Drayton Bird on websites and keeping on message

Grant Leboff: Drayton, obviously in the digital world now websites have become really, really important. What’s your view on getting a website right?

Drayton Bird: I think in order to get a website or anything else right, it’s a good idea to start by asking what are you hoping it will do for you? An American copywriter whom I respect a lot wrote the other day that, the only purpose of a website was to collect names, and I don’t agree. I do agree that if your website is not collecting names you’re an idiot, which means that nearly all websites are run by idiots because hardly any of them really make an attempt to collect names.

Grant Leboff: At this point I’m really relived that my website collects names.

Drayton Bird: Yes, I mean, so the first thing you got to … That’s one thing, it’s got to collect names, but the other thing, what else is it doing? It’s validating you. The way it looks will, you know, if you look scruffy like me it’s not an inspiring enthusiasm, if it looks smart like you, people trust you. I bought this shirt 25 years ago in California – I found it this morning, really.. I’m just a recycled mess! What is there to validate you? It’s one of the great things about a website as you don’t have to be a big company to have a website, so you can be any size company with a website. Unless you’re well known brand people won’t know whether you’re big or small, so it’s there to validate you. It’s there to tell people what you do best than other people. It’s there to inspire confidence, which is why, again, a lot of websites don’t do this properly. Pictures of people are very, very important. What’s really important is a nice picture of a person making an offer on the top right hand there.

There is one problem with a website, big problem, I assume everybody watching this knows what a landing page is, or a squeeze page. Maybe if any of you don’t, it’s just something that’s like … It’s a long string of stuff. The difference between a website and a landing page is a very important difference, so if I’m trying to sell something to you I won’t send you to my website. Why won’t I send you to my website? Because the difference between a website and landing page is like the difference between a field with horses in it, with no fences, and a field with horses in it with fences. A website is like a field with horses in it with no fences. You’ve gone to a website, and you’ve done it you’ve gone to a website to see something and you’re surprised somewhat to find 20 minutes later you’re somewhere totally different. You saw something on that website and you go, “Oh, I’ll have a look at that.”

So you’re not held in, but I want to hold you in and show you something here. If I’m trying to show you something I will send you to landing page. It will just keep you going, there’s nowhere else you can go, I won’t give you a chance to leave. We have found sometimes that having a landing page which doesn’t even allow you to buy anything for a long time will work very well. I have a thing called ‘Ask Drayton’ which is a thing where I offer people advice, and it takes 22 minutes to read it. Certainly in one test we didn’t ask anybody to buy anything until right at the end, and it worked very well. You’ll see if you look … If you want to be good at marketing you’ve got to study people who are good at marketing, and the people who are good at marketing very often tend to be people selling complicated things that cost a lot of money. The complicated thing that cost a lot of money in this particular case is investment.

If you go and have a look at say the Motley Fool or The Daily Reckoning, any of those sites and you’ll see how long … The Daily Reckoning everyday, comes out everyday. I once measured how long one of their emails was on a day, it was well over 2000 words long, well over 2000 words long. This brings us back to the question of websites, most websites do not tell you enough. Any communication designed to sell you something should number one, give you every reason why you should do what they want you to do. Number two, overcome any sane reason why you wouldn’t want to do it. Number three, it must also have repetition, because unless you repeat something, it doesn’t stick in the mind, and teachers know this. I have a daughter, I have several daughters, but I have a particular daughter at the moment who right now as we speak, she’s got something on Sound Cloud in America and it’s just gone over 100,000 plays.

I have know her since she was very small obviously, since she was born. When she was a baby she used to stand in front of the television screen blocking everybody else’s view, and she would do the alphabet.(In children’s rhyme) “A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P- Qoo -R-S-T-U …” She was repeating, that’s how she learnt the alphabet, how do I remember? Because she said ‘qoo’ and that’s the element of surprise, yeah? You need surprising things on your website.

Grant Leboff: That means your implication of what you’re saying is that long copy is still very much alive and well. Are there any particular areas of long copy in a digital environment when someone’s doing something on digital that you have to pay particular attention to?

Drayton Bird: Those things, those things-

Grant Leboff: The element of surprise-

Drayton Bird: I think you have to look … I don’t think there’s any difference between a great commercial, say many people think the greatest commercial ever made was for the Volkswagen, oddly enough written by some people I used to work for in the 60s. It’s the one that, if anybody has seen it, it worth showing it to them if they haven’t seen it. It shows … There’s no words at all, you just see feet crunching on the snow, and then you see a guy getting out of a car / You don’t see … You see a car arriving, you hear it arriving, you don’t see it, and then you hear something else arriving, you don’t know what it is. Then you see this foot comes out of this car, and crunches in the snow, and then a voice says, “Have you ever wondered how the guy who drives the snow plough gets to the snow plough? This one drives a Volkswagen.” Probably the best commercial ever made, element of surprise making one simple point.

There are different kinds of marketing communications, there are marketing communications where all you’re trying to do is to get over one point. Let’s say, when commercial television came into England, which I can remember, so there was a commercial for Pepsodent. “You wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.” I know people who can remember commercials I know they were not alive to see, a strange thing, folk memory. Very strange thing. These sort of commercials are trying to hammer home one point because there are different kinds of marketing. There is the marketing I do mostly, not always, where I want people to do something now, and there is the marketing where I don’t want them to do something now, I want them to do it when they get to the point of sale.

Retail marketing which I found … My first job in London, with Leo Burnett in 1962, I think it was, I worked for a retail store. The challenge was the same as it was for direct (marketing) because you knew if I wrote an ad that run on a bloody Friday, I knew on Monday whether it worked or not. In the same way that if I run an email … We send our emails every single day except Saturday, which is something I arguing with my people about, what’s special about Saturday? Always, I’m hammering home one point in each email, and I know immediately what’s happened. I know within hours. I know what the open rate was, which is not the most important thing, but it’s a clue. I know what the click rate was, and then I know the most important thing, how many people replied. Even more than the most important thing, how many of the buggers bought, but that’s not the same as selling pork pies, or Pepsodent, or something else.

Many years ago I went through a period of my life when I lived under a false name because I’d gone broke, and I owed the tax people too much money to appear in public. I did everything for a living, and one of the jobs that I did, I was a freelance creative director. One of the brands I worked on was the Airbus, a small aero-plane which was new then. What was I doing with the Airbus? I wasn’t trying to sell a bloody airbus, they’re expensive! I was trying to get over point, the Airbus is okay, although it’s only got two engines it can fly with one engine. Up to that point they’d all had four engines. This brings me to what I was talking about before when I was talking about planning, when you plan something you have to look at what are you competing against? We were competing against the DC9 or whatever it was, the Boeing. What was the difference? What were people worried about?

This business is about overcoming people’s objection, don’t worry. “Shit, it’s only got two engines, is it gonna drop out of the sky?” You’re not only emphasizing the positive things, which in the case of the airbus was fuel economy, you’re overcoming the negative things. The degree to which you have to do it depends on the kind of marketing you’re doing, do I want something that getting over a message over a long period of time, like it would be with the Airbus? Do I want something where I want immediate response like it is with my little emails, or other people’s little emails, or a little ad in the paper to sell mole skin trousers, for £7.59? Whatever, the people have to think!

I think the mistake … Well, looking back at my career with remorse, I’m always reminded of President De Gaulle’s remark, and he said, “Aim for the top, it is less crowded there.” I never thought I aimed high enough, and I think most people are like me, we don’t aim high enough. I did aim I think high enough in the sense that I tried to master every kind of marketing. This idea that you’ve got to specialize in one narrow field seems to me insane, but I’m probably wrong.

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