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Differentiation deep dive, trailblazing women in advertising & copy resource of the week

Author

Kimberly Houston
October 06, 2024

Hey, hi, howdy, and welcome to Issue #27 of The Subhead, a bi-weekly newsletter about copywriting, marketing & media, and a look at some of the women who make it great.

In today’s edition*:

✨ This week in newslettering: Celebrating one year

✨ Differentiation Deep Dive … Redux

✨ Trailblazing Women in Advertising: Jane Maas

✨ Copy Resource of the Week: Improve Your Website in 5 Minutes

✨ Just for Fun

*A quick note before we get started … two sections of the newsletter today are content repeats from last October because … circumstances. But hey, you can’t control the weather!

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This week in newslettering: Celebrating one year

Instead of the usual “This week in freelancing” section that typically appears here, I want to talk briefly about this newsletter, because …

Break out the champagne, I sent the very first issue of this newsletter on 10.08.23, which makes this the official one-year anniversary of The Subhead, hooray!! 🎉🎉

My goals for the first year were modest: I simply wanted to get in the habit of sending a newsletter out every other Sunday, no matter what.

Between the writing I do for clients, the content I create for other avenues on the regular, and some complicated life stuff I won’t bore you with, I knew that if I found the bandwidth to build that one simple bi-weekly habit, that would be enough, and I would consider this project a success.

That said, there are many, so very many, things I want to do with this newsletter going forward, such as, improve the content by leaps and bounds, develop more clarity and focus about this newsletter’s JTBD (Jobs to Be Done), acquire more subscribers, create a design template for this thing once and for all, holy heck, and so on and so forth … the list is long.

But for now, I’m going to celebrate myself for making it to the one-year mark. 🎉

And THANK YOU for being here for it, whether you’ve read one issue, five issues, or all of them. 💖

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Differentiation Deep Dive … Redux

And since it’s been a year … I thought I’d re-share the resource on differentiation from my very first newsletter last October.

I spent very many long weeks researching and writing this article; in fact, it’s the longest I’ve ever spent on any writing project that I can recall … except for maybe one of my research papers in grad school?

Anyhoo, I give you:

Is your boring brand personality killing your sales?

A breakdown of how beloved brand Saddleback Leather uses storytelling, quirky brand personality and stand-out copy to differentiate in a crowded, competitive market with a commodity product, and generate enviable revenue.

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Trailblazing women in advertising: Jane Maas

“Jane Maas, who, though neither mad nor a man, became a trailblazer in the testosterone-driven advertising industry of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Friday in Mount Pleasant, S.C. She was 86.”

That’s the first line of Jane Maas’ obituary from the New York Times in November 2018.

It’s said that the character of Peggy Olson from the show Mad Men was based on Maas.

(It’s also said that Peggy Olson was based on Mary Wells Lawrence, the first woman to lead her own ad agency in the Mad Men era, and also on copywriter, Shirley Polykoff, who came up with the Clairol tagline, “Does she…or doesn’t she? Hair color so natural only her hairdresser knows for sure.” Peggy Olson could have been based on any of these pioneers. But I digress.)

Career highlights

Maas started out as a junior copywriter at the famed Ogilvy and Mather in 1964, a well-known agency doing work for some of the most recognizable brands in the world to this day. She eventually became only the second woman to be promoted to vice president at the agency.

(You’ve probably heard of Ogilvy and Mather – one of the agency’s founders, David Ogilvy, is known as the “Father of Advertising,” and created the ultra-famous headline, "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”)

Over the course of her career, Maas was also a creative director at the agency Wells Rich & Greene, president at agency Earle Palmer Browne, and ran her own agency.

She was credited with shepherding the wildly successful tourism campaign, “I Love New York,” while at Wells Rich & Greene in the 1970s. The campaign featured an original song, tv commercials, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, and of course, the iconic “I ♥New York” logo. (You can still find some of the original commercials on YouTube. Fun!)

Did the show “Mad Men” exaggerate what it was like to work in advertising?

Maas recalled witnessing even more drinking, more sex and more sexism in her office places than Mad Men depicted.

Stick to writing about household products, sweetie

What a trailblazer Maas was. Back in those days, female copywriters were few and far between, often working as one of only seven or eight total in an agency with dozens of male copywriters. That was back when female copywriters were kept off liquor and automotive accounts, and relegated to food, detergent, coffee and other household categories.

Maas says female copywriters at Ogilvy were only permitted to work on certain accounts that were deemed “appropriate” for women: “Women were not allowed to work on automobiles, because men didn’t think we knew how to drive, women were not allowed to work on financial accounts, because men didn’t think we knew how to balance our checkbooks, and we weren’t allowed to work on liquor, because that’s what men used to seduce us so they didn’t think we understood that either.”

Which brings me to my favorite bit from the Times obituary:

“Interviewed by Advertising Age in 2014, Ms. Maas recalled creating one commercial in which an actress rhapsodizes about how much her husband enjoyed the coffee she had lovingly brewed for him. ‘I can’t believe I wrote that drivel,’ she said.”

Maas also wrote books

Maas wrote about her career in two books, Adventures of an Advertising Woman (1986), and Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond (2012). She co-wrote How to Advertise: Building Brands and Businesses in the New Marketing World (1976), with Kenneth Roman, considered an industry classic.

Interestingly, though Maas was such a trailblazer in the industry, my research didn’t turn up many reliable resources worth linking to. Here are four I found the most useful, if you’d like to learn more about Maas and her work:

Maas was one of the first women to reach the top ranks of the industry, later chronicling its shocking behaviour in two memoirs

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Copy Resource of the Week: Improve Your Website in 5 Minutes with These 7 Tips

In the brief video linked below, Gill Andrews, copywriter, web consultant and all-around website expert extraordinaire, shares 7 quick tips to reduce your bounce rate and keep web visitors on your website longer.

I encourage you to watch the video, so you can get the context / rationale / why for each of these tips, because the rationale is important.

#1: Keep your subheads and section headings short

#2: Avoid centered text

#3: Use action-focused button copy for your CTAs (calls to action)

#4: Remove useless images

#5: Don’t use too many one-line paragraphs

#6: Keep your text lines narrow

#7: Internal links should open in the same tab

And if you’re looking to improve your website copy and overall website performance, I highly recommend subscribing to Gill’s emails (looks like you have to scroll down to the website footer to do that) where she shares loads of actionable website improvement tips on the regular.

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Just for Fun

“Hello workers. Another long day at the office?  Boss being a meanie? Too bad! Shut up! Listen, I’ve got some important news.”

So starts this brilliant ASICS ad / PSA with Brian Cox, urging us to put our mental health first by taking a short movement break from our desks during the workday.

It’s 1 minute, 14 seconds of pure levity, with an important message baked in.

(And Brian Cox in shorts and sneakers? That’s just a bonus. 😊)

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That’s it for this week, my friend.

As always, thanks for reading, I appreciate you!

Be well. Stay curious. See you again in two weeks, on October 20.

Warmly,

Kimberly