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11/29/2004: "Advertisers Using Fewer Words in an Effort to Grab More Business."

The following is from The Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2004.

Advertisers are trying to say more and more with less and less.

Under pressure to reach consumers more quickly and directly, some marketers have reduced their slogans and product names to the most commonplace bits of the English language. Verizon Wireless has been selling a feature known as the "In" network. In ads that ended earlier this year, AT&T Corp. brandished its ampersand. And Citigroup Inc.'s Citibank has a new rewards plan known as "Thank You."

Meanwhile, International Business Machines Corp. has started to highlight the "on" in its already brief tagline "on demand" (which followed another tagline -- "e-business" -- centered on a letter). And Nextel Communications Inc. is running ads linking its name to a four-letter word: "Done."

Marketing observers aren't certain the trend is a good one. "The irony is that if you just used a few more words, you might be able to get your message across a lot clearer," says Martyn Tipping of New York's TippingSprung, a naming and brand consultant. "It's not about the number of letters in the word. It's about the clarity and consistency of the message, and that's what's missing."

I wrote an ad for a national campaign that appeared in, among other publications, The Wall Street Journal. It was for an automobile. The ad contained one word on a full page and sold cars like you wouldn't believe!

The power of words is not in the number of words but in the words themselves.

Consumers Pop Open their Wallets to Buy Online Black Friday
. . . and buy they did . . .

Charge-card data collected by Visa USA indicate that cardholders charged a combined $7.4 billion on their Visa cards at retail stores on Friday and Saturday, a 14.3% increase over the same period last year. Use of debit cards was up sharply, possibly the result of worries about debt: Shoppers spent $3.3 billion using debit cards in the two-day period, a 20.2% rise over last year; consumers' credit-card spending exceeded $3.8 billion for the period, an 8.8% rise. (The remaining $276 million in sales were made on corporate charge cards; the data reflect both increased spending and the effect of more cards in use.)

More people than ever chose to let their fingers do their holiday shopping. Consumers spent $250 million online on Friday, a 41% increase over the $174 million they spent online on the same day a year ago, according to comScore Networks, a Reston, Va., company that tracks Web site activity. For the November-December holiday season, online spending is expected to surpass $15 billion -- marking as much as a 26% increase over last year, comScore says.

What's selling: Digital cameras and DVD players.

And so it goes . . .




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