September 2, 2009

Randall Rothenberg’s Where the Suckers Moon: A Story About Falling for Stories

Where the Suckers Moon is a story about trying to sell a decent product by turning it into a political movement. Or a hip trend. Or a trend-free anti-trend. Or beautifully-produced anti-art. It’s a story about finding roundabout ways not to get to the point.

In short, it’s a story about an award-winning ad agency that burned through millions of dollars trying to sell an attractively-priced, middle-of-the-road product as anything but that. If you’ve ever wanted to waste millions of dollars on someone’s flash of creative insight (or wished someone would waste millions on yours), you should read it. Read the rest of this entry »

September 1, 2009

The Copy Quotient

Here’s how you know whether or not to fire your copywriter, in five simple steps:

  1. Use rank checker to find out where you rank for a particular keyword on Google (for best results, you should be in the top ten.
  2. Find out how much monthly traffic that keyword gets, using Google’s keyword tool.
  3. Multiply that by the percentage of users who click on a search result of that ranking.
  4. Find out how many visitors you get from that keyword (if you’re not using Google Analytics for this, you’re probably doing it wrong).
  5. Now, divide #4 by #3. If the result is less than one, your headlines aren’t doing their job. Consider drastic action.

Read the rest of this entry »