Emotional Reversal FTW: Advertising Wishes It Were This Good

Nouveau happiness. Unlike nouveau riche—because, damn if it doesn’t all spend the same—it’s just not as good.

A lot of brands want to make us happy, not only with their products, but also with their advertising. P&G honestly made me happy to be a mother with their Thank You, Mom campaign by Wieden + Kennedy. Volkswagen made me not only happy to drive a Jetta but also just happy to be watching their Smiles commercial. Mattel even made me happy to have entered an incorrect URL with their awesome error 404 page.

The poem “By the Front Door,” by W.S. Merwin, is three lines long. It takes less time to read it than to sneeze. Yet, it conveys a kind of deep, ancient happiness that none of this marketing—that no marketing I’ve ever seen—can begin to touch. The poem sets the context and the reason for this happiness so perfectly that, at the end of the last line, after only 16 words, the reader herself is extremely happy.

This emotional connection is made through contrast and empathy, and our own reaction is part of the delight.

The poem starts with a feeling of inertia and sadness: "Rain through the morning." In the second line, "long" brings to mind "longing." Toads, ugly, moist creatures with a (probably unfounded) reputation for spreading warts, are not known for generating warm-fuzzies. And who ever thinks of a toad as a singer?

So by the time we're two-thirds of the way through the poem, a melancholy feeling has seeped in. But in the last line, where "singing" connects to "happiness," there's a reversal. As soon as we understand that the toad is singing because of the rain, because he's in the long pool, we understand. The reader can actually empathize with that toad, can be happy for him. The toad’s delighted to be in this environment, and in its delight it is singing an ancient happiness. Not only are we happy for the toad, but we’re surprised that we’re happy, and that the poem turned out happy. This sense of relief adds to what we ourselves feel.

In three lines, “By the Front Door” puts the reader through a small but real about-face of emotions and leaves us with a smile.

In an ad that could never be aired in the U.S. because we are a culture of whiners, Subaru attempts this same kind of reversal, hoping to leave us relieved and happy. It does work, but it’s heavy-handed. In its heart, this ad wishes it had even half the deep, elegant resonance of Merwin’s poem.

Can any ad? If you can think of one, let me know.







With thanks to The Writer's Almanac, @writersalmanac, for making "By the Front Door" today's poem and to Creative Market, @creativemarket, for The Best 404 Pages on the Internet.

That's Not What I Ordered: UX at a Restaurant

User experience (UX) isn't hard to understand. Like a lot of web specialties with fancy names, it's mostly just common sense. People can specialize in it because a) not everyone has common sense and b) not everyone takes the time to think through all the details.*

Also like a lot of web specialties with fancy names, UX is not something that's limited to the web. When you call the gas company to ask about your bill and their recording tells you that you'll be on hold for approximately three minutes, and you're actually on hold for three minutes, that's good UX. But if you're told three minutes and you're on hold for a half hour, or you're not told an approximate hold time at all, that's bad UX.

Looking at something through a different lens allows us to understand that thing better. (This is why poetry is so cool: it nearly always gives us a new perspective.) That's why analogies are so awesome—even if I did get smacked for exclaiming over this one:

My husband and I went out to lunch today and experienced UX through a restaurant lens.

He ordered a Reuben sandwich. You know what a Reuben sandwich is, right? Of course you do. Everybody does. It's this:

And this will tell you that, although there's a bit of variation here and there, the Reuben sandwich is pretty standardized.

Except today. My husband ordered the Reuben and he got this:

It looks like a flower, right?

Now don't get me wrong. It was probably delicious. But an open-faced Reuben with fresh cole slaw and shaved beets on top was not what my poor husband was expecting, and therefore he did not have a good experience.

That's the first truism: People want what they are expecting. If they don't get it, they're not happy. You can give me an all-expenses paid trip to Hawai'i, but if I was expecting an Alaska cruise, I'd be disappointed. No matter how good the Reuben was, it wasn't what my husband expected.** Quality of experience is based in expectation.

"Did you read the description?" I asked. "Did they say it was open-faced?"

He gave me a look. "Of course I didn't read the menu. I didn't read past the word 'Reuben,' anyway."

That's the second truism: People don't read. As content creators, as writers, this might make us sad. (It makes me sad, anyway.) It might make us worry about the future of humanity, decency, and culture. Et cetera. But it's a truth, and as content creators and writers, we must acknowledge it. TL;DR. People don't read.

On the web, user experience design relies on the same truisms. Label a button with the phrase "Show Me My Credit Score"*** and give them an opt-in page after the click—or, hell, give them an adorable kitten after the click—and they'll be disappointed, because experience is based on expectation. Put small print under the button saying something to the effect of "Registration is required to get your free credit score" and they'll still be disappointed, because people don't read.

Are you offering an open-faced "Reuben" sandwich with fresh cole slaw instead of sauerkraut and some locally-sourced, tender beets shaved on top, that will be a pleasure to the eye as well as to the palate? Great. Tell me so. Say "The XYZ Restaurant's 'Reuben'" instead of just "Reuben." Say "Our Take on the Reuben." Say something (briefly, ever so briefly) in the heading that will make me understand that what I'm getting isn't a thick, greasy, cheesy hot mess like the one pictured above.

Fulfill the expectations you set up...without making people read too much. That's good user experience, no matter what your business.



*In fairness, c) it also requires a solid understanding of the research that's been done in the field, but applying this research requires common sense.

**Now, it's a fact of life that expectation breeds disappointment, but we don't seem to be able to keep ourselves from setting up expectations. Personally, I'm trying. Not expecting makes me happier. But that's not really something we can rely on from a UX point of view.

***"Show me" rather than "Get my" courtesy of Joanna Wiebe, @copyhackers, whose great talk about buttons at Authority Intensive 2014 was just steeped in great UX.

With thanks to @NewYorker for the great analogy and to @SellingEating for the reminder.

It doesn't always have to make sense.

Sometimes words just sound right together. Good copy doesn't always have to make sense; sometimes it just has to evoke emotion.

Let's have a ball and a biscuit, sugar.

Ideas are like grounders.

The other day, throwing grounders to my son in the back yard, I found myself saying again and again, "Get in front of the ball." He would stick his glove out without moving his body, and if he missed, the ball would go right past him.

"Move your body so that if you miss the ball, your body will stop it," I told him.

"But, Mom, that will hurt."

"Then catch it."

Ever notice how your mind will record a moment and play it back on repeat the rest of the day? Standing there in the spring breeze--the green of the grass and newly-leafed apple tree was so fresh it almost hurt my eyes--repeating "Get in front of it. Get in front of it. Get in front of it," I thought about catching ideas.

Ideas often come to me out of the blue. Like my son on the baseball field, I may see them coming, but I haven't been doing a good job of making sure I catch them by getting in front of them. I'm not capturing theses flashes of creativity.

How to fix this?

1. Identify and Acknowledge. 

My son needs to do this, too. I wish I could make him say, "The ball is now coming rapidly toward me; I should get ready to catch it." He has a little trouble with focus, and I think this would help.

It'd help me, too. "My mind is like a steel sieve" is one of my favorite phrases (people never get it, though). Ideas pass through like water through a leaky roof, never to be remembered: a rhyming couplet, a great headline, a pun, a collage I'd like to make, or even the perfect thing to get my husband for his birthday. If I'm not ready to capture those ideas with pencil and paper, they flit away.

But if I were to identify them, just say to myself "Self: this is An Idea," they'd stick out more. Almost as if my son, by saying to himself, "The ball is coming toward me," could, by so saying, cause the ball to slow down until he got his glove down, ready to catch it. This is possible: the mind truly focusing on the task at hand can cause the body to do exactly what is needed.

2. Evaluate and Decide. 

If, in the shower, or behind the wheel of my car, I were to say "Whoa, Self: this is An Idea," I could then make a conscious decision about what to do. Maybe I need to step out of the shower, or pull over, right at that moment to write it down. Maybe I need to just latch onto it and think more carefully about it for awhile. Maybe it's not such a great idea, and, like an ugly butterfly that wandered into my net, I can let it go.

"I'm going to move to the left three feet, kneel, and put my glove down." It's as easy as that. "When I get to the grocery store, before I get out of the car, I'm going to write this idea down."

3. Act...and keep acting.

"Get in front of it." Do the thing you decided to do. Write down the idea, sketch out the collage, just go on Amazon and order the damn birthday present right then.

Keep asking yourself whether you're in front of it.

I'm notorious for leaving things places, so now, when I leave a restaurant or a movie theatre, I always ask myself, "Do you have your purse?" I need to get in the habit of asking myself, "Do you have any ideas you need to write down?"

Catching the ball isn't the end.

My son caught a ball during the game the other day. Then he stood there. (Maybe he was just so surprised at making the catch that his mind blanked.)

Capturing an idea isn't the end, either. Random couplets jotted on the back of a receipt while illegally parked on the side of the road do not a poem make. We have to go back to where we put the idea and then do something with it. Get in front of it, make the catch, and then throw that idea back out into the world in its finished form.

Stephen Nakatani. "Baseball & Mitt."
Creative Commons License. Via Wikimedia Commons.

4 Copywriting Lessons from "Elegy for a Walnut Tree"

W.S. Merwin's lovely, understated poem (read it here) has lessons for everyone, even copywriters.

1. Set up the feeling immediately.

Many great ads, as well as marketing copywriting, rely on emotion. Merwin's poem demonstrates the effect of setting that emotional stage immediately so that the feeling pervades the entire piece. At the end of the first line we're already in it:  sadness and nostalgia and loss. "Now there is no one alive" opens a wasteland of grief.

While grief is probably not our emotion of choice for marketing and advertising, the concept's the same. Proctor & Gamble set up the feeling immediately in their best "Thank You, Mom" commercials, opening on a note of tenderness with the first few images and notes of background music. Both the voice itself and the script set the stage immediately in this surprisingly touching Walmart commercial: "When I was born, the doctors said…" 

Harley Davidson did it differently in this print ad: 

2. It's all relative.

We don't need to know how old the poem's speaker is to understand how long ago he first saw the tree. "Most of my life ago" is a sweetly clever way to demonstrate the period of time in question without resorting to clichéd phrasing such as "when I was a boy" or an awkward and unfitting numeral. It's also a gorgeous turn of phrase, with a nice rhythm and both alliteration and assonance.

3. Show, don't tell: use evocative words rather than naming that which you're discussing.

The speaker of the poem never says he's sad; the words "death" and "grief" don't appear in the poem. Yet the feeling and the subject matter are tangible. Instead of coming right out and saying it, Merwin instead sprinkles in other words that evoke his meaning. For example:

• "dry grass" implies "dead grass"
• "your shade," the double meaning of which conveys "your ghost" as well as "your shadow"
• "wars"
• "silence"
• "parting"
• "absence"

In addition to clearly conveying a general emotion, these words serve to connect the

reader with his or her own specific memories or feelings.

4. Leave off the last line.

This is a hard lesson to learn, but it can make good writing great. It's hard to learn to trust yourself, and the reader, enough to stop bludgeoning the reader over the head with your point. Let it be divined.

Merwin doesn't say, "and now you're gone and I'll never see anything the same way again."* He doesn't have to. The use of past tense, especially in the last line, drives it home, but we know from the title of the poem that the tree is dead or gone—an elegy is a funeral song or poem written for the dead.

A lot of great ad writers know this trick, like this one from Adobe, but it's equally important whether you're writing the next Clio winner or copy for a grocery mailer. Telling people they should "buy now" is never as effective as making them think it themselves.

* Although, if he had, it would certainly be more poetic than that.

Walnut tree on the green. Colin Grice. Licensed under the Creative Commons license, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Ready to write.

Today I feel like this:

And this makes me think about that iPad ad and how I wanted it to actually be an ad for pencils. (Although, the copy in that ad makes me all squishy inside, it's so good.) 

What will I write today?

Pencil Elves

Last year I took a poetry workshop  in the musty basement of a small-town library. One of the featured poems was "Pencil Elves," a previous merit winner in our local poetry contest.

Among the powdered elderly ladies in their flowered hats and the gangly middle-schooler who'd dragged his dad along, I felt miserably out of place in that workshop. I kept trying to work on my own poetry, or even make a decent analysis of anyone else's poem, but nothing was clicking. Yet "Pencil Elves" stuck with me afterward for days and I couldn't figure out why—until I realized that it was tickling my other writing sense. My copywriting sense.

Pencil Elves

by Kobe Woodruff

Pencils


are wooden elves


With no arms and only one leg


And very odd hair


They have no face


But they have a black foot


And yellow clothes

If that didn't at least turn up a corner of your mouth, you're too jaded. The poem is fresh, and it takes a new approach to an everyday object, allowing us to see it from an altogether alien perspective. What product marketer doesn't want to be able to do that?

The "Pencil Elves" poet was in the 5th grade when the poem was written, giving him several advantages over agency-weary marketing copywriters that I'd love to have:

No internal critic; no mental carping "that's dumb" or "no one will like that." How I envy that freedom—in both my poetry and my copy—and yet it is possible to turn off that internal voice. Coworkers may find it odd if you sit at your desk muttering "Shut up...shut up!" but there are other, more socially-acceptable ways. Just give yourself permission. Tell yourself no one will ever see what you're working on if you don't want them to. 

No knowledge of what's cliche, what's been done—and no driving need to be original. A child is  at the center of his or her own universe. They think (and, yes, some adults still do, too) that there is nothing more important on this earth than what they are doing, saying, and feeling. Not only does a child not know what's already been done, but she also doesn't care. Similarly, when you're in the early throes of a creative project, and I don't care whether it's a poem or a sculpture or the script for an explainer video, don't let yourself worry about what's been done before. There's beauty in cliche if it comes from an unusual source, so if you come up with something truly great but horribly overdone, try putting it in different context.

No concept of what's silly, or childish, or ridiculous. OK, we all know there are some advertisers who also don't have this concept. But as you're getting the creative juices flowing, don't apply the brakes by censoring yourself. So what if it's silly? That might turn out to be good; or it might lead you somewhere that's not silly at all. 

No notion of what's "obvious." Kids describe what they see; nothing is implied to them. Write or concept from that perspective. Let's say you're trying to sell a cracker. Jot down the most basic qualities of it: it's square, with little pokey serrated-looking edges; the top poofy, golden brown, with baked-looking puffs punctuated by sixteen evenly-spaced holes and scattered with salt crystals. List facts, list descriptors, draw pictures. Look at the product as Kobe Woodruff looked at his pencil: as if you didn't know what it was. A pencil is an elf. A cracker is an air mattress. A Christmas tree is a giant's traffic cone. 

No real, solid understanding of what's impossible. Why couldn't a pencil be an elf? Fat old Santa Claus fits down that chimney, doesn't he? An unseen fairy exchanges spare teeth for money, rules don't matter much when Mom's not paying attention, and "shit" is OK for Dads to say but not kids. Huh? To a child, the whole world is improbabilities and loopholes. Go ahead and make comparisons, even if they're a stretch. You may find something valuable, or even brilliant.

What does all of this tell me? That when I'm stuck, creatively (or even when I'm not), maybe I should take a "Pencil Elves" -type approach to my creative challenge. 

"What is a pencil?"  "It's an elf."

"How do I get people to download this app?"  "42."