Thursday, January 16, 2014

Why the Transformers are not Worthy Enough to Sniff Indiana Jones’ Butt

Every now and then I go off on a tangent and get way off topic. Actually, I am a master at doing this, and sometimes I get so far off topic that I have less of a chance than a goat of figuring out where my point originally was.

However, today I am going to deviate from my original blog planning and talk about something that is absolutely critical to the success of your sales copy.

Character

Character is actually a fun subject for me, because I am a con –o-sewer of movies.  (I think that’s French  for “I like them”.)  Anyway, for years I've wondered why I like certain movies and hate others. 
Some website on the Internet recently had a massive list of movies that you could go through and mark so that you could see how many movies you actually watched over the course of your buttered popcorn laden life.

Facebook has recently started a listing similar to this, and that social site looks more and more like MySpace every day to me.  But, there I go off on another tangent again.

So, as I was going through the many movies I had seen, I began to wonder why I could stand to see some movies over and over again, while others, even though they were very expensive to make, bored the snot out of me.

For example, my all-time favorite movie was Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was a slam – bang, live on the razors edge, laugh in the face of death action/adventure flick, while the Transformers, which ranked very low with me because I thought it was a very expensive, special effects loaded bore-a-thon, not worthy of sniffing the butt of Spielberg’s masterpiece.

But hey, that’s just my humble opinion.

I came up with two key reasons why some of the moves stunk while a few of the others were awesome.  One reason was the writing, and the other was an extension of that reason, which was the characters were BORING.

Someone once observed that even if a movie or TV show isn’t too good, if the character is well written or developed and the audience can identify with him or her, people will still watch the show.
Just recently, the Marvel Comics empire launched the “Agents of Shield” TV show.  Now, just for the record, I am a huge fan of Marvel comics.  I exclusively collected them, especially anything with Jack Kirby’s genius artwork on it.  Spiderman was the character I most identified with as a kid even though Kirby didn’t draw that comic.

Ooops! Off topic again!

But, my point is, that even though I am a die hard Marvel fan, I don’t like the show and it all boils down to a few things, like, fer instance….Situations that are just too unbelievable or fantastic it makes the rest of us mere mortals feel like gnats.

The other thing that I don’t like is that the characters are too cardboard.  I mean, they take everything for granted no matter how fantastic it is.  Some wet-behind the ears 7th grader invents a device that splits the moon in half, and all the main characters can do is yawn.  You know, that sort of thing.

I mean, they don’t react to anything!

So, if you have boring characters, or the story is just too unbelievable, then you will lose the interest of your readers.

It is exactly the same in your sales and advertising copy.

If you are painting a rather boring picture of your client, product, service or yourself and the ad copy is just plain unbelievable, your advertising copy will probably not convert very well. 

So, what you should take away from this is that when you have somebody write your advertising copy, if the copy is missing a certain amount of character, your ad will probably not get read very much.  And let us not forget the credibility factor either. 

Oh, another one of my pet peeves is what I like to call the Star Trek Statue of Liberty Play.  If you watch any of the Star Trek TV shows for very long there is always one of these.  There is almost always a situation where the star ship is facing eminent danger, and at the last minute, one of the crew members comes up with a way to save everyone using some sort technical wizardry.

Situation: The ship is about to be sucked into a black hole and there is absolutely no way in hades that they are gonna get out of this alive.

Then, some ensign with a brain about the size of Donald Trump’s ego says,

“Captain, if we re-calibrate the trans-inducers and boost the thermal power to the ship’s core, we might be able to reverse the polarity of the gravitational pull and have the black hole catapult us like a bucket of chicken into the negative zone.”

Captain:  “Make it so.”

So, if you are writing ad copy, make sure that if you really have a fantastic offer, you can back it up with facts, too.

I could elaborate on that idea more, but I went off topic again. (Sigh…)



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