April 21, 2006
Does Copy Have to Follow The "Airport Rule" — That Is, No Jokes?
Last night I spoke to the Laugh Lovers Toastmasters Club in Oakland, California. It was poignant for me because the club was founded, in another format, by a friend of mine who is no longer with us on this Earth, the legendary John Cantu.
Robin William, Dana Carvey, Paula Poundstone, Margaret Cho and many other comedy superstars of today got their start at Cantu's Holy City Zoo, a comedy room on Clement St. between 5th and 6th Avenues in San Francisco. Today the space is occupied by a fierce Irish bar called The Dogs Bollix.
I was invited to speak last night to commemorate Cantu (he went by his last name), and in dredging up memories, I thought of a story he told me once from his days as a carvinal barker.
Besides being a great humor resource, Cantu was also a very skilled salesman. Rare combo, don't you agree?
He used to sell the Veg-o-Matic, and he also sold a super-absorbent cloth called the Shammy. On tables at County Fairs. A real pitchman of the first water.
When selling the Shammy, Cantu would give examples of how you could use the product.
One piece of advice he would give his prospects:
"And if you have a Golden Reliever at home… oops, I mean a Golden Retriever… "
That would get a laugh, and that would increase sales.
While this great friend of mine was alive — and I miss our wide-ranging conversations so much! — he and I would talk about how most advertisers totally blow it with humor in sales copy (Cantu also wrote killer radio commercials, and had a lot of expertise selling over the telephone).
Now, throughout advertising history, there are legendary disaster stories about how humor has made copy reduce sales. Alka-Seltzer. Isuzu. I'm sure you can think of a few.
And in all the "below the radar" sales Web sites and direct mail letters that pull in the big bucks, humor is so rare as to be seen as an endangered species of communication.
The conclusion Cantu and I came to is, humor for humor's sake — that is, to get attention for the copy itself — was a sure-fire losing strategy.
But what worked so well with the Shammy could work in any piece of copy (spoken, as a pitch or delivered as an ad, Web site, sales letter, or email).
What Cantu did, perhaps not deliberately, but instead intuitively, was make fun of the problem that the product was promising to solve.
When you can render an annoying problem in your customer's life as a little less overbearing, by poking fun at it, you stand a chance of making a few more sales. Doing so is a way of creating empathy.
Now this can backfire. If you ridicule and dismiss a real and serious problem too cavalierly, you can end up looking crass and uncaring. And that doesn't usually help sales.
So, it's a fine line; it's still risky to use humor in copy. Like a comedian trying out a new line in front of a tough crowd, you can still bomb.
But at least you have the possibility of using humor, productively, in your copy, with this strategy.
Just don't read these last three paragraphs out loud at an airport. You might end up speaking one of those no-no words (hint: it begins with a "b")… and these days, there's nothing funny about pranks at airports, no matter how clever you are.
David Garfinkel is one of the best copywriters on the internet and was a speaker at Armand Morin's Big Seminar Series and Carl Galletti's Internet Marketing Super Conference. You can learn more about his books and training courses by clicking the links below.
David Garfinkel is founder of the World Copywriting institute and is considered by many people to be the best teacher of copywriting in the world. The stated mission of the World Copywriting Institute is to “eradicate copywriting illiteracy in the world.” Jay Conrad Levinson, author of the world’s best selling series of marketing books, Guerrilla Marketing, says, “David Garfinkel is the best copywriter I know.” Sign up for David’s free World Copywriting Newsletter. and you get a free one-hour downloadable teleseminar on copywriting. Also visit David’s World Copywriting Blog:
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