My last day of my two week placement at Spring. I feel like I’ve done quite a bit in the nine days here. And it’s certainly been a fantastic experience.

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Along with Zapfino, a lazy fad is the Three. Word. Strapline.

I can see how this has come about. You are the marketing manager or director of an SME and you want to make the brand more up to date – so you call in a brand strategist to work on the brand character with you.

The brand strategist gets out his flipchart and asks everyone to brainstorm words that sum up the brand activities and character. You end up with pages full of words: inspiring, real, responsible, tasty, green, bouncy – etc etc.

Then the whittling down process starts. This is key (and necessary) – all those words need to be distilled to a pithy trio that summarises your brand’s purpose.

This whole process may have taken three days (at a country hotel with two of those days beset by hangovers) or a morning, may have involved everyone from CEO to cleaner or just the marketing department – but by this stage everyone is thoroughly fed up with the process and wants to check their emails.

Now, my view is that the stage that has been reached now is only the start. Those three words (and the process that led to them) and a really solid body of competitor, market and consumer research should form the basis to a good quality creative brief, which allows a creative copy johnny to play with words until the perfect set have been found to summarise your brand.

But, maybe due to exhaustion, maybe due to bordeom, maybe due to sudden budget fears, an enormous amount of companies seem to confuse their three word brand distillation with a strapline.

It’s particularly rife in the hospitality and services industries:

Eat. Drink. Sleep
Hotel. Restaurant. Bar

Communication. Integrity. Results.
People. Places. Passion.

This is largely a feature of small companies but the big boys are not totally innocent of the lazy strapline crime. Look around you – on signs, in magazines, on the tellie – and you’ll see a lot of them, some from some pretty big players.

It’s such a wasted opportunity! A good strapline adds tremendous value to corporate branding. The classics stay with companies for years. It’s a key stage of brand development and this current fashion for dropping it in favour of what amounts to a brief or a scamp is a crying shame.

Our George has just undertaken some competitor research for a construction client, and dug out this plum mission statement from a large company that really should know better:

“To deliver exceptional value through customer-focused radical solutions to create, manage and invest in property and infrastructure assets.”

Maybe this is where they got it from – these randomly generated mission statements make about as much sense.

It’s a tricky subject, copyright. Much to clients’ surprise, their work does not automatically belong to them. In fact, agencies own the copyright to all the work they generate, whether the client has paid or not.

Copyright will automatically belong to the creator of the work, unless they:

1: Are creating this work as part of normal employment – in which case copyright will belong to the employer.

2: Have agreed as part of the contract or terms of service to hand over ownership of copyright.

Now, what Spring does to get round this for our clients, is offer them the right to take over copyright once they have paid for their work. Funnily enough although this is written in clear terms on our quotations, only one client has ever asked us to send them formal documentation to this effect – and that was a 14 year old intern for whom we had created a pro bono item. He’ll go far.

So what if clients DON’T ask, or DON’T pay? Well, in effect they have to secure their agency’s permission – a license in effect – for the use of their brand, photography or other item. And clearly if they haven’t paid, this permission will not be granted. If they use the item anyway, the owner of the copyright has the legal right to demand that all copies of offending material be recalled and destroyed.

So, the lesson is:

1. If an agency pitches concepts, and, despite not taking them up on it, a client uses elements of those concepts in the finished piece, the agency has every right to demand payment or pulping
2. Up until the point that bills are paid, it is highly unlikely that an agency will allow use of their items
3. Upon payment of a bill, clients should ask their agency for a copyright transfer or useage license.
4. Wise clients will check what agencies are prepared to surrender, up front.
5. In the event that a client sells their business, the new business owner has no more right to use items than the client did, if those items were unpaid or unlicensed, as it is not an asset of the company.

This is terribly important and often overlooked. We would strongly advise clients to ensure they have covered the issue, and make sure it doesn’t come back and bite them.

Yes yes. I know you’ve spent ages fine-tuning your product to make it a rip-roaring success.

So it’s no surprise that you want to tell everyone — including me — about the fruits of your hard work. About all the brilliant features you’ve spent ages developing.

One problem. I, the reader of your ad, am not the slightest bit interested in you. It’s all about me.

If you want me to buy your product, I want to know what’s in it for me. Don’t give me your features. I want benefits. Cold, hard benefits:

• I don’t buy a camera because it’s got a ‘night-flash-mode’; I buy it because I can take better pictures at parties.
• I don’t buy a coat because it’s got a patented thermo-lining; I buy it because it keeps me warm when others are shivering.
• I don’t stay in a hotel because it’s in the town centre; I stay in a hotel because it’s just a few minutes walk from the many bars and restaurants in the town centre and so I don’t have to pay extortionate taxi fares.

Copywriting that ignores benefits and focuses on features is the advertising equivalent of looking at someone else’s holiday snaps. You know the ones:

This is me with an ice cream, what a lovely ice cream it was. It was worth going holiday just for that ice cream… And here are the kids with their ice creams…

Excruciating.

So don’t do it to your customers — explain to them why parting with their cash for your brilliant new product is going to make their lives better.

They might not thank you for it. But they’ll probably buy it.