Copywriting

positioning strategy BNBranding

The secret, missing ingredient of content marketing.

It’s the age of information, and much of the marketing buzz these days revolves around information-rich content marketing. Especially for business-to-business marketers, it’s all the rage. We have YouTube videos, webinars, blog posts, slide sharing, Powerpoint Presentations, Facebook updates, LinkedIn articles, tweets, podcasts, websites, ebooks, and white papers coming out our ears. In many cases, …

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waste in advertising BNBranding's Brand Insight Blog

Garbage In, Garbage Out — How to avoid waste in advertising

I took a load to the local dump the other day. As I hucked yard debris and unwanted consumer goods out the back of the truck, I got to thinking about waste in advertising… There are mountains of it. Despite all the analytics that are available, the digital targeting and the plethora of specialized channels, …

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Words matter! Why your brand identity needs a tagline.

Cadillac stole my tagline. Back in 2004 I wrote “Be Iconic” to support my name change from AdWords to BN Branding. That tagline was a critical element in my decision to go with that brand identity. “Be Iconic” worked perfectly in context with the name and the mark. It has staying power because it sums …

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BNBranding how to choose the right message for your ads

Old-school Mad Men advice : Use a USP in your advertising

Life in a 1960’s advertising agency makes for a great costume drama. Sometimes the powerful men of those fictitious Madison Avenue agencies can even teach us a thing or two. Like how to come up with a USP in advertising after downing five martinis over lunch. (If you haven’t binged on MadMen, you should.  It’s …

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BNBranding brand insight blog example of incongruity in copywriting

How to make your copywriting more compelling – Introduce incongruity

Sometimes, one single word is everything. The difference between a marketing home run and a dribbling bunt.
I recently ran into a client who was completely fixated on one word in a headline: “Precious.”
“Babies are precious, not parking places,” she argued. “Yes, but diamonds are also precious. And what’s more valuable than diamonds?” I countered.

Golf industry branding.

Fear of loss in advertising — Another effective angle of attack

I have an ongoing debate with a client who says we should never, ever take a negative approach in her advertising. She believes, whole heartedly, that fear of loss — or any hint of trouble — should not be part of her brand narrative. The debate’s been going on for years, and at this point …

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BNBranding's Brand Insight Blog

Enough, already, with the exclamation punctuation in advertising.

I’m an advertising guy… a copywriter from way back. We’re not nit-pickers when it comes to grammatical details like sentence structure and punctuation in advertising. (Got Milk?) But there’s one thing we all know:  the fastest, easiest way to get better ad copy is to delete all those ridiculous exclamation marks. Someone has to speak …

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Who reads long copy these days? The hungry ones.

I’m really tired of people telling me no one reads anything anymore. “Copywriting doesn’t matter.” “Long copy is dead.” A prospect recently said he didn’t want professionally-written web copy because, “no one reads it anyway.” He insisted that “People go to a site looking for something very specific. They don’t want to read, they just want to …

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craftsmanship of great advertising on the Brand Insight Blog

Craftsmanship in Advertising (God is in the details.)

I seldom write about Super Bowl advertising. (Too many other commentators offering their expert insight on the latest crop of outlandishly juvenile spots.) Besides, for most small business owners there’s no worthwhile takeaway from those big-budget productions. No marketing lesson to be learned. Spending millions to air one commercial just doesn’t compute. But in 2013 I …

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The new normal for Ecommerce — How to sell more stuff online.

Ecommerce is exploding. The COVID 19 pandemic has created a tidal wave of activity in that industry. One of our clients has seen a 550% increase in online sales. A year ago they were wondering how to sell more stuff online, and now they’re wondering how to handle the operational implications of this new normal …

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Take your next agency for a spin.

You wouldn’t buy a BMW without getting behind the wheel. You have no idea what it can do. Same with BN Branding. So let’s go for a test drive… just one small assignment to prove how well we handle whatever you throw at us.

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