chairs.
e)
Feather- step comfort shoes.
These are all full-page colour adverts. Multiply this by (say) ten for
the number of campaigns this company might run in a year, and multiply this by
fifty for the number of serious players there are in the game, and you have
another two thousand five hundred
full-page colour adverts appearing. If you didn't
know the 'inside' information I'm giving you here, you might think that all of these companies were cleaning up! But of course you would be absolutely wrong.
Four out of five of these adverts
bomb completely. Only one of them works. The companies didn't know
which advert would work in
advance, so they had to test them all. 4. 'Franklin Mint' type adverts and their dozen or so
competitors. This accounts for a further two
thousand full colour pages a year. Each one of these pages loses big, big
money. They reckon to only take half of advert cost in orders, on each one of those adverts! How do they
stay alive? Simple. If you're sucker enough to buy one tacky china plate, then
you're a dead-cert for a 'loveable' china puppy-dog, or shocking-pink ballerina
a few weeks down the line! In a nutshell,
the repeat order business can justify the initial loss on the adverts.
Also included in this category are people who don't mind losing on the
advert, because they are building a mailing list, or have some other 'hidden'
motive. 5. The newspaper or magazine's own advertising.
Increasingly they are getting into this area.
There is the 'Daily Express Offer - A Pair of Super Garden Shears', type
of thing. Then there are adverts which you
wouldn't necessarily realise were being 'backed' by the newspaper.
These adverts can't fail, because they are not
paying for the cost of the advert! If you remember, I told you that I could
make a fortune out of anything as long as the advert was
free.
That leaves the tiny handful
(about five percent) of adverts which: 1. Actually sell you a product. 2. Actually make money out of selling you that product!
It is this area in which I operate, and in which you must operate if you
are to make money in the mail-order business. And there is big, big money to be
made, let me tell you.
Before I move on to tell you how to write adverts, I want to tell you
three things. I want to explain the effect that all of these 95/100 adverts have
on you and me. Also I want to tell you why those middle-management people keep
losing money, and finally I want to tell you why the 'reader's offer' adverts
make such a killing (for the newspaper, of course). Dead
Weight
I expect you have guessed what the effect is if only a meagre five
percent of adverts are trying to make money. The effect is that it pushes up the
advertising rates to a point where if you were to actually pay
these rates, then you would rapidly go bust. This is how the rates are forced
up: 1. Silly, middle-management types with their millions of
'no hope' adverts, all paying rate card. 2. Corporate awareness adverts paying rate card and
above. 3. Advertisers who are totally unconcerned about the
price of the adverts. They might be selling time-share, or £10,000
conservatories, or advertising for a new director-general for the BBC. 4. New, naive players who are trying their products for
the first time, and paying rate card. There
are hundreds of such new hopefuls each year.
You can't blame the newspapers and magazines. Effectively they have a
long queue of suckers all waving their cheque-books and clamouring to be
ripped-off. I mean that's pretty hard to resist!
But the newspapers and magazines also need the people like me; the
regular advertisers who make steady money from the adverts. They need us because
it's hard work having to sell a new customer each time. It's easier to go to a
reliable, credit-worthy customer (particularly at the last minute), even if they
are paying less money. Why
The 'Middle Management' Adverts Fail
These adverts always have, and always will fail. It's important for you
to know why, so that you can avoid the same mistakes yourself. Here's why: 1. The people responsible for these adverts are, in the
main, mediocre people. They do not have much in the way of flair or talent. They
are largely untrained and inexperienced in producing decent adverts. They have
always been buffered by working for a large company. In other words it's not their money they're spending. Nothing, but nothing can
substitute for putting your own cash on the table. It sharpens your mind
wonderfully. Suddenly, you start taking a keen interest in details! 2. These people haven't the faintest idea where to place
their adverts, or what rates to pay.
Most of the people at that conference, advertised in the appropriate
trade journal, you know,
'Modern Sewage Handler', or 'Arc Welding Weekly'. Why do you think these
adverts fail? Simple. No-one
reads these things! If you've ever been in an 'industry' and been sent,
regularly, the industry magazine, then you'll know that what I'm saying is true.
You simply toss them in the bin,
unopened, still in their cellophane wrapper!
People don’t read this stuff. Remember that. This is why the
response to these adverts is
One of the delegates at the conference told how he had spent five
thousand pounds on local radio advertising. He sold Fax machines and copiers
and was offering good deals on a popular range, obviously in an attempt to 'lock
in' new business customers. The time he chose to run his series of adverts was
the 'drive time', 8.30 a.m. to 9.00 a.m. when he reckoned (not unreasonably)
that those making buying decisions would be on their way to work and listening
to the car radio.
I'm sure you know the sort of script. First you have to imagine this bass
drum banging rhythmically away in the background, with the station's one and
only 'voice-over' person saying:
"At ACME copiers, we've got a great
range of copiers and Fax machines at prices to suit your pocket. There's the
Canon AT 135 at only £199.99, and the Sharp C1322 at the sensational low, low
price of just £345. Thinking of buying a copier or Fax? Call 0212 345234 today
for your free quotation. That's 0212 345234. Have we got a machine for you." Etc. etc.
Anyway, he got absolutely no
response at all! Before you read on, write down three reasons why.
Here are the reasons why this series of adverts drew a nil response: 1. Not many people listen to local radio. Why? It's naff,
that's why. The more senior you are, the less likely you are to want to tune
into this pap. 2. He made the fatal
error of using a consumer medium (local radio) to sell a
business-to-business product. 3. Only a tiny, minute percentage of people are
actually, that day, thinking of making a buying decision about a copier or Fax
machine. The secret of selling these products is to make sure that the customer thinks of you whenever he is interested in such a
machine. 4. Finally, although the drive time is the best time if
you really are hell-bent on using local radio, you have to be stark-staring
crazy to give out a 'phone number. Particularly a forgettable one! What are you
expecting people to do? Pull-over and jot the number down? Take
their hands off the wheel and scrabble for a pen? Of course not. They will never
remember, or write down your number, so there is no point in giving it.
Anyway, lists of numbers read-out on
the air, make for incredibly boring
listening. You would be better off hammering
your company name and area, e.g. "Acme copiers at Palmers Estate,
Reading." Then anyone who
is halfway interested will remember your name and look you up. Don't tell
them to find you in Yellow Pages! Why? Because they will also see your
competitors, that's why!!
Did you get three out of four? If you did, then you're starting to think
like a mail-order winner! Why
Reader's Offer Adverts Work So Well
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