Communicate Through Puppets
A Dummy's Puppet's Ramblings - from Chip Martin, Puppet (Mannequin American views and guidelines on marketing/PR trends plus bits of humor and interesting but useless information.)
You People Need to Get a Life
Over 10 billion online videos were viewed in February - up 66% from 2007. That's right; nearly 135 million U.S. internet users spent an average of 204 minutes per person viewing online video in February. Come on people, haven't you got anything better to do? (By the way, click here to see one of Dale's puppet videos on YouTube.)
Puppets Before People
According to a Civil Defense film from the fifties, this marionette cow could survive a nuclear attack.
Speaking of watching online videos, this one is worth a gaze. Seriously, it'll make you laugh. Regular readers of this blog know that I often point out how puppets can be used as communication tools for all kinds of things. In the case of this old American Civil Defense film from the Cold War, puppets are used to educate the public about the dangers nuclear war and radiation pose to farm animals and how to protect those animals during a nuclear attack.
I don't know if it's hysterically funny, poignant, or scary that the film recommends stacking hay against your barn to protect your herd of marionette cows. It also advises, "Shelter your livestock; then seek shelter yourself." PETA would be proud that Civil Defense put animal safety ahead of human safety.
More Than Annoying
A recent study revealed that drivers who talk on cell phones travel an average of 2 miles an hour slower than non-chatters and make others' commute times 5% to 10% longer.
Marketing in the Sky
Now you can make "clouds" in the shapes of, well, anything. The clouds are actually a mixture of soap-based foams and lighter-than-air gases.
"Flogos" uses re-purposed artificial snow machines to generate the floating ads and messages. The machines can pop one Flogo out every 15 seconds, flooding the air with foamy peace signs or whatever shape a client desires. Renting the machine for a day starts at $2,500.
The Flogos are about two feet long and nearly a foot thick, and generally last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, depending on conditions in the atmosphere. They float to heights of 300 to 500 feet, though they can rise up to 20,000 feet. Flogos are reportedly environmentally friendly and "just evaporate in the air." Click here to see the machine work its magic.
Happy Birthday
Belated birthday greetings to Adelia Detweiler.
Why Writing Marketing Copy is Becoming More Difficult
As you compose copy for marketing materials, you'll think you have made your ideas perfectly clear. You spent 14 hours on that lengthy article describing your fascinating new product. You followed up with a 12-part series on your blog and an auto-responder sequence of 20 emails.
To you, any moron can see what to do next. A reader of your materials should click through to contact you, or buy your product or find a dealer, or whatever it is you want them to do.
The reality isn't very inspiring. A prospect found one of your posts (maybe #3 out of that carefully planned series of 12) on StumbleUpon and spent 30 seconds skimming the subheads. He read the first sentence twice because he thought it was funny. Then he skipped down and read part of the last paragraph.
Then his boss came up behind him and your prospect astutely brought up a spreadsheet to look like he was working on an overdue report. An hour later, your prospect's cousin sent another link to YouTube, and he spent 20 minutes surfing videos of dogs drinking beer. Then he wrapped up that overdue report while eating a bag of Fritos and catching up on email. Four minutes before he shut down for the day, he noticed your post again. So he read your first paragraph and one of the sections that looked kind of interesting. I don't know what he did next ... it depends how good your copy was.
Readers of your marketing copy are not dumb. But they do have a lot of other things competing for their attention. So no, your prospect is not going to know what to do next or why unless you spell it out with painful clarity. And spell it out often ... over and over again.
While marketing messages should reinforce and build on previous marketing messages, they also need to be able to stand on their own and repeat your key messages which are typically "Why should your prospect care?" and "What do you want them to do next?"
