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Humor in marketing, trailblazing women in media & copy resource of the week
Kimberly Houston
July 14, 2024
Hey, hi, howdy, and welcome to Issue #21 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 freelancing
✨ Humor as a differentiator in marketing
✨ Trailblazing Women in Media: Kelsey McKinney
✨ Copy Resource of the Week: Subjectline.com: The #1 free subject line rating tool.
✨ Just for Fun
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This week in freelancing …
Not much new to report this week. Just chugging along, working on projects for my two current clients, one in the software space and one in the healthcare space.
For my software client, I’m working on an article about the use of QR codes in healthcare. Did you know that QR codes were invented in 1994? I had no idea they’d been around that long!
I didn’t even know that “QR” stood for “Quick Response” until I started researching for this article. 😊
Ah, the interesting things you learn in a day’s work as a freelance writer!
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Humor as a differentiator in marketing
Humor, when done well, can be a wildly effective way to stand out among others who do what you do. That’s why I like to share examples of humor in marketing every chance I get – with clients, in social content, and in this newsletter.
Today’s example is a very short, yet hilarious & instructive, video. It teaches you to how to use a tool that might seem complicated, all in under a minute, while keeping you entertained.
I shared the video on LinkedIn with some brief commentary here:
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Trailblazing Women in Media: Kelsey McKinney
As with a couple of previous profile subjects, I came across the subject of today’s mini-profile on an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Longform, which features interviews with writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters about how they do their work. What a discovery goldmine this podcast is!
Kelsey McKinney is a features writer and co-owner at Defector.com, an employee-owned sports and culture website. She’s also the author of the novel, God Spare the Girls, published in 2021, and the forthcoming non-fiction title, You Didn't Hear This from Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip, to be released in February 2025.
At Defector, she’s written about arts & culture, food, life lessons, baseball, “chaos gardening,” and more*.
(*Normally I wouldn’t link to a site that requires you to enter your email or create an account just to read an article, but it looks like that’s how Defector is set up.)
McKinney has also written for The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Deadspin, Vanity Fair, GQ, and The Village Voice, among others.
She hosts a podcast, Normal Gossip, of which The New Yorker says, “The show evokes the thrill of sitting next to chatty, high-drama strangers at a café, a rare feeling in these indoor-oriented times. It’s delicious.”
Her body of work is substantial. Her journalist profile at Muck Rack features 1218 articles, as of this writing. 1218! I cannot even imagine having published that many bylined articles. So much respect for the ambition & work ethic required to pull that off.
By the way, interesting story about Defector … they launched in response to private equity taking over the media property, Deadspin, firing the deputy editor on the spot, and asking the Deadspin team to “stick to sports” – after which the rest of the editorial staff quit in protest.
Eighteen former Deadspin staffers then launched Defector “as a worker cooperative to shield ourselves and future employees from the travails of private equity ownership.”
As they say on their About page, “This is Defector, a new sports blog and media company. We made this place together, we own it together, we run it together. Without access, without favor, without discretion, and without interference.”
I love the way they think!
You can learn more about Kelsey McKinney at the inline links above, and / or check out:
A conversation with the author of the moving and assured ‘God Spare the Girls.’
Gossip Is Not a Sin (Guest essay in The New York Times. Gift link.)
Check out her personal website here, her Muck Rack profile here, or read some of her work at Defector here.
Listen to her appearance on the Longform podcast here or check out her chat with Hoda & Jenna of The Today Show about the origin of the “Normal Gossip” podcast here.
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Copy Resource of the Week: Subjectline.com: The #1 free subject line rating tool.
This week I bring you a new tool I just discovered that lets you test email subject lines. (FYI, there are many subject line testing tools out there, but I haven’t seen one as easy to use as this one.)
Because we all know how important subject lines are to getting our emails opened.
And we also know how important getting our emails opened is to most anything we’re trying to accomplish online, whether it’s sharing a free resource with subscribers, selling a product or service, asking folks to read our free content, or just about anything else.
I used this tool to test the subject line, The Taylor Swift Guide to writing emails that sell, and it scored a 92 out of 100. Who knows how accurate it is, but I’ll take it. 😊
Check it out here:
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Just for Fun
Let’s talk about books.
If you’re looking for something good to read, may I suggest perusing this list of books from one of my favorite resources in the history of ever, Bitter Southerner.
This year’s roundup is a far-ranging reflection of the incredible breadth (and oh-so-diverse source points) of Southern experience. Novels, short stories, memoirs, music, pop culture, poetry, history, food – this year’s list contains the most titles we’ve ever touted, from some incredibly gifted writers. So get those book totes ready. The pickings are rich.
In other book news I love, the writer Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies, The Vaster Wilds, Arcadia, Florida, Matrix and others) opened a bookstore in Florida, partly in response to terrible, no good, abominable book bans.
She and her husband decided that their town needed “an independent bookstore where titles that had been purged from libraries and classrooms would be on prominent display.”
Love that!
It’s called The Lynx, after the wildcat native to the state. “We wanted something a little fierce,” she said.
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Alrighty then.
That’s all for this week, my friend.
Be well. Stay curious. See you again in two weeks, on July 28.
Warmly,
Kimberly