 Great photo by Grok. Question: As the year draws to a close, are you merely older… or wiser?
Not to flatter ourselves, but we think we can help with the latter. That’s because it’s time for our year-end round-up—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications —of our top posts for creatives like you. Catch the ones you’d missed. Or revisit those that helped. Enjoy!
Well, that’s all for this year. Have a suggestion for a post for next year? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you!
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 Great photo by Grok. Wait, it’s December already? We must have blinked.
Because it’s already time for the round-up of our top posts for consultants from 2025—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications. Here, then, is your chance to catch any articles you may have missed, or to brush up on others you may want to re-visit:
Phew! That should be enough reading and tips to tide you over for a little bit. But how about next year? Any topics you’d like us to address? Contact us and let us know!  Awesome photo by Grok—an instance where AI, and good prompts, rock. This is a true story. As usual, we’ll blur the details for privacy, but you’ll get the important take-aways for your business.
We were on a Zoom call recently with a client, brainstorming ideas for updating their tagline. The tagline was basically a message to prospects, saying, “Use this service, and you’ll be better at doing XYZ.” During the call, the client asked, “Hey, why don’t we use the word ‘turbocharge’?” “Sure. Try it.” And so: “Use this service to turbocharge your ability to XYZ.” Hmmm. Here’s the thing. This service has nothing to do with turbocharging. It’s a B2B play, not an automotive one. In the land of taglines, where you typically only have less than a dozen words to get your point across, you can’t be off one bit. And now comes the lesson of this article. Ready? At this point, our instinct was to start brainstorming other ways to update this tagline. Starting with the customers’ needs, and layering in what this company really specialized at, and how they did it. That should seem straightforward to you, especially if you’ve ever read any of our other articles here at Copel Communications. But remember: We were on a Zoom call with the client at the time. And so that client said, “Let’s ask ChatGPT.” And they brought up a screen-share, and plugged the “turbocharge” tagline into it, asking ChatGPT for other versions. (If you see where this story is going already, give yourself some extra points.) And so ChatGPT dutifully delivered. It spat out a bunch of other options, all with variations on the word “turbocharge.” Things like “energize.” “Electrify.” “Invigorate.” “Supercharge.” Et cetera, et cetera. Guess what? None of these was any better than the original version. Of course you know why. Although it wasn’t immediately apparent to our client during the call. It was a classic case of GIGO: the old software programmers’ acronym for “garbage in, garbage out.” ChatGPT assumed that “turbocharge” was a perfectly good prompt, so it ran with it. Client: “Let’s try ‘amplify.’” They did. And ChatGPT spat out more of the same. Having waited patiently during this exercise, we then asked the client specifically what we’d mentioned, in this article, just a few paragraphs ago: Why don’t we take a different tack? Why don’t we start with the target customers’ needs, and layer in what your company specializes at, and how it does it? Guess what? And, no—it’s not a case of “Ta-dah! We got something brilliant, instantly.” The “Guess what?” answer is this then took a lot of work. ChatGPT is easy. But in cases like this, it’s just a GIGO vacuum. At least our client could see that it wasn’t delivering useful output. And so we worked on answering those questions above, because we both knew the answers. At that point, it was a matter of narrowing it down to just a few bullet points and words, and assembling them into a tagline-like sequence that would have a strong cadence and impact. It went something like this: Master the art—and science—of performing XYZ to achieve ABC benefit. Look! “Mastery”! And the subtle art-like touch that comes with this company’s services… not to mention the grounded-in-science methodology. Plus specific business benefits that the company delivers to its clients! Honestly. Do you think that ChatGPT would have figured out any of that on its own? Of course it couldn’t. That’s not fair to ChatGPT. Now you can (in fact, we did) feed “Master the art—and science—of performing XYZ to achieve ABC benefit” into ChatGPT and let it try and polish that. But again, it just didn’t come through as well as good old-fashioned elbow grease. Don’t get us wrong. ChatGPT is a cool tool, and it can be quite useful. But you need to apply it appropriately, and recognize its limitations. It’s like that old adage that if you’re a hammer, you tend to perceive everything in your world as a nail. Need help with a creative challenge that AI can’t handle? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Grok. “Blend word”?? What the heck is that?
More importantly, how can you make money off of one of these things? Let’s dive in. As is the case with lots of our articles here at Copel Communications, this one is based on a real client story. And as is the case with all of the real client stories we use as inspiration for articles, this one, like the others, has been anonymized for privacy purposes. But you’ll still get the gist. And the takeaways. Here’s the story: Recently, a client of ours wanted us to develop some pitch materials for a new business they were developing. Excitedly, they told that they’d already come up with a name for this new business, and were looking forward to registering a domain for it. The name of this new business (we’re modifying/anonymizing/making this up) was “Asset Protect.” “Asset Protect.” Hmmm. Well, you can guess, pretty accurately, what they do. So that’s good. But boy is that name ever generic. Which is not good. Can you guess where this story goes? Of course: Our client had one tough time registering that “unique” domain. “Asset Protect” had long been taken, by someone else, in an equally straightforward/uncreative foray. Portmanteau to the rescue To us, the solution to this problem was super simple. Employ a portmanteau or blend word. “Portmanteau” is about as funny a term as “blend word,” and you may not have heard of either. Not a problem. Because you know zillions of examples of these things, and you’ll say “Ohhh!” as soon as you read ones like:
We could go on forever. Applying this mashup concept to branding is equally well established and, we think, effective. Consider:
Need we go on? One of the reasons we mention this is because our frustrated client had considered inventing a totally new made-up name. That certainly comes with benefits: For example, if you invent something completely new, there won’t be any competition for it when it comes to registering your domain, and you’ll have rock-solid IP protection in the potential case of infringement. Still. The drawback is that that’s hard to do, for a basic small-to-midsized business. It takes a ton of (expensive) impressions for the whole world to know what you do. Consider:
Honestly. Would you have any idea what those companies do without their having invested zillions of dollars to inform you? So. The portmanteau/blend-word is a nice middle ground between the uninspired “Asset Protect” and the what-the-heck-is-that “Wazzibobo” or whatever. It’s not perfect. Because great minds think alike. If you’re launching a new brand and come up with what you think is the perfect portmanteau word for it, brace yourself. There’s a decent chance that someone else already came up with that one, and registered it, too. Not to worry. Keep on plugging. Or get help. Like us. Contact us for that next marketing assignment. We do things like this all the time, and would be delighted to help.  Great photo by picjumbo.com We recently worked on a project, for an ad agency, in which they gave us a 22-page PDF wireframe of a new, in-progress website for a client of theirs. Sometimes we create website wireframes for our clients; other times, like this, we’re tasked with helping to populate others' wireframes.
While we could simply tell you about what we did for this client, we want to broaden this article to make it more useful for you. A website—your website—is a big deal. It’s your face to the internet world. You want to get it right. Question everything When we create wireframes for our own clients, we create them as easy-to-follow Word docs, written in outline form. We have a nice article on how you can easily make one of those, too; be sure to check it out here. When we create wireframes for our clients, we always take a customer-back approach: Who is the website trying to reach? What are their needs? What do we want them to do, i.e., what is the call-to-action? More often than not, for our clients who happen to be consultants, the call-to-action or CTA is “book a demo.” So all of this will be well thought-out. You need to think this out, in detail, before you craft your wireframe. We can’t assume that everyone is so diligent. Fortunately, our ad-agency client, in this story, was. That said, we still had questions. Poring through the 22 pages of boxes and arrows and dashed lines, we wanted to know what their client was trying to accomplish, who their audiences were, the tone they wanted to convey, and what the CTA was for each audience. Nicely, they’d created what we’d call a “three-door” website. Their client serves three different audiences, and so there was a clickable tile (“door”) for each, right on the home page. As it turns out, these three audiences were largely different, but still had some traits—and needs—in common. This helped us to develop a unified tone for the overall business, while still addressing the needs of each target audience. Now think of your website and its audiences: Of course they’re different. But how are they similar? What might they have in common? Asking these kinds of questions can help you elevate the entire site and make it more effective. The brain dump Our ad-agency client didn’t want the typical “fill in the spaces” type of web-writing project from us. Rather, they wanted us to brainstorm lots of ideas for each high-level section of the site, so they could pick, choose, and mix-and-match at their will. This was, for us, fun. It was a headline and body-copy free-thought zone, and we came up with tons of stuff for them… which we then selectively edited down, so that they’d actually get 100-percent usable stuff to choose from. In the end, we delivered a 34-page document, consisting primarily of headlines, subheads, and intro body-copy teasers. Fast-forward to the conclusion of this site’s gestation, and we were happy to see lots of our stuff employed in the finished product. So the takeaway is that there’s more than one way to do this. Our ad-agency client gave us a super-structured document, but then told us to freewheel when we got it. Conversely, we’ve worked on other website projects where there are actual slugs of approved copy baked right into the wireframe itself, and we’ll be given very strict input to create very strict output. We can work either way. Have a website challenge on your plate? Contact us. We’d be happy to help!  Great photo by Angela Roma. True story: We worked with a client recently who wanted our help, using a shared online Word doc, to rework the copy for one page of marketing material: a website page.
The Word doc had a headline at the top. And then a big page of body copy. This was the client’s original, rough draft. As we’d noted, they wanted our help wordsmithing it. This client had booked us, via Zoom, for a one-hour screen-share meeting. And guess what? We spent pretty much the entire meeting just working on the headline. To you creatives out there, this is hardly shocking. But to this person who was an employee at our client and was new to this process, it was shocking. In this article, we'd like to cover 1) why this person was so shocked, 2) why headline writing is so hard, and 3) how you can lubricate the process. Two hands on the paintbrush To be clear: In the story we described above, we were forced to work slower than we usually do. Because we couldn’t just dive into our process; rather, we had to explain our process, at each step, before we undertook each step. So that took a lot more time and was, candidly, rather draining. It’s hard enough to do the work; it’s even harder to do it and describe how you’re doing it at the same time. In other words, a tip of the hat to Bob Ross! As we’ve noted before (specifically in this article), shared Word docs are a double-edged sword, which have a habit of cutting you more than others! Still, let’s discuss why the headline part of this assignment required so much more time than the ensuing body copy; we didn’t even sweat the latter. And that’s part of the reason. With body copy, you’ve got lots of time and space and leeway to make your point. A headline is the opposite. You have just a few words. Plus, a headline needs to be, well, “headline-y.” It has to read like a headline. It has to look good on the page. And it has to sound good in your head—to your inner ear. It needs a good rhythm. And cadence. It must convey the exact right tone: if one word is off, it collapses. Oh, and it should be clever. Good luck with that! Tools for your box A way to help you surmount this challenge—in fact, a few of the component parts at once—is to start with something familiar. If there’s something familiar that rings true, and you can spin it your way, then you’ve got a great headline, seemingly ready-made. Don’t believe us? Look at Apple. Every headline on their website is written to try and meet this exact goal. An example from our business: We wrote a headline for a consultancy that helps businesses transform by using a library of proven templates. The headline we wrote for a page describing that process was: Reinvent your business. Not the wheel. Why does that headline work? It’s the exact same approach we’d just described. Everyone knows the expression, “Don’t reinvent the wheel.” But no one had spun it this way before: a ripe opportunity for us, and our client. Anyway, we’d promised you some tools for your box, so here goes. When it comes to headline-writing, lean, liberally, on tools such as:
That person who joined us on the Zoom call was kind-of shocked to follow us down these exact same rabbit holes. They didn’t realize that it took this much time and effort… just to write a headline that’s only a few words long. Know why? Because you can read a good headline in about two seconds. By that token, you can look at a great painting in the same amount of time. Need help with headline-writing? Contact us. It’s a specialty of ours.  Here’s a dilemma: Your business serves two different audiences. They each have different needs. They each are aware of the other audience—and may well be wary of them.
Yet you need to serve them both. What do you do? Do you create two different websites? That is, one for each? You could. But we think there’s a simpler, more elegant way. A twofold dilemma The situation we described above is common:
So this is a common situation. Think about your client base, and the prospects you’d like to serve. Are they really all in one homogenous “bucket”? The self-selecting gate The simplest way to shepherd these crowds through your site is to give them a simple selection, right up front. Imagine a home page that is truly minimal. We’ll use the recruiting firm as an example:
Below it, you’ll see two buttons:
There. Done. Simple as that. When you arrive at this site, you can’t get confused. You’re either an employer or a candidate, and there’s nothing for you to do but click one of those two big buttons. Thus you self-select your “side” of the site and enter it. As you might guess, each “side” of the site is similar looking, but different enough to avoid confusion. Imagine, for example, the exact same layout, but with different color palettes. Once the visitor is on their “side” of the site, it’s basically a self-contained experience. They land at “their” home page, where they get more-focused messaging and navigation. And they get the full panoply of options they’d expect: “Services.” “About.” “Recent Posts.” "Contact us." And so on. Some devilish details As we’d mentioned above, the two different sides of the website are similar yet different. So just in case the visitor of one side accidentally stumbles onto the other side, they’ll know immediately that they’re on the wrong side of the fence, because it will look different. They’ll thus need to click their browser’s “Back” button to return to familiar territory. This leads to an opportunity, and a caveat: The opportunity: The “About” page content that you offer to one audience is likely 95 percent the same as the “About” page content you’ll be offering to your other audience. And aside from the color change, the layout is the same, too. This translates to a big bang-for-the-buck cost saving, in terms of content creation and site-development time. You can effectively copy-and-paste Version 1 to create the bulk of Version 2. So do this as much as possible. Start with the bigger/more difficult “side” of the site, and build it out. Then leverage its parts for Side 2. The caveat: You need to assume that members of Audience 1 will occasionally stumble onto pages designed for Audience 2, and vice versa. And since you want both of them as your clients, you’ll need to offend neither. This is a messaging/copywriting challenge. You don’t want those HNWIs to think that you’re helping the professional-service providers to profit off of them. Similarly, you don’t want those professional-service providers to see anything that suggests you might interfere with their relationships—or revenue streams—with those HNWIs. So you need to craft the messaging carefully. And then you need to read each “side” through the eyes of each audience, and see if anything looks amiss. Making it happen We recently worked with a web-design firm that was a vendor to one of our “two-audience” clients. The lead person at that firm was totally confused by our proposal of a “two-button home page.” They hadn’t seen a site like that before. They were scared it wouldn’t work. Now that that site is up and running, that person is totally sold on the idea. And so are our client’s prospects: The site traffic statistics confirm it. Here at Copel Communications, we also serve two broad swaths of clients: 1) consultancies, and 2) ad agencies and internal departments we call “Creatives,” since they hire us for creative services. And guess what? Our home page has two big buttons, too. Need help with that bifurcated website challenge? Contact us. We’d be happy to help.  If you’re looking to hire a firm to help you write a positioning statement for your business, you might consider doing it yourself first. Why?
In this article, we’ll walk you through the basic steps of creating a powerful positioning statement. We’ll touch on the pros and cons of doing it yourself. But first, we’d like to address a couple of important questions: 1) What the heck is a positioning statement? And: 2) Why would you ever want one? Internal vs. external First things first: What is a positioning statement? Its name gives you a clue. It’s a short written piece—generally a single sentence—which describes your business, relative to its competitors, along with who your intended customers are, and why they should choose your business vs. the others. Sound straightforward? It is. Indeed, if it’s that straightforward—if it’s that much of a no-brainer, then our second question becomes all the more relevant: Why would you ever want one? There are two important words to consider here, both of which pertain to this discussion. And those words are internal and discipline. Let’s be crystal clear about this: A positioning statement is strictly an internal document. You do not put this on your website. You do not use it in any of your marketing material. You do not include it in a presentation deck alongside your company’s mission statement or team bios. This is internal. For you. And your team. And selected partners. And that’s it. Which begs the question: Why? Quite simply: It’s not a good piece of marketing. Any more than your company’s policies-and-procedures manual is. Sure, that’s an important document. But you don’t put it on your website. Same thing for the positioning statement. The biggest advantage of a good positioning statement is to provide alignment. If you’ve got sales reps out in the field, they need to know what your company is about. If you’re hiring a marketing firm, they need to understand where you’re coming from. Similarly, every single member of your team should know and understand how the company is intended to compete. Thus the “discipline.” To make this easier to understand, consider the opposite. Imagine if everyone on your team had a different idea of who your prospects are. Imagine they all had their own, varying ideas, on why those prospects should choose you. Imagine they had differing opinions on who the competition is. All of this “noise” can be eliminated with a good positioning statement. So how do you create one? As we’d said above, this is very straightforward. Indeed, there’s a formula for it. We didn’t invent this. It goes like this: For [target audience], [brand name] is the [competitive frame of reference] that delivers [emotional benefit/point of difference], because only [brand name] is/offers [reason to believe/critical support]. It’s a fill-in-the-blanks exercise. Simple as that. Or perhaps not so simple. We’ve helped to moderate some very emotional, hair-pulling arguments over each of these “blanks” to fill, with various clients of ours. Consider some of the issues that can arise:
A little tip: Be prepared to do this a lot. A lot. We typically go through a zillion iterations of positioning statements when we’re hired to help craft them. And a caveat: Don’t expect to find good examples of others’ positioning statements online. We know. We’ve tried. All you’ll find are other bloggers out there, pretending to quote, say, Amazon’s or Disney’s positioning statement, when you can tell, just by reading it, that that’s not it. As we’ve said, these are internal documents. There’s an embarrassing number of mission statements and even taglines out there, supposedly standing in as “positioning statements” in all these other articles. Don’t believe them. Besides, someone else’s positioning statement won’t help you. This is about your business, not theirs. A parting shot As we hinted above, a positioning statement is not the same thing as a mission statement. Or a vision statement. Or a tagline. Or a value proposition. They’re all different. Some are internal; others are external; there are subtleties which differentiate them all. That said, the utility of all these things is limited—by their intended usage, by the quality of the input used to create them, and how they’re actually leveraged in the real world. In other words, don’t put effort into this exercise unless you really intend to use it. And if you do, you might want to get help. This is a real team-building exercise, and as we’ve intimated above, we’ve facilitated this numerous times. Contact us today to get started.  One of advertising’s most powerful tools has fallen by the wayside
Jingles have fallen out of favor lately. You don’t hear them very much any more. This is wrong. It’s more than wrong. It’s egregious. In this article, we’re going to show you why jingles are one of the most powerful tools in the advertiser’s kit—and how you can take advantage, to grow your business. Even in today’s “non-jingle” world. One-hit wonders What is a jingle? It’s a short tune, usually with lyrics, employed to make a brand or campaign memorable. Ideally, it’s catchy: an “ear worm” that you can’t get out of your head. We’re not composers, but we’ve worked with lots of talented jingle artists over the years. And we mean talented. In many ways, jingles are even harder to write than hit songs. Since they’re inherently short, there’s no time to build. You need to launch in fast, establish the hook, dig in, repeat if possible, and leave your audience breathless and moved. That’s a tall order for something that may only run, say, ten seconds, and get produced on a less-than-lavish budget. Jingles used to be everywhere. See if you’re old enough to recall some of these classics, based on the hints below:
Admit it. You’re already singing some of those tunes in your head right now. Aren’t you? As we’d mentioned above, writing jingles takes real musical chops. It’s little surprise, then, that some of the most storied songwriters have cut their teeth in the jingle world. Barry Manilow, for example, penned “I’m stuck on Band-Aid” and the “Like a Good Neighbor” jingle for State Farm. Rumor has it that he was paid a flat fee of $500 for that composition. If Mozart were alive today, he’d have gotten his start writing jingles. Guaranteed. Why they work It’s simply astonishing to us that jingles have fallen by the wayside. The so-called creatives helming major agencies these days are anything but. What, after all, is more creative than music? More importantly, from a business standpoint, what can possibly make a more visceral connection to your audience? Telling you that jingles don’t work is like telling a baker that her shop’s aroma doesn’t bring in passers-by. Music is hard-wired within us. It’s with us before we’re born: we each carry our own internal metronome—our heartbeat—all our lives. And a tune with a hook? It’s irresistible. There’s an old truism from the ad world which needs more attention these days: “No one hums the announcer.” Make jingles work for you It’s been said that jingles are “less relevant” these days, because we live in a world of small-screen instant gratification. That’s a lame excuse. If anything, we’re even more open to jingles and their magic, given their minimal bandwidth requirements, and the ubiquity of Facebook videos, websites, satellite radio, and more. AM and FM “terrestrial” radio are still with us, but they’re no longer the only games in down. And while the need for talented composers and singers can never be replaced by computer, the digital tools available to composers these days have truly leveled the playing field for the budget-constrained. So how do you make a jingle work for you? First, you’ve got to have a good foundation upon which to build: a solid grasp of your target audience (do they prefer classical or rap?) and a strategy to reach them. Then reach out—search online, get suggestions from professional groups and web forums—to actual jingle artists, and get the ball rolling. Not all jingles are “jingles.” Think of it: There are jingle elements you can leverage in other applications. A good tagline has a rhythm—and even rhyme—to it (“Amazon: And you’re done.”) A rhyming phone number is easier for your prospects to remember. Incidentally, we’ve produced, on the ad agency side, dozens of jingles over the years, working with ingenious composers, musicians from chart-topping rock groups who sometimes moonlight for their producer friends, and gifted singers who have breathed life into our lyrics. We’re grateful for the experience. Need help getting your mind around that jingle project? Need lyrics written? Have a new jingle you’d like to share with us? Contact us today. This is a topic we’re—excuse the pun—well-versed in.  There’s a lot more lurking online than you’d expect
Printed dictionaries are a pain to use. Our last hardbound Merriam-Webster was so coated with dust that we finally relegated it to a box somewhere. And don’t you remember all the admonitions you’d gotten in school? “Look it up in the dictionary!” If you were reading an exciting book, you’d instead do your best to tease out the definition from context; if you were slogging through a boring homework assignment, stopping to page through your Funk & Wagnalls would only make a long assignment longer. What does any of this have to do with an article about creative services? A lot, actually. Stay with us. Enter the digital dictionary. It takes many forms. The earliest one we recall was simply the list of words that accompanied a word-processing application; today, we don’t call that a “dictionary”; we merely call it a “spell-checker.” But it was a start. Then there were huge dictionaries you could buy (on disc!) and install on your computer. Next came dictionary websites such as Merriam-Webster.com and www.dictionary.com They’re still around. Some of the most useful digital dictionaries you’ll employ these days are ingeniously embedded within other things you ordinarily use, such as e-readers (double-tap a word and its definition appears) and mobile phones. That’s an astonishing amount of power at your fingertips. Now let’s put it all to work for that next creative assignment. Defining “creative” First of all, what kinds of creative challenges could be helped along with a digital dictionary? There are lots, but before we get to those, we would like to point out one usage that always makes us cringe. And that’s simply quoting a definition as part of the opening text of your written document. Such as “Webster’s defines ‘Fashion’ as ‘a prevailing custom, usage, or style,’ etc., etc.” That galls us almost as much as attempting to spell out the word phonetically, as if the reader needs help learning how to pronounce a word such as “fashion”. Honestly. It’s pretentious and insulting. Enough ranting. You can use your digital dictionary for good, for lots of good, for things like taglines, product and service names, slogans, jingle lyrics, and plain old-fashioned copywriting. Your dictionary as word generator Most people think of a dictionary as a source of definitions. That would overlook one if its more useful applications: word-list generator. The trick here is to look up any word that’s relevant to your search, and then scroll through the list of entries before and after it. You’d be amazed at how much inspiration you’ll find. Let’s say you’re working on a tagline for a company that’s involved in—oh what the heck, why not—fashion. Type “fashion” into your dictionary and look not at the definition, but at the other entries which appear around it. Hmmm! Check out all of the interesting and inspiring choices that appear; here’s just a few of the 39 entries we found:
Now, in your same app, while still in “fashion,” click the “Thesaurus” tab. Oooh! Here are just a few of the helpful words that appear:
We’re even getting phrases we could play off of, such as:
Are we done? Of course not. Click on over to one of our favorite sites, rhymezone.com, and enter “fashion”. You’ll get hits sorted by syllable-count, such as:
And those are just the rhymes! Look at the pull-down menu when you first go to search at Rhymezone, and you’ll see it includes intriguing choices such as:
Notice that we didn’t crack open one single definition during this entire exercise. Putting it to use We don’t mean to imply that any of the stuff we’ve bullet-listed above is a tagline. But if you can spin any of those phrases into something new which is highly reminiscent of a well-known turn of phrase, you may be well on your way to creating a new tagline that’s inherently catchy and memorable. A dictionary—of any kind—is a tool, one of many, at your disposal. The trick is to not assume that it simply has one use. Need help with that next tagline, product name, or slogan? Contact us. We’d love to help, using these techniques and many others. |