Tag: advertising

Some decisions

FabrizioLeave a comment

There are some decisions you make as a company that go beyond the mere consequences of the decision.

Whether or not you will send a notification to a customer when a contract is up for auto-renewal.

Whether or not you will require a credit card to do a free trial.

Whether or not you are going to hire that talented woman who has just informed you they are pregnant.

Whether or not you will let go that nice colleague who is under-performing.

Whether or not only managers are allowed to talk at company updates.

Whether or not you are going to raise the salaries or invest in the tenth project management tool.

We are used to think of culture, values, and principles as something very abstract, something intangible, something that reads nicely on the career page of the website. But the truth is that some decisions determine what a company stands for much more strongly and definitively than any two lines crafted by the most skilled copywriter.

Caution does not spread

FabrizioLeave a comment

It might be that everyone is out there waiting for you to come out with the new feature. Perhaps your detractors are just waiting for you to trip and your competitors can’t wait to see the sneak peek of your new product. Somebody for sure has also set an alert to track everything that you are doing and beat you to it.

Or maybe not.

The point is that the time you spend worrying about all these unlikely scenarios – let’s accept it, in most cases we are not that important – is time you could invest to put your work out there and get people excited about it.

Caution does not spread.

Breakthrough

FabrizioLeave a comment

You don’t have to tell, to explain, to convince, to persuade.

You just have to listen, understand, and play back.

That’s copywriting.

Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the heart of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product.

Eugene Schwartz, Breakthrough Advertising (1966)

P.S.: Thanks Katelyn Bourgoin for sharing this in the first place.

An important metric

FabrizioLeave a comment

There is one important metric that should be considered in any report.

It’s the cost of what you have achieved.

Not only monetary cost – though that is always a fantastic way to start, that would immediately set you apart from the vast majority of people – but also the cost in terms of energy, in terms of time spent, in terms of forgone opportunities.

Adding the cost to your reports can very much give you a clearer picture of how effective your work is.

It’s surprising how many teams are not aware of how much their achievements cost.

Anger and social media

FabrizioLeave a comment

It turns out anger spreads faster than joy, because it does not need strong ties – and most of our relationships are weak, particularly nowadays and particularly on social media.

If you share something negative or enraging, it gets picked up more likely by people who don’t know you or are mere acquaintances. While if you share something positive or joyful, it most likely will stop at your closest ties.

The idea that something liked, shared, commented, viewed is good is fundamentally faulted. We need to change that before we can actually look at the future of social media.