![]() Here at Copel Communications, we’re proud to have a diverse clientele. Sometimes it’s so diverse, it can be challenging—to the point where successfully addressing these challenges generates some teachable moments. Hence, this article. We recently worked on a social-campaign assignment for a very big global brand; while we can’t name them in this article, you certainly know who they are. To be more specific (about the assignment, and not the brand, LOL! we need to be delicate here), we were brought on by one of this brand’s multiple ad agencies. This agency specializes in addressing a certain ethnic market in the U.S. and overseas. And their specialization derives from the fact that they, themselves, belong to this same ethnic group. (It’s really hard to tell this story while protecting identities!) So. They handed us some creative, which they had developed, and the Big Brand had approved, for a social campaign touting one of the brand’s products. And the creative—the visuals, and the ideas—were really thoughtful and inspired. The campaign consisted of different little multi-panel vignettes that would tell the story of a certain person, depicted in them. It went something like this: Imagine there are five panels that will go by, almost like a little slide-show of memes. The first four establish this likeable person—whom the target audience can easily relate to—and their situation. Their situation, mind you, is aspirational-yet-flawed. They aim high, but there are constraints on their dreams. Guess where this is going? Of course. Panel Five introduces Big Brand’s Great Product, which, you guessed it, organically solves all of Hero’s problems in one fell swoop. We’ve over-simplified this a bit here, but you get the gist. Lost in translation Now why on earth, you may well be wondering, was Copel Communications brought in for this assignment? It certainly seems like it’s a wonderful campaign, neatly tied up with a bow. Well, almost. The problem here—and it was a big one—was the copy. Remember: Each “slide” in each of the campaign’s hero stories was effectively a meme: A photo with a quote, title, or caption. And while the ideas for all of these were great, the original copy had been written in Ethnic Audience’s Homeland Language, i.e., not English. Oh. So the Google-translated-to-English copy was clunky and needed help. On its surface, this seems like an easy, straightforward, and fun assignment. It was neither of the former, and hardly the latter. Why? Because, as easily as we could see where each of these panels (and there were tons of them, effectively five for each of the numerous “heroes” selected) needed to go, that didn’t make our client’s English any better. Example: One of the panels showed a young barista, working in a coffee shop. He’s our hero. Remember: aspirational-yet-flawed. So the input caption we were handed read: My job is hard. Gee. My job is hard. He’s a barista, right? So we came up with this version: Life can be a grind. Cute, huh? And so we got big pats on the back from the client, and we were happily endorsing a check five minutes later. Yeah right. Here’s the problem: The client didn’t understand “Life can be a grind.” So they kicked it back to us, instructing us to make it more like “My job is hard.” And, by extension, our job was hard! There’s not a huge lesson we can simply spout from this story. There were a zillion revisions and, not shockingly, for one of the “hero stories,” after they rejected Version 10, we used their suggestions for Version 11 to gently suggest that they re-visit Version 1 and, you guessed it, that was the one that flew. The takeaway? Assignments like this boil down to patience, and trust. The skill is just a subset. Need help with an outside-English-to-English assignment? Contact us. We’d be happy to help!
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![]() It’s funny how some things in business are cyclical. Way back in the day, we toiled over printed outreach, a.k.a. “direct response” a.k.a. “mailers” a.k.a. “junk mail” a.k.a. “printed spam.” Of course, all that went out the window when things went electronic. Spam postal mail was superseded by spam email. Ah, progress! Yeah, we can afford to be a little snarky here. Stay tuned. Because the very recent tale we’re about to spin holds profit potential for your business, and your outreach. Dialing up the numbers game First things first: You invest in direct response to drum up new business. It’s like cold-calling. (We could—and may—write another article on that topic, speaking of business cycles and swinging pendulums.) Direct response is a numbers game. If you send out to 100 people, your odds of getting a response aren’t very high. If you sent out to 10,000 people, your odds go up accordingly. Direct response is also often described as a three-legged stool. The list is one of those legs, and its quantity is just as important as its quality. You don’t want to send to people whose addresses (physical or electronic) have changed, not to mention their title… or even their company. The second leg is the quality of the offer. You’ve got to have something that’s really targeted and worth their time, ideally solving a problem they needed solved yesterday. The third leg is the outreach piece itself. That is, the email, or the letter, or the catalog or brochure or whatever. That’s the crux of this article. A matter of cost Print is expensive. Postage is expensive. There’s a carbon-footprint consideration to it, too. So the whole marketing community breathed a collective sigh of relief when things went from postal to email, decades ago. And for a long time, it worked. Correction: It still does… to an extent. But things have definitely changed. You’ll cringe when we mention it, but a big disruptor here is ChatGPT. When it hit the scene, it made it easy for anyone to instantly generate a well-enough-worded email, which they could then blast out to whomever. And boy did they ever. It practically broke the internet. No, that’s an exaggeration. To put a finer point on it: it practically broke every ISP’s spam filter. We have clients now who can’t even send emails to their own, known clients without their getting trapped in spam filters. It started with ChatGPT: The clients’ clients’ spam filters have been closed down so much, to deal with so much incoming junk, that even their own trusted vendors sometimes get locked out. Some of those longtime trusted vendors happen to be clients of ours. And they’ve been switching back to postal outreach. And it’s been working. Where have all the emails gone? One of these clients of ours recently sent out a catalog. Well, not really a catalog. Call it more of a thought-leadership piece that was really a very handy resource for C-level executives to have on their bookshelf. (We’re purposely being cagey here; we can’t reveal too much.) Now this “catalog” isn’t any good unless it gets opened. In other words, tucked inside the envelope with it was--gasp—a cover letter. Yep. We worked on that one. Short, but vital. It teased what was in the “catalog.” It teased the benefits of working with the company that created it. And it invited the reader to book an all-important demo to learn more. Guess what? Envelopes were opened. And demos were booked. By the exact same execs whose spam filters had blocked every other form of recent outreach to them—including electronic versions of the exact same catalog. Email isn’t dead. But boy is this pendulum ever swinging toward print right now. Need help with thorny issues like these? Contact us. We’d be happy to help! |
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