Volkswagen Made a Great Point about Software Marketing (60 Years Ago)
And Grubhub gets far too excited about taco delivery
Hello Gobbledeers,
Let’s start with this week’s podcast:
Mike Nelson, the founder of Really Good Emails, joins me to discuss really good emails. Email marketing is the cockroach of marketing, in that it’ll never die, and we chat about overcoming fear, being vulnerable and how that makes for better emails. Also, my wife does some pretty damn fine voiceover work.
Listen on Apple Podcasts. (it also helps if you give it a number of stars after you listen).
I very, very much appreciate everyone who has told someone about this newsletter - you actually responded to my begging last week and told other people about it, and we got the biggest jump in subscribers we’ve ever had. And welcome to Jennifer K. who became Gobbledy’s 300th subscriber. If we ever meet at a conference, I owe you something.
Everyone who starts a newsletter starts with zero subscribers. I wrote the first one for literally nobody - that we’ve hit 300 people is insane to me. This is, to say the least, a bit of a niche topic that I write about each week. It means a lot that people actually read this. Thanks for continuing to share it….Onward to 1,000.
This week:
-My least favorite commercial of all time
-Grubhub needs to chill
-Software marketers can learn from 1960s Volkswagen ads
l dislike when marketers insult our intelligence
My least favorite commercial of all time was produced by Continental Airlines, and it’s fitting that the only screenshot I could get of it is also terrible:
(The ad I’m talking about starts at about 1:52).
I believe it’s from the mid-2000s from around the time when airlines stopped serving meals and before they started selling meals. If I’m remembering correctly, there was a period where you were neither given nor sold food on many flights.
The commercial shows travelers flying on a not-Continental plane and thinking about how hungry they are, as Americans are incapable of going 2 hours without stuffing their faces full of Biscoff cookies.
Those travelers then look out the window and see clouds going by, and those clouds are in the shapes of food. And the passengers are dreaming of the amazing food that is served on other airlines - namely Continental - and, as people used to do, daydream about the incredible meals they would be served when they flew to Milwaukee. The ad then reminds us that Continental still, in fact, serves that amazing food all of these passengers are dreaming about.
The end.
My response to this advertisement is, as Gobbledy charter subscriber James J’s 3rd favorite M*A*S*H* character would say, “horsehockey.”**
** (If there was any question in your mind whether I’m 97 years old, perhaps my namedropping a character from a 1970s sitcom while grousing about a 20 year old ad for a defunct airline and using the word “grousing” answered that question for you).
From roughly 1970 to 2005, the terribleness of airline food was such an overused joke, that the joke itself became shorthand for overused jokes. When airline food disappeared, no brave restauranteur went and opened an airline food restaurant to address the needs of customers demanding airline food.
Continental was insulting our intelligence. Everybody hated airline food and to pretend that everyone liked airline food was ridiculous and offensive. The product differentiation was legitimate (sometimes it’s kinda nice to have a half a turkey sandwich and a tiny bag of carrots as you wing it from Cleveland to Dallas).
It’s one thing to lie about your product - everyone’s pretty much expecting that - but lying about consumer REACTION to that product is offensive. Please don’t tell me how I’m going to feel. I’ll know how I’m going to feel if you describe the product well.
Which is why I also think Grubhub needs to chill
I believe these are running elsewhere, but delivery service Grubhub is currently running a campaign in the NYC subway that shows people who have recently had food delivered to their abode, and are (or are about to) enjoy that food. The image of someone enjoying their meal is accompanied by some clever-only-to-a-copywriter line like this one:
There’s a few in this campaign. This one has “eggzilaration” as the headline, though I couldn’t find the screenshot with it in there:
These bother me to the point where I’m torturing you about it because it is offensive to suggest that a $4 egg sandwich, delivered to your office at 8:30 in the morning would evoke that type of reaction.
Is this just me? As I’m writing this maybe I’m overreacting. Like this guy:
What we can learn from Volkswagen
Alright, enough complaining.
I’ve become fascinated with Volkswagen’s advertising from the 1960s, in part because it is an absolute masterclass in clever-but-informative copywriting, and because the lessons we can learn from these ads hold true for people who write software marketing copy.
I was thinking that copywriters had an advantage in the 1960s because marketing copy tended to be longer back then. But long isn’t necessarily better (and short isn’t necessarily worse - Absolut vodka ran a successful-beyond-belief decades-long campaign based on two word headlines.)
In the software world, I think we have a situation where we would benefit from longer copy, that would allow for better, clearer explanations. We often resort to gobbledy when we don’t have enough space to explain how our product is different and why that matters.
In this first Volkswagen ad from 1960, the focus is on why the Beetle basically looks the same every year. And why that’s a good thing:
I think the copy is legible, but if you’re my age, maybe it isn’t. 2 lines to call out:
The Volkswagen is never changed to make it different. Only to make it better.
19 functional improvements have been made…improvements in handling, in ride, in durability. But your eye wouldn’t detect these changes unless we pointed them out.
I assume the unchanging design was a knock on the car, and they wanted to turn that perceived negative into a positive. So they addressed that criticism head-on — other car companies just change their cars to change their cars. We only change it to improve it.
Secondly, they try to educate the consumer: looking at a car doesn’t tell you if it’s better.
We run up against these same issues in software all the time. How is your customer supposed to determine the best tool for them? From the demo? From how the admin screen looks? Take a suggestion from Volkswagen - tell them how they should decide. And be specific.
Have you made updates to the product over the past year? Instead of just rolling out the features, tell prospects why you chose to build those features and not others. Who’s your “famous Italian designer” and what did they tell you?
Let’s talk about this ad:
The copy above was on the left side of the ad, with the right side of the ad (which I’ve cropped) being a blank space where (ostensibly) you could fill in the picture of the car and a space for copy.
Yes: They ran an ad about how to write an ad for their product.
But the advice in it is legit! That’s the best part of it. It’s not some self-satisfying pile of trash. I have a project I’m working on now where I actually used this advice.
“Look harder - you’ll find enough advantages to fill a lot of ads, like the air-cooled engine” — the brilliance of this copy is that it IS about the car. Somewhere between 1961 and yesterday copy became clever for its own sake, rather than clever while touting product benefits. The ad is for the Beetle, not the copywriter.
“Don’t exaggerate…some people have gotten 50 mpg…but others have only managed 28. Average 32. Don’t promise more.” A specific truth is far more impressive than a generic lie. “6 of the Fortune 500 use our product” is better than “leading customer-obsessed enterprises choose us.”
“Call a spade a spade. And a suspension a suspension. Not something like ‘orbital cushioning.’” They wrote this 60 years ago. 60! We’re still writing whateverthehell the software equivalent of ‘orbital cushioning’ is.
Clever + specific = winner.
Readers’ Corner
Thanks to Gobbledy reader Gary S. for sharing the “How to do a Volkswagen ad” ad.