Clayton Makepeace has released the latest issue of ‘Total Package’. The featured article by Daniel Levis is titled “The Customer is Not a Moron – She’s Your Wife”. [Article]


Clayton Makepeace has released the latest issue of ‘Total Package’.

The featured article:

The Customer is Not a Moron – She’s Your Wife

by Daniel Levis

Fellow Small Business-Builder,

56 Key Profit Growing Lessons I Learned from The Marketing Masters

Dear Web Business-Builder,

Kicking around over the holidays, I couldn’t help but be amazed at the sheer stupidity of some of the advertising I ran across.

It reminded me of the above quote …

I wasn’t there when the legendary David Ogilvy said this, but I take it to mean: “Don’t insult people’s intelligence with your advertising.”

It seems like just good common sense, doesn’t it?

But somehow, Ogilvy is not the only advertising sage to have felt it necessary to stress this point …

This famous quote from Claude Hopkins leads to the same conclusion: “There is one simple answer to many advertising questions. Ask yourself, “˜Would it help a salesman sell the goods? Would it help me to sell them if I met a buyer in person?'”

And John E. Kennedy had this to say: “We must not expect average people to have classical educations, nor an excessive appreciation for art and inference. Neither are they as children in intellect, nor thick-headed fools.

“They are just average Americans of good, average intelligence, considerable shrewdness, and large bumps of incredulity. Most of them might have come from Missouri because they have “˜show me!’ ever at the ready in their minds, when any plausible advertising claim is made to them.”

Interestingly enough, all three of these giants of our industry had one foot in the world of direct response and the other in the world of brand advertising.

Both Kennedy and Hopkins made fortunes while working on big national brand accounts at the Lord & Thomas agency – at the time the largest institutional agency in the world.Lord & Thomas was later renamed Foote, Cone & Belding until it merged with another agency in 2006 to form a new agency named Draftfcb.

And of course Ogilvy & Mather remains a going concern to this day. The firm uses the tag line “an agency defined by its devotion to brands.”

All three of these advertising wise men tried to bring direct response fundamentals to the world of general advertising. And their legacies live on in the companies they helped make mega successful.

So you’d think that anyone involved in brand advertising would be at least aware of their ideas and have read their books. But even in this most basic of their observations – that you can’t expect results if you insist on insulting people’s intelligence – seems to go unnoticed.

So much so, I’m compelled to take a poll to uncover the most insulting dumbass ads of 2008 right here in THE TOTAL PACKAGE.

Here are a couple of real beauties to get you started.

Over the holidays – while waiting for my SUV to be serviced – I observed a 30-second TV commercial sporting the following tagline …

“Change Your TV, Change Your Life!”

Isn’t that a zinger?

This was an ad for a flat screen TV. The tag line might as well have said, “You Mr. Customer, are an absolute loser … a sad sack of a human being with nothing to live for other than to lump your sorry ass on the couch in front of one of our glorious flat screen boob tubes.”

What an insult!

No attempt was made to justify the statement. There was no allusion to the potentially educative nature of the device … no intimation that I might become the envy of the neighborhood as a proud owner of one … no clever innuendo at amour with some hot little number as a result of having one … any of which might conceivably provide some justification for the claim.

No, just a bunch of artsy-fartsy visual effects and pretty pictures of the flat screen TV among shameless boasts about how magnificently realistic the sound and picture quality is.

The main body copy of the ad was unmemorable. But the tag line “change your TV, change your life” was enough to make me go out of my way to remember the brand name so I would know enough never to buy one of the damn things.

Is it just me, or does anybody else find “change your TV, change your life” incredibly insulting?

Admittedly, a good ad – whether brand or direct response – in addition to providing practical “reasons why” someone should buy, should also hold out some kind of identification for the prospect to embrace.

The product becomes a symbol of one’s personal identity, or as a vehicle for enhancing that identity. The problem with a lot of these ads is they identify the prospect as a drooling moron.

A few minutes later, while driving home from the dealership, I had the pleasure of being pitched a hamburger over the radio with the following eruption of creative brilliance: (Please forgive me if I’ve substituted a word or two here or there because I’m writing this from memory.)

For a limited time, save enough on our new
double-bacon grease melts to buy yourself a sports car
– just in time for your mid-life crisis.

What kind of mental imagery does this conjure up in your mind’s eye?

Personally, I found myself mentally calculating how many double-bacon grease melts I’d have to scarf down in order to buy myself a brand new sports car.

I figured somewhere in the neighbourhood of 50,000 ought to do it.

Doable?

Incredibly, it just might be. Heck, that’s just 13 double-bacon grease melts a day for the next 10 years.

Then I imagined what I would look like if were still alive after eating that many: like a 300 pound impotent bag of lard, no doubt. Not exactly stud-muffin material. Not even in a 911 Carrera.

Instantly, whatever carnal cravings I might have had for a double-bacon grease melt went up in a puff of barbecue smoke.

I mean seriously – who thinks up this asinine crap?

Even more amazing, imagine the dimwits who pay good money (shareholder money) to have it created and broadcast over the airwaves.

Is it just me, or does it boggle your mind that anyone could be so brainless?

Or is this just what naturally happens when you decouple creativity from results?

Direct response is not without its dumb-ass ideas after all. The pressure to grab attention in today’s over-communicated world is intense. And wild, zany, crazy, odd and unusual identifications (that may be insulting to some) can sometimes cut through the competitive clutter.

At least in our world, we know enough to measure and test …

If what we do crosses the line and offends the wrong people, the sales results tell us quickly, and we can adjust our approach. The aforementioned poor sods are at a decided disadvantage.

Because they haven’t read Ogilvy or Hopkins or Kennedy they are often brutally victimized by ad agency clowns who maintain a litany of self-serving agendas that have nothing to do with increasing sales.

Ad agencies earn kickbacks from the media companies where their creative is placed. They’re driven by awards and peer recognition. And they win business by pandering to their clients’ egos … creating ads that make their customers look good instead of making their customers’ customers look good. The last thing they want is for their work to be measurable in dollars and cents.

Still, it’s incredible how stupid some of the ads are.

So what about you?

Seen any incredibly stupid and insulting ads you’d like to sound off about? Tell us about the ad … and how it made you feel when you experienced it?

Just type your reply into the comments box below. Have some fun with it.

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis

Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor

THE TOTAL PACKAGE

Daniel Levis is a top marketing consultant & direct response copywriter based in Toronto, Canada and publisher of the world famous copywriting anthology Masters of Copywriting featuring the selling wisdom of 44 of the “Top Money” marketing minds of all time, including Clayton Makepeace, Dan Kennedy, Joe Sugarman, John Carlton, Joe Vitale, Michel Fortin, Richard Armstrong and dozens more! For a FREE excerpt visit http://www.SellingtoHumanNature.com.

He is also one of the leading Web conversion experts operating online today, and originator of the 5R System (TM), a strategic process for engineering enhanced Internet profits. For a free overview of Daniel’s system, click here.

Attribution Statement: This article was first published in The Total Package. To sign-up to receive your own FREE subscription to The Total Package and claim four FREE money making e-books go to www.makepeacetotalpackage.com.

*IMNewsWatch would like to thank Clayton Makepeace for granting permission to reprint this article.

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