Think about the poor, over-messaged prospect

People are - as always - short of time.  I suspect people always have been.  I can see Socrates, in the agora at Athens, checking his diary and thinking he just had too many things to do.  That means you need to make stuff relevant - and fast.

It doesn't matter whether you're writing for big budget TV ads or charity direct mail.  The stuff we produce in the 'communications industry'* has the life-expectancy of a gnat.  In the same way, the people who see our stuff have the same attention span.  The average direct mail pack gets 12 seconds before it's binned or read - and eight of those 12 seconds are spent unfolding and opening the pack contents.  That means we need to get their attention pretty briskly.

So how do most practitioners do it?  Whacky bloody headlines.  Egg, this morning, sent me a mailing with the envelope line "Look inside.  It's worth it.  We're not just saying it's worth it because we can.  It really is.  Truly."

Now, 'worth it' to me at 7am means either coffee, a bacon sandwich or free money.  They were offering none of those.  In fact, they wanted to sell me an interest-free credit card.  No interest for 14 months.  A good, powerful offer.  So why use an envelope headline that has all the attraction of a plate of lightly salted slugs?

Two minutes with Google, and you can see that Virgin has a 15 month interest-free card, but there are plenty of 12 month, 9, 8, and 6 month offers the writer could have compared with. Get the art director to bash up a comparative bar chart for the envelope and stick on the headline "Where would you rather transfer your balance?"

It's not madly creative, but it IS simple, clear and gets straight through to the consumer.

It raises another point too - the notion that your consumer is capable of sapient thought.  That means it's THEIR decision if something's 'great', 'high-quality' or 'worth it' - not yours.

More next week...

*it's not a bloody industry - industries have foundries, sweat, workshops and make stuff; we sit at laptops, pontificate and have lunch.  And I like it that way.