My super power is fighting cheerleaderism. Here’s why I do it, and how you can too (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this post, I talked about the disturbing trend of marketing stakeholders and clients reflexively responding to questions about their marketing problems with a lot of positive rah-rah nonsense that’s not only not helpful, but actually harmful to the strategic and creative process.

In this second part, I’ll list several possible reasons for this trend, a trend which invariably results in wasted money and bad marketing—and then follow them with a pathway to reversing it.

Here are the reasons why cheerleaderism might rear its ugly head:

The stakeholder is in sales, or a sales-related position, and is so used to pumping up their company that that’s how they answer any question.
The stakeholder has bought the fictitious line that thinking and acting positive all the time, and making positive statements all the time, no matter how terrible the situation, is the road to success. It isn’t. It’s the road to denial.
The stakeholder just has a psychological need to please and impress people, even people whom it absolutely will not benefit them to impress.
The stakeholder is simply not a very clear thinker. They are possibly the victim of 12-hour days, the stress of working for a volatile boss and driving in traffic and raising a family, the mental cloudiness of certain substances commonly used to alleviate said stress, etc.

Any or all of these may be true, but the result is always the same: When a creative professional asks the legitimate question, “What marketing problem are we solving here,” the response is either a blank stare or a bunch of positive-sounding but unhelpful gibberish.

Now, here’s what you, as a stakeholder, can do about it:

Be candid. When a creative professional or strategist is smart and curious enough to probe, answer their questions openly. In other words, tell them what the damn marketing problem is. There must be one, or you wouldn’t have hired them. What are you paying them to fix, exactly? This is not the time to be Mr. Rogers and pretend everything’s OK when it’s not. If you’re not straightforward, you’re not “saving face” or “making the company look good” or “being a loyal employee.” You’re simply hurting yourself and hurting your company.
Be proactive. If your copywriter or art director doesn’t ask you where your business is falling down, tell them. Don’t wait for the question. With some people, you might be waiting a long time. Tell them exactly where the holes are in your business model. Do you have renewal and customer success issues? Are there lead nurturing gaps where prospects show interest at first, then fail to engage? Is there a high price point that can’t be moved, so you need to show more value? Do your own homework, then be brutally frank. Remember, the first step to solving a problem is acknowledging that you have one.
Be humble. This is not the time to talk up your product. You’re not trying to sell it, and the creative professional is not a sales prospect or a user. Don’t boast and brag about how your product is the greatest thing since sliced bread and creams the competition, or about all the great numbers you made last year and plan to make this year, or all the new demos you plan to crush. Instead, everything that you’re unsure, insecure and secretly freaking out about? Let it all out. That’s what we’re here for and who knows, we might even be able to help.

Dave Dumanis is a creative director, copywriter, and 25-year veteran of Bay Area advertising and marketing.

My super power is fighting cheerleaderism. Here’s why I do it, and how you can too (Part 1)

My most common question to clients and potential clients is what I always thought was a simple one: “What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing?”

It’s strange and somewhat concerning to me that I almost never get a straight answer to this question.

I mean, they shouldn’t be trying to impress me. I’m working for them, or auditioning to do so. If anything, they should be glad to be blunt, frank and forthright with me.

After all, I’m not their boss! If they tell me what’s going wrong, I’m not going to use that info to fire them. I’m going to use it to help them.

Yet time after time, when I ask a client or stakeholder about the most pressing problem, issue or challenge they face, here’s the answer:

“We’re doing phenomenally well… We’ve just merged with/acquired X company and have plans to acquire Y company… We just received X million dollars in funding… We’ve released a new version of our flagship product and it has this killer feature and that killer feature, all based on our exciting new platform of blah-biddy-blah-biddy-blah… Etc., etc., etc.”

As a creative professional, I can safely say that this information is of less than no use to me. In fact calling it “information” at all is being kind. It’s promotional boilerplate, also known as PR, also known as bullshit.

And while I understand why you might relate it to your customers and users, or even to your underlings, I’m at a loss to understand why you would give it to a copywriter or art director and expect them to do anything with it.

Our job is to find out what’s going wrong with your business, so we can use our creativity to clearly define and solve that problem. If you tell us what’s going right with it, that leaves us no better off than before, and possibly worse off depending on how true it is.

And at the end of the day, Mr. or Ms. Stakeholder, who gets hosed? You do.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where I’ll tell you where the instinct to make this huge mistake comes from, and some concrete ways to fight it.

Dave Dumanis is a creative director, copywriter, and 25-year veteran of Bay Area advertising and marketing.

Want to see a million dollars set on fire? Just drive down 101 and look out your window.

I don’t drive too much anymore. I hate traffic and I hate tailgaters, so I avoid freeways as much as possible. I find that nine times out of 10, a combination of CalTrain and Lyft get me exactly where I want to go, stress-free.

Whenever I do drive, though, I notice one thing, and it’s not the little old lady doing 35 in front of me or the venture capitalist yakking on the Bluetooth in his Tesla.

It’s the billboards.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but why the hell do companies spend thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars on out-of-home space, just to run terrible work in them?

They’re glad to pay for the media, but the creative is a complete afterthought. They’d rather save a few hundred bucks by hiring their cousin, or an intern who’s still a freshman in art school.

This is the most egregious case in history of being penny-wise and dollar-stupid.

What’s wrong with these billboards? Everything! For a start, many of them break the seven-word rule, which says billboard copy should never be long enough to cause an accident.

Then there are cheesy stock photos, copy that insults your intelligence, and “concepts” with no freshness or impact.

Throw in horrendous typography and color, and you’ve got an easy way to pour a fortune down the drain. All because the person in charge cheaped out on art direction and copywriting.

One thing you see all the time, just for example, is a headline set in type with a particular word crossed out and a replacement word “scribbled” above it. This is what passes for wit in Silicon Valley. I swear, a different pre-IPO startup does this every year and they all think it’s the most brilliant thing they ever heard of. This is because they thought it up in their incubator office at two in the morning when they were high on Red Bull and White Claw, which when mixed together make some kind of pink mythological monster that makes you write crappy billboards.

Then there are the city namecheck billboards, which think they’re cool because they mention something local like Karl the Fog or the Niners. Get out of my face with that stuff. I might be half asleep but I do remember where I live! Plus, you’re not giving me a clue what your new SaaS company does.

Bus shelter boards are bad too. These are billboards’ ugly stepchildren. They have all the same problems, plus they often include body copy of all things. News flash: Most of the people who see your bus shelter are driving by at 40 mph on their way to work. They’re not sitting there waiting for the bus and reading your body copy.

If I sound angry about all of this, it’s because some of the money used to pay for all that expensive media space should be going into the pockets of writers and art directors. That it isn’t, shows every day. These poorly crafted billboards are a hideous blight on the freeway landscape, and they don’t succeed in selling their companies to anyone except their own executive teams and a handful of Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. But maybe that’s exactly the point.

Dave Dumanis is a creative director, copywriter, and 25-year veteran of San Francisco Bay Area marketing and advertising.

Dude, does your company even “copywriter”?

A slow change is taking place on the corporate marketing landscape, so slow in fact that it’s nearly imperceptible unless you’re in it.

It used to be that the “client side” of the advertising business was filled with agency folks who’d grown tired of the rat race. The intense pressure, the endless pre-pitch nights, the revolving door of clients which, when they quit the agency, often resulted in jobs being hemorrhaged.

But then, a little at a time and often under the radar, the agencies that fed those second-hand (vintage?) creatives into the client side started closing their doors, or scaling way back. Google and Facebook, and their respective offspring YouTube and Instagram, were largely to blame, since they were vacuuming up more and more of the ad revenue that used to go to agencies.

As a result, the old agency-to-client-side funnel is gone. I don’t know where companies get their copywriters these days. It might be from university English departments, or viral video writing teams, or even from each other, but it sure as hell isn’t from agencies.

Apart from deteriorating copy quality, one result of this seismic shift is that fewer and fewer companies seem to know what a copywriter is even for. This is somewhat amazing to me.

As a matter of fact, I’ve been approached by marketing executives with jobs far above my pay grade and advanced Ivy League degrees to do everything from writing technical white papers and designing pitch decks to editing business letters. While it all pays the bills, and I can even do some of it quite capably, it’s not the best use of my talents. I can do so much more for you, if you let me–but first, you have to know what that is.

A copywriter is not:

A technical writer
A public relations (PR) writer
A content writer
A UX writer
An editor
A business article writer
A blogger
A ghostwriter or book author

A good copywriter might be able to do a few of those things. Indeed, I spent all of last year writing UX content! But again, if that’s all you hire a copywriter to do, you’re not taking full advantage of what’s in front of you.

A copywriter is:

Someone who develops ideas, and writes words, to make customers change their mind, take action, or both.

That’s what it is and that’s all it is.

I’ve seen it expressed before that copywriting is “selling through print.” That’s another good definition. If there’s no selling, it’s not copy.

If the copy is primarily designed to change people’s mind, it’s awareness advertising.

If the copy is primarily designed to get customers to take action, such as buying a t-shirt or renewing a subscription or accessing a gated article, it’s direct response or lead generation advertising.

And that’s what a copywriter gets paid to do. Nothing more or less.

Are there fewer such opportunities to deploy great copywriting? Well, some of the old ones aren’t as common as they used to be, print ads being a great example. But the world is still full of things that could have been made great by a writer, and instead are aggressively mediocre.

You see them every day. Pricey billboards lining Silicon Valley’s 101 freeway with janky headlines and concepts created by the CEO’s brother-in-law. Event booth signs and handouts that should have gone straight into the trash can, Home page copy (your first chance to sell your prospect on your product!) that reads like it was fed through Google translate.

Put your copywriter to work doing what she or he was born to do.

Writing great copy.