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E-Marketing Performance Blog

Damn Those Cereal Boxes! Kellog's Endorses Insane Clown Posse and the National Rifle Association. Start Your Morning Off With A Bang!

As copywriters we have to gain the consumers’ trust. We have to present the information in a clear and honest form. Any one who doesn’t follow this strict code of ethics, does harm, not only to the consumer who gets duped by their faulty claims, but to their own profession and the business of their clients.

The worst case of this injustice is the cereal isle patronized by hundreds of children each day. Little Suzie raves to mom about the free toy she’s getting in her fruity tooties, only to arrive home later and realize she has to send in four proofs of purchases and $6.95 for shipping and handling, then wait 6-8 weeks for delivery of a magic trick that’s to small to practice anyway.

We tend to have a greater belief in print words. The salesperson can tell us over and over that the car has a 10,000 mile warranty, but until we see it on paper we won’t sign the contract. The authors, or can we even give them that much credit, ruin real advertising for all of us. We are surrounded by spam. I’ve actually thrown out a real check after receiving several phony (non-negotiable) checks from sketchy financial institutions trying to get me to consolidate my student loans. I figured it was more junk mail.

It starts as a child when you scoop all the cereal out of the box, and it’s empty. A skeptic is born as mother rants about the kitchen floor and you watch your Kellogg’s truck drive off a cliff. It was too good to be true. This vein of thought flows through the marrow of everyone and reminds them of this nasty little fact by striking a cord even when they are approached with a genuinely good product or service that has managed to eek out an existence in the spam swamplands.

While this may be seen as an obstacle, it can increase your efforts; therefore, making your copy more pungent and increasing you revenue. You’ll have to be more honest and state real facts, not just blank percentages that sound like the copywriter came up with them instead of an an analytics person. You might realize some big shot blogger (really just a copycat) is stealing and smearing your copy all over the internet and gets away with it because you’re a simple beading blog. With every bad turn comes good. This may fuel an exceptional number of unique, uncopycatable blogs. Hmm, ya never know.

Can you use your enemies as fodder for better writing?

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