I’ve always thought that if marketers wrote newspapers, the famous New York Times headline of August 8, 1974 would have looked like this:
Instead of how it actually looked, which was:
What’s the difference? While both of the above presentations are structured, the newspaper doesn’t let the template get in the way of story. The newspaper works within the template to tell the story.
I think because marketing departments are so often split between “design people” and “content people,” that (1) templates get over-weighted relative to content and (2) content people get so busy adhering to the template that they forget to tell the story.
Here’s a real, anonymized example:
What’s wrong here?
- There is a lot of wasted vertical space at the top: all large font, bolded template items with generous line spacing.
- The topic section gets lost among the other template items. Visually, author is as important as topic.
- There is no storytelling. There is effectively no headline — “Latest Release of Badguy Product” takes no point-of-view and doesn’t create an angle for a story.
- The metadata is not reader-first, preferring to remind Charles of his title over providing information on how to contact him.
But there is one, much more serious problem with this: the claim / rebuttal structure of the document lets the competitor, not the company, control the narrative.
For example, political affiliations aside, consider current events between Trump and Comey. Like him or not, Trump knows how to control a narrative. With the claim / rebuttal format, our competitive bulletin would read something like this if adapted to the Trump vs. Comey situation.
Competitive Update: Team Comey
Trump says:
- Comey is a coward
- Comey is a leaker
- Comey is a liar
But, don’t worry, our competitive team says:
- Comey isn’t really a coward, but it is interesting that he released the information through a colleague at Columbia Law School
- Comey isn’t really a leaker because not all White House conversations can be presumed confidential and logically speaking you can either leak or lie, but you can’t both at the same time.
Great. What are we talking about? Whether Comey is a leaker, liar, or coward. Who’s controlling the narrative? Not us.
Here’s a better way to approach this document where you rework the header and metadata, add a story to the title, recharacterize each piece of the announcement on first reference (rather than saying it once “their way” and then challenging it), and then providing some broader perspective about what’s happening at the company and how it relates to the Fall17 release.
This is a very common problem in marketing. It comes from a lack of storytelling and fill-in-the-template approach to the creation of marketing deliverables. Avoid it by always remembering to put the story ahead of the template.
Just likes blogs and newspapers do.
