Our new self-promotion t-shirts . . . 

Just in case there is any doubt about what we generate for our clients.

The stultifying sameness of advertising.

Here's a fun thing to do. 

Google a bunch of hotels and resorts and look up a bunch on TripAdvisor. This will prime your re-targeting pump and you'll get to see a lot of digital ads for these folks and people like them. Cubes, leaderboards - the works.

You're going to see fairly quickly that they look pretty much alike. Especially the resorts - a beach-in-the-foreground-water-in-the-background shot with some line that, frankly, is probably pretty much interchangeable with any other line on any other ad. In other words, nothing terribly unique or compelling here folks, move along. It appears that nobody ever even thought, for example, to show the beach from the water - if for no other reason, just to look different enough to attract attention.

Lookalike advertising is a waste of money. The purpose of advertising is to grab some eyeballs to your message. Not look like everybody else.

What's wrong with the New York Times?

Nothing really, so far as we can see. 

So one has to wonder why there is so little travel advertising in the Sunday Travel section. Sometimes, there only one or two ads in there. It's a national run - they don't do regional editions - and the open rate is a shade less than $1,200 per column inch. That means for about $18,000 you can run a 3 x 5 ad with almost no competition. Nationwide.

Which is to say, to people all over the country who are enjoying the Sunday Times over breakfast and coffee. And, because they are reading the Travel section, they have an interest in travel. These folks probably also have the time and money to travel, which makes that 18 grand a pretty good deal.

A highly visible 3 x 5 ad one time in a respected newspaper with a desirable readership. Well, no, it's not exactly a collection of cubes and leaderboards that come and go on all sort of websites (including some you'd never want to visit), and it's not the same as Adwords.

But it can sure as hell make those other things work harder. 

There's a difference between copywriters and SEO writers

The difference between an SEO writer and an ad copywriter is that SEO writers try to use as many words as possible to tickle the Search gods, while a real copywriter uses as few as possible to enhance the delivery of the message to the actual target audience.

One is focused on over-writing at the expense of clarity while the other is focused on making a marketing point.