Three crappy copy examples I’ve seen recently

Number one, from Addison Lee:

Why no, I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know it was a good idea to put negative messages in a supposedly helpful ‘Did you know?’ setting (because it isn’t).

Number two, from Facebook (click for bigger):

I receive this email far too often and the subject line irks me every time. For one thing, they’ve left off ‘Marketplace’ at the end, and for another, it should be and others’ friends rather than other’s. Grr.

Number three, from eBuyer (click for bigger):

I should point out that it’s mostly the messaging rather than the actual copy that vexes me here. We’ve missed you? Is there a more transparent way to say ‘We miss your money’?

Well yes, apparently there is. Namely, ‘…and your friends are more than welcome too!’. Dear god.

And of course it’s incredibly weak to send a ‘we’ve missed you’ email with no incentive to return. Without a cursory 5% off, or something, it’s literally just a reminder to give them some money. Great CRM there.

Ocado wants to see the end of local shops

Just spotted this ad for grocery shopping service Ocado, on a YouTube video (click for bigger):

See that? ‘No need for the local shop’. For a brand that’s known for its progressive, benevolent attitude, that’s pretty harsh. Surely there are better ways to extol the virtues of your business than wishing bankruptcy on someone else’s?

I’d be interested to hear Ocado’s comment on this. I’ll be tweeting it at them, so we’ll see if they respond.

UPDATE: Ocado’s response on Twitter:

Thanks for highlighting the error – the ad was meant to refer to supermarkets, not local shops, and has been corrected. Apologies.

‘Apologies’ is a bit weak (what’s wrong with plain old ‘sorry’?) but at least they responded. Hopefully we won’t be seeing this anti-local ad for much longer.

When things go wrong: brand apologies

I’ve just had this very apologetic email from Innocent Drinks:

Innocent’s tone of voice is much-envied and much-imitated by other brands, and yet it’s incredibly rare to see a brand apologise when something’s gone wrong. I’ve seen countless mistakes put down to ‘computer error’ (what a cop-out) or ‘supplier error’ (nice buck-passing) when the brand could just say sorry and put it right.

So if everyone wants Innocent’s tone of voice, why don’t more brands tell the truth and just say ‘we’re sorry’?

When I worked on the O2 account, one of my projects was a leaving card for people quitting the network. On the front, it says ‘Sorry to hear you’re leaving’. Sometime after that started being posted out to approximately 800 people a month, someone decided that saying sorry was a bad move, and that it would have to be scrapped (I don’t know if it was – I don’t work there anymore). How ridiculous. That particular ‘sorry’ wasn’t even a ‘we’re in the wrong’ kind of sorry, it was ‘sorry’ in the sense of ‘we’re sad’. What’s wrong with that?

One brand that’s notable for their prompt, detailed apologies is Transport for London, who run the London Underground. Whenever there’s been a disruption or delay, a printed apology is put up in the relevant stations within 24 hours. It explains what the problem was and says they’re sorry:

Picture from Annie Mole’s Flickr stream

OK, so ‘please accept my apologies’ isn’t exactly grovelling, but it’s a good deal better than not saying it at all. And 9 times out of 10, it seems the problem that caused the delay wasn’t even TfL’s fault. Clearly no-one thinks they’re weak for their apologies, so why don’t we see more brands putting their hands up? And people, for that matter. Come on, let’s all say we’re sorry.

You first.

T-Mobile cut fair use limit – and a lot of apostrophes

The indisputable winner of today’s ‘Adding insult to injury’ award is the UK arm of the T-Mobile phone network. From 1 February, they’ll be reducing customers’ monthly data limit from 1GB to 500MB. That’s bad enough, but the page they’ve hastily slapdashed together on their website (or at least I hope it was hastily, otherwise there’s no excuse) really takes the cake. See for yourselves (click for full size):

Here are my main grievances with this exceptionally shoddy piece of copy:

1. First line – “Fixed-price”. No need for the hyphen. Yes, I’m going to be that picky, I’m annoyed with these people!

2. Second line – “we never charge our customer’s more…”. Superfluous apostrophe, unless you’ve only got one customer – which may well be the case after this.

3. “You’ll never need to worry about how many emails you’ve sent, how long you’ve been on-line or the ‘data / GB’s’”. I have multiple problems with this sentence. Firstly, clearly now that they’ve cut the limit, we WILL have to worry about how much we’ve used. Secondly, online isn’t hyphenated – are you from the 90s or something? Do you still write ‘e-mail’ and capitalise the word ‘internet’?

Thirdly – and this annoys me so much I’m not sure I can articulate it properly – “‘data / GB’s'”. No need for the inverted commas, no need for the space before and after the slash, no need for the apostrophe in GBs. But worse than that, the reason we don’t need to worry about the gigabytes anymore is that we no longer have any. Gee, thanks!

4. “So Whats Changing?” and “What Does This Mean?”. Don’t Use Title Case. It’s Annoying, See? Also, this time they’ve omitted an apostrophe where they actually needed one. Sigh.

5. “So remember…” comes out of nowhere and is one of the reasons the whole piece scans terribly.

6. “If you want to download, stream and watch video clips, save that stuff for your home broadband.” Complete tone of voice fail on this line. It comes across as rude and dismissive. Excuse me – I’ve signed myself into an expensive 18-month contract with you jokers, for a smartphone whose main selling features include its large screen for watching videos and its app store for downloading things. Don’t tell me what to use my phone and home broadband for. That’s very much up to me. You pillocks.

7. They’ve halved my bastarding data allowance!

Ahh, I feel better now. Nothing like a good rant to soothe the commercial Copywriter’s harried soul.

The smartest spam I’ve seen yet

I’m quite interested in spam. In order to make an email convincing enough to get people to click the poisoned link, it has to sound a good deal like the brand it’s purporting to be from. Or at least, sound like A brand. Even if you’re not overly familiar with how your bank speaks, you wouldn’t expect them to misspell multiple words or sound like they wrote the email via BabelFish.

Scammers and spammers have cottoned on to this, and realised that the more they sound like their target company, the more money they’re going to make. And so those of us who write on behalf of brands for a living are no longer the only ones learning their tone of voice. Scattered across the world are a whole other group of people learning the quirks of a brand’s way of speaking, often through the filter of their own native language and with no hint of a brand manual. So it’s all the more impressive when they sound passable.

Behold this email I received from “Alliance & Leicester” the other day:

Dear Customer,

We are excited to announce that…

Alliance & Leicester, Abbey and the Bradford & Bingley savings business, are coming together to become Santander. This is great news for our 24 million customers in the UK, who will be able to enjoy the benefits of access to over 1,300 branches and 4,500 cash machines, all under the one name.

We want to be the best commercial bank in the UK, best for service and best for customer loyalty. We have got big plans to do it, and this website tells you all about them.

Please Click Here To Start

Yours sincerely,

Chairman, Emilio Botin”

Now, the language isn’t quite right (particularly “Click Here To Start”) but how clever is that? They’ve seen in the news that Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley are becoming Santander, and they’ve sent what looks very much at first glance like an official announcement message. They’ve even done their research about numbers of customers and ATMs.

If I were a customer of Alliance & Leicester, and a little less savvy about spam, I might well have clicked that.

Scary, isn’t it? Imagine what will happen when they do get it spot on. They could bankrupt the company they’re scamming (withdrawing a large proportion of savings from any bank puts it in trouble), which would eventually put legitimate brand writers like me out of business.

Spam emails could even become recruitment tools for new writers. Your standard Nigerian spammer scams because he needs money, and he’ll work for a good deal less than someone like me. We could end up with talent spotters from marketing agencies scouring their junk mail folders for potential new hires. I could end up working alongside a chap from Lagos who only last week tried to convince me I was the last surviving relative of a dethroned Indonesian king.

What a strange world that would be.