Two options for creating a great homepage headline

And one option for a celebrity spokesperson: someone who sits around and plays video games

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going?

I wanted to share an essay I just read by a writer named Dan Sinker about what he’s calling our “Who Cares Era.” The idea is that AI (coupled with some other shifts in the culture) have allowed lots of people to get away with creating content (and reading content) that was produced, at its core, without any care. As writer Les Orchard put it, “It’s not publishing. It’s performance art for algorithms.”

This newsletter is read by a lot of people who work in Content, and this can be a disheartening time because we’re inundated with, er, content telling us that what we do and the work we create, can be done just as well without putting in any of the work that we all know is required to create writing that we are proud of.

If you’ve talked to me about Gobbledy, the thing I’ve likely said to you is that writing this is a joy. That’s the word I always use - joy. I know that not everyone finds writing to be joyful. That’s OK. But so many of us reading this newsletter DO find it joyful.

Here’s the good news: For all of us who find joy in writing, this is our time. Our work stands out, and has soul, and feels - I don’t know how else to say this - real, in a way that so, so much of what I read today does not.

We don’t live in an age that’s the beginning of the end of writing; we live in an age that’s the beginning of a rebirth of it.

As Dan wrote in the essay: In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

I’m excited to see what you all create.

OK, enough.

Today:

1. Two options for creating a great homepage headline

2. Cheesy marketing

3. I guess your celebrity spokesperson doesn’t need to be aspirational

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Two Ways to Make a Clear Homepage Headline

I promised last week that I’d share an example of a clear homepage, and I’m not going to keep you in suspense anymore.

Well, a little bit more…

So many companies struggle with what to put at the top of the homepage because they think it needs to be something clever or cute. That is a waste of time. I like clever and cute as much as the next guy (probably more!) but it does exactly zero to get your prospect to want to know more. It wastes the most valuable space you own.

I’d suggest that you have a two options for your headline on the homepage:

One option is what I’ve seen referred to as “Now you can…”

Let’s say you work for Fluzzio.ai, a company I made up that is in the medical records encryption space (also they help you overcharge Medicare so you can make more money).

You’d write out “When you buy Fluzzio.ai, now you can encrypt medical records while overcharging Medicare so you can afford your alimony" (or whatever). For the headline, you’d write out everything after “Now you can”. Like this:

Perfect. I like “Now you can” because it forces you to think about what the product actually DOES, and what the future will look like for the user.

The second option is to spell out your target market. Tell the reader either what you do (we encrypt medical records) and for whom you do that thing (divorced doctors). Rather than using the “now you can” construction, you can go with “we are an X for Y people” (you can either include the “we are a” or not). Here is one example, from actual company Proton.ai:

Putting side the board-mandated “AI-powered,” “CRM for distributors” is incredibly clear. They then have the rule-of-3s subhead, but at least none of those are the trite “increase revenues.” I’d suggest they make “Watch a video” the main call-to-action and make “Book a demo” the secondary CTA, if only because this is at the top of the page and people are more likely to want to watch a video at this point than to book a call, but that’s a quibble.

If you’re a distributor looking for a CRM tool, it’s pretty clear Proton is an option for you.

The other example I wanted to share was from a small consultancy called Hermit Tech.

The typical advice for a homepage is to make sure the message is about the buyer, not about the company. That advice is good. But it doesn’t mean other advice is bad.

If you are not a known quantity, people will be coming to your website knowing very little about you. Especially for very early stage companies, the top of the homepage should be clear about what you are (and not make up a new category), and who you are for, preferably with some detail around who it is for.

In other words, your Series A (or earlier) company, should have a homepage that looks like this:

Probably clearer than the headline on your company’s website, no?

Want an fun (“fun”) exercise for your next team meeting? Show them those two homepages (“CRM for distributors” and “we engineer…”) and come up with versions for your own homepage. Go into Inspect in developer tools in the browser and actually look at the mockup. Then show it to people in the office. The clarity will be shocking to people, and your team will be heroes.*

(*Not a legal guarantee.)

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The Cheesiest Marketing…

If you asked me, “Hey, Jared - can you find me a marketing thing that completely sums up America?” I would say, “Absolutely! Thanks for asking!”

And I would share this sign I found in Guam a couple of years ago that, thanks to Google Translate, I’ve learned is telling Japanese visitors that they can shoot guns in a “American traditional shooting range”:

10 points to the graphic designer who turned the “A” in “USA” into a gun.

Well, yes, you might say, that certainly is an advertisement that sums up America. But maybe, you’d ask, there’s something a little bit, I dunno, less sad?

I’m glad you asked!

Obviously the best way to sum up America in one bit of marketing news is to make sure it involves mozzarella sticks:

Yes, America’s most successful marketing campaign is based on deep fried cheese. And if your software company isn’t getting in on this trend, well, I don’t really know how to help you.

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Re-thinking the Celebrity Spokesperson

Here’s something you weren’t wondering about:

Did you know who the first celebrity endorser was?

Me neither!

But the Internet is pretty amazing, and you can look stuff like that up, and I learned that the answer is Lily Langtry, a British actress who graced advertisements for Pears Soap back in 1882. Take a look:

She’s a beaut.

I assume the marketers at Pears hired Ms. Langtry because of her aspirational beauty and fancy job as an actress, and the idea was that everyone who read the ad would think, “If I buy me missuz some Pears Soap, I reckon she’ll ‘ave the same ‘ealthful skin and complexion as Ms. Langtry, she’ll ‘ave…” (or whatever). In any case, the first celebrity endorsement was about aspiration.

I’m obviously not telling you anything you didn’t already know.

Celebrity endorsements continued for the next 150 or so years, virtually always with the idea that the celebrity represents the aspirational idea of something - beauty, athleticism, wealth - and that buying the product will get you closer to that ideal.

And yes, sure, there have been bumps along the way. Pepsi set Michael Jackson’s hair on fire. OJ Simpson may have been involved in a domestic incident that went viral. The guy who sold Jell-o Pudding Pops seems to have enjoyed drugging women. The basketball player selling your underwear and t-shirts decides that a Hitler mustache would be a good look in a commercial:

That’s one of the challenges of having a celebrity endorse your product - they might do something that will no longer want people to aspire to be like them.

That said - I want to make clear: the thread that runs through 150 years of celebrity endorsements is that the consumer should want to buy the product so they can take on some of the positive traits of the endorser.

Until now.

Behold, Pete Davidson for Verizon:

Allow me to set the scene:

A 31-year old man is playing video games alone on a couch. He says:

“I’m not really big into committing to things…I usually stop binging the show halfway through the first episode. I mean, remember when my hair was blond for like 2 seconds? When Verizon announced that I could lock in a low price for like 3 years for both phone and Internet, even if I’m already a customer? I was like, ‘duh!’”

Like duh, indeed.

So while I said above that there is one thread that runs through all celebrity endorsements, I was being flippant. Also, I was lying. There are a couple of ways to use celebrity endorsements:

1. Aspiration

2. “I’m a celebrity, but I’m a regular guy like you.”

Back when I was living in Michigan in the 1990s, there used to be an ad for manufactured homes featuring beloved Detroit Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell, who opened the ad with something like, “If you’re like me, you want the comfort of a home at a great price…” This is less about aspiration and more about trust - hey, I’m a regular guy like you, so you can trust me.

Those are the two options: If you buy this product, you can be like me. Or, because you know me, you can trust my recommendation.

This Verizon ad (that you’ve probably forgotten about at this point) is an unexpected twist on these 2 traditional celebrity advertising tropes. You think it’s going to be an aspiration-type message, but it’s actually an “I’m a regular guy” message. Except the way in which he’s a regular guy - he’s a 31 year old guy who sits on his couch all day playing video games, while being unable to make any commitments in his life - embodies traits that are not, classically, those that the average person is trying to embrace.

And credit to the agency that wrote the ad for saying, “You may have some traditionally-considered-undesirable traits yourself, just like this famous guy, but that’s ok, because we have a product for you.” They somehow twisted all of this around back to the product.

But still, this is the oddest celebrity endorsement I can remember.

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Thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part…

P.S. - Here’s a guy who spent $12,495 to be Gene Simmons’ roadie for a day, and thought it was worth every penny. And despite my incomprehension of the band KISS (I’ve written that they are “the Count Chocula of music”), I also think it might’ve been worth it.