According to she-conomy.com, 85 percent of all brand purchases are made by women. But incredibly, only three percent of advertising agency creative directors are women. That means men are doing most of the advertising to women.

Pick up any Communication Arts magazine “Advertising Annual,” a compendium of the year’s best advertising in the US. When you look for the creative teams developing the work, it’s about 90 percent men. They’re selling women feminine hygiene products, makeup, clothing, jewelry, pregnancy products…you name it.

How can they possibly know and understand the female mindset? Sure, they get tons of research to help them craft compelling messaging. But when it comes to actual female emotions, I really don’t think they have a clue.

So why don’t more ad agencies staff their creative departments with women? The female writers I know can concept a headline and write motivating text  just as well as any man. Ditto for the female art directors I know.

Is it the ‘Boys Club’ mentality? Is it fear of being one-upped by, horrors, a girl? I judged an ADDY’s show a few years ago with a talented creative director from Minneapolis. I asked him if his firm ever hired women copywriters. He said, “Oh, we had a client specifically request a woman writer this year, but we couldn’t find anyone.” Really? I mean, really? In the whole country?

I told a male writer friend in Phoenix that his creative department had too much testosterone. “We’ve been talking about that with our creative director,” he said. But that was months ago. They still haven’t hired any women.

I think the facts speak for themselves. Women make most of the buying decisions in a household. Therefore, it stands to reason that women are uniquely qualified to advertise to other women. Ad agencies take note: hiring women creatives could be the smartest thing you do this year.

What happened to customer service?

Everybody talks about providing great service. But nobody actually does. I find it interesting that there are so many books and seminars dedicated to the subject of customer service today. Is anyone reading them? Is anyone attending them?

Here’s an example: When I walk into my doctor’s office, no one looks me in the eye, smiles and says hello. Instead, I’m expected to sign a clipboard, take a seat and wait to be called to provide my insurance card and co-pay. It’s cold, impersonal and I don’t like how they waste my time. Then I’m taken to a patient room where I, once again, sit for quite awhile, waiting to be seen.

Through my marketing business, I had an opportunity to counsel one of my physician practices about their shoddy reception desk service. The doc’s all agreed that something needed to be done. They told their front desk staff to provide better customer service. But nothing changed.

I pondered this and came to the conclusion that customer service can’t be ‘caught’ – it must be ‘taught.’ A training program with a behavioral modeling component needs to be put into place. Will they ever do this? Probably not. It will require time, and maybe, money. But if they did, just think how their patients would feel – not just under their care but actually cared for.

I’m not picking on medical practices, it’s just one of many places I visit where the service is less than stellar. I can find the same shoddy treatment at any retail store, restaurant or auto repair shop in any neighborhood. The good news is, I’m resolved to avoid their mistakes when dealing with my own customers.

1. Women are innately in touch with the emotional benefits of a product or service – they easily identify with the feelings it evokes

2. Women are excellent presenters – they can relay a conceptual idea to a client in a way that’s highly articulate and persuasive

3. Women enjoy dirty jokes just as much as men (at least some of us do)

4. Women bring a different perspective to the table – they solve problems differently from men. Often this is more intuitive than rational, which is what all great advertising campaigns are based on.

5. Women write in ways that men often cannot – for example, writing for the luxury market requires a more eloquent, upscale voice that women seem to master more easily.

I say yes! A well-crafted advertising slogan, or tagline as it’s more commonly referred to these days, sums up a company’s or organization’s unique selling proposition in a way that’s personable, memorable, original, simple, and most important of all, believable.

Unique selling propositions:

• Contain a benefit
• Offer something the competition either cannot or does not offer
• Move the masses

Taglines incorporate elements of the unique selling proposition to leave the key brand message in the mind of the target audience. They’re universal (everybody likes them) and they stand the test of time. The really good ones create buzz…remember “Where’s the beef?” Taglines are the sign-off that accompanies the logo. They say, “If you get nothing else from this ad, get this!”

Here are some examples of great taglines:

• M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hand.
• Does she or doesn’t she? (Clairol)
• We try harder. (Avis)
• Just do it. (Nike)
• The quicker picker upper. (Bounty)
• Don’t leave home without it. (American Express)
• Got milk? (California Milk Processor Board)

These days, everywhere I go I see good ideas executed poorly. Today at the park playground (my dogs like to play there!) I saw a height chart attached to the jungle gym. A great idea, right? Little kids love to see how much they’re growing. But this particular one started at the 3-foot mark and went up to 5’6″.

Most of the kids that play here aren’t even 3 feet tall yet. And I’ve never seen a 5’6″ kid get anywhere near the place. They’re typically sitting at a picnic table smoking. Who designed this chart? Why did this person arbitrarily or consciously choose these particular heights? Does he or she have kids? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

That seems to be case with a lot of design projects. Websites that are difficult to navigate. Signage that goes up with no usability testing. Products that manufacturers say are easy to assemble, but only if you’ve got a Ph.D. in structural engineering.

It makes me wonder why we don’t build more planning, usability and testing time into our process? Maybe it would keep a lot of great ideas from turning into crappy ones.

In author Lon Safko’s book, The Social Media Bible, it says that Social Media is all about enabling conversation. It’s word-of-mouth that takes place online. You don’t have control over these conversations. Your customers do. That’s why it’s so powerful.

The biggest faux pas in Social Media – MySpace, Facebook, LlnkedIn, Twitter, etc. – is using it to sell something outright. There’s a reason it’s called “social” media. I’ve had people connect with me on LinkedIn (who I barely knew) that started hawking their products and services to me as soon as I accepted their connection. Guess what? They’re no longer in my contact list.

It’s perfectly okay to become a fan of a product or service. Or even tweet about something you really like. But if you represent a company and blatantly try and sell stuff, no one will want to connect with you.

I recently signed up to receive tweets from a knowledgeable copywriting consultant. I expected to get valuable information from this company. What I’ve been getting instead, is tweeted to death about anything and everything they can think of. I no longer view their company as an expert offering me valuable information. I think of them as a daily annoyance, and sometimes, even rude. Why? Because they tweet me at all hours of the day and night. And they waste my time. So, if you’re going to use Social Media, please use it correctly, and with care.

1. Clients that say, “I ran this by my wife/husband and they had a few changes…” — are they copy experts? Are you paying them to do the job? If not, leave them out of the equation, please.

2. Clients that make revisions by committee — getting everyone’s input, including the delivery guy, means you don’t know what you really want. If you’ve got to send the copy around the office to be politically correct, then assign a point person to put all changes and comments into ONE document. Otherwise, your writer gets really confused.

3. Clients that use time they’re unwilling to pay for — Calling your writer to bounce a ‘few ideas around’ at all hours of the day and night and on weekends, or expecting to meet more than once or twice without getting billed is disrespectful and it wastes your writer’s time. Trust me, they’ll start putting your calls into voicemail.

4. Clients that tell writers their budget is small but ‘We’ll make it up to you the next time around’ — This is the fourth biggest lie in the world. There is never a next time around. Pay your writer what the job is worth. Or if you have limited resources, be honest about it and let your writer decide whether or he/she wants to do the job for less than what they typically charge. Most times, we will.

5. Clients that don’t provide a creative brief but expect perfection right out of the gate — If you’re not willing to put the parameters of a job in writing, complete with a description of the target audience, the key message you want to get across, the reasons to believe, and what you want the net takeaway to be, you’re not ready to hand it off to your writer. If you’re not willing to provide this information, don’t be surprised if the writing is off target and off strategy.

In my travels as a copywriter, I’ve found there are basically two kinds of clients:

1. The first kind gives you no information to do the job, but expects you to not only “get it” immediately, but produce a work of strategic brilliance by the end of the day.

2. The second kind gives you so much information it’s like trying to find the proverbial golden needle in the haystack. You spend hours trying to sift through it all to figure out what the assignment is and the best selling strategy for it.

Both types of clients are difficult to work with. The first requires a CIA-style of interrogation to extract pertinent information. The second requires constant deflation of hot air to bring them back down to Earth, and the task at hand.

Of the two, I prefer the first since I can ask lots of questions, lots of different ways, to get the answers I need. The second one is tougher because it’s like herding cats. I personally like to handle the discovery process at my own speed. When someone vomits out a lot of information and says, “Well, what do you think you can do with this?” my first thought is to turn heel and run, so I don’t catch the sickness too.

I attended the HOW Creative Freelancer conference in San Diego last month. Since it was a “creative freelancer” conference, I “creatively” came up with the money to go and wondered if it would be worth it. Well, I’m happy to say that it was. Not because I met lots of wonderful folks (which I did). Not because it was 85 degrees in San Diego (versus 115 in Phoenix). And not because I wanted to work for three long days (listening non-stop is tiring). What truly made it all worthwhile were the two magical sentences I learned to say to clients whose budgets are as short as their deadlines.

Here they are…I urge you to commit them to memory because they’re so good:

“It sounds like you (Mr. Client) haven’t allocated enough resources to a project of this scope.”

AND…

“I would be irresponsible as a business person if I took this project on in that period of time. It wouldn’t do it justice.”

So very PC, yet so very powerful, don’t you think?

I used to not care about illegal drugs. If you were free, white and 21, you could do whatever you wanted in the privacy of your own abode. Didn’t matter to me.

Now I hate them. I’ve suffered at their death-dealing hands. Not my physical body, personally. But something personal, just the same…my kid. I’ve lain awake at night scared half to death my son was going to die from an overdose of coke, meth, oxycontin…whatever his drug du jour happened to be. I’ve felt the drenched sheets on his bed from night sweats. I’ve been taken out, down for the count, with worry, fear and guilt.

You might think I’m over-reacting. A worry-wart. I thought so, too. Until the soft edges of my fears were brought into sharp focus by another boy’s death. A 20-year-old kid who OD’d on heroin. He used to play ball with my son.

I sat at his funeral, tears streaming down my face, and remembered cheering on this little chubby boy when he was learning how to pitch. Remembered those junior high boys’ delight in spitting their sunflower seeds all over the dugout.

Some people say marijuana is no big deal. It’s just a plant. Maybe some can use it and be successful, but I haven’t seen any real evidence of this. My son will tell you it was a gateway drug for him.

I personally believe that people who use drugs self-medicate. They may say they use for pleasure, but really, they’re just trying to escape something…fear…anxiety…pain…guilt. Something they either aren’t prepared – or don’t want – to deal with.

I’ve come to the conclusion that drugs are powerful. More powerful than me. They lie. They destroy. And they kill.

I wish I could wipe them off the face of the Earth. But that probably won’t happen before they wipe more kids off my block.