How much do you pay for ads that fail?

• Reading time: about four minutes

Is your copy “swing” as on-target as an MLB batter? You wish…

“The severest test of an advertising man is in selling goods by mail. But that is a school from which he must graduate before he can hope for success.”

–Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising

Do you follow baseball? I’m new at MLB fan-hood, myself. Wow, those guys are all ABOUT the statistics!

There is one stat they give us more than perhaps any other, from Spring Training all the way to the post-season (if your boys are still in it, or you’re such a fan that you watch October games even though the home team is tucked in for the winter). In general, rounded terms, the figure goes like this:

A 70% failure rate is… really quite good.

On average, batters in the Major Leagues–best players we’ve got–fail to get a hit seven times in ten attempts. And yet we call them great hitters, when they’ve got averages of .300 or better! We pay ‘em a ton of money.

The failure rate comes from one fact we can’t avoid. The batter may know a lot about the pitcher and the situation but, ultimately, he must have an idea in his head (a guess) about what pitch he will get next. The only way he can hope to improve his odds and make the right guess? More scouting information on the pitcher.

Do you scout your target customer before every “game” you play (every new ad you offer up to a reader)?

Marketing data is worth cold, hard dollars. Theory is not.

If you’re buying space for copy you THINK will work… you’re fired.

Eventually, anyway. Because you’re spending hard cash on soft theory, at best. At worst, you’re wasting the bottom line chasing a hunch. Please, you’re not actually doing such a thing, are you?

Finally, I get around to Hopkins: This is my brain hashing out chapter 4 in Scientific Advertising. If you mail an ad piece filled with copy you wrote “from the hip,” with no data to supprt its end goal (at least a hypothesis, if you’re testing a new idea against a proven control piece), then Hopkins says you’ve got about a 10% chance of success.

Good luck holding on to your team jersey, copy cub.

This hails back to chapter one, where Claude preached that the “laws” of advertising are worth nothing to you if you don’t apply them to your own work. Now, he narrows our focus to direct mail, the advertising profession’s “clean room,” a shiny lab where we can test our days away. Call it batting practice!

He also brings up again one of his key data indicators: ad cost per response (sale)…

“The only response data that matters has a dollar sign in front of it.”

That’s the way my last Marketing Director said it. Phil, are you reading? You rock.

For years I duly noted this gold nugget, filed it under “What Entrepreneurial Bosses Say,” and went back to my desk to write whatever the heck I felt like writing. And since I write okay, and had the basic understanding of F.A.B. (feature, advantage, benefit) down pat, my sales were “good enough” to get me NOT fired.

Then I crossed over into the light. I tested an ad with several variations, and saw (written in brilliant, shining money) what my customer wanted me to know about their personal interest in my offer.

I should touch on a couple bullet points that Hopkins takes trouble to note, regarding the “design component” of mail advertising that most of us find… ugly. Too bad, he says. If “ugly sells,” then let’s do it:

• Small type: set your ad in readable type, of course, but no bigger. Why? That way, you’ve got room for more copy. Duh. “To make an immediate sale,” says Hopkins, “advertising must tell a complete story.”

• Coupon: And by “coupon,” Claude means any Action Device your reader needs/wants to clip, tear or otherwise save to remind him later that for a moment, he felt sold enough to act on what you asked him to do.

• Images: Not a given. And certainly not just ANY old visual. Every image takes up space you could fill with your story, and so you must give a picture only as much space as it earns. Oh, and a freebie from me that Hopkins would validate, I’ve no doubt–never a picture without a caption. Never.

Will a larger ad bring more sales? Not if you don’t add content to match.

The real issue here is not back-end potential profit but front-end ad cost per response. More space costs more money, so of course you HOPE that simply being bigger in my field of view might do the trick. No, Hopkins argues that any value increase is proven only when you use more space the same way you use less. That is, fill it with more of your story. More pictures. More testimonials. More urgency and desire. More call to action.

I want you to hear me on one thing: I do believe that all this good, solid science can work for a very snappy, modern ad design like graphic artists hunger to deliver these days. But before you dig in your heels onelements of style, listen to Claude one more time…

“Every departure from principle adds to selling cost. It is a question of what you are willing to pay for frivolity. Most of us can afford to do something for pride and opinion. But let us know the cost of our pride.”

As always, thanks for reading.