My life in advertising as a “beat the control” copywriter…
It’s Web Wednesday, and I’m going to take advantage of that to riff on an idea that might at first seem a bit controversial.
… The Death of “Beat the Control!”
You don’t have to be in the direct response copywriting world for long before you start hearing about “beat the control.”
This is a concept that goes back probably about as far as direct response — and it’s certainly been around for the last few decades.
The “control” — in direct response parlance — is the best performing ad to date to sell a particular product or service.
This is a concept that came about in part due to expensive media. If you’re sending a sales letter or running a print ad, or something similar, you’re laying out thousands, tens of thousands, or in some rare cases hundreds of thousands of dollars on the success of one ad or direct mail package.
And so in this case, you want to make sure it works!
So here’s what a smart direct marketer does…
Take someone like Boardroom, Inc.
They’d hire a handful of the top copywriters in the world to each write a promotion for a new product.
They’d do a (relatively) small test of each package against each other. Maybe 4 packages, tested across 4 lists each, to 5,000 names per list. That means each of the 4 packages are mailed to 20,000 people each, across 4 separate (proven and representative) audiences that they could use to gauge the expected response for a roll-out.
These 4 packages from 4 copywriters are sent to a total of 80,000 people, and the responses are tallied.
After this test, they can figure out which performed best, and qualifies for a roll-out.
This is their new “control” — a term from statistics — the ad they’ll run until another test gives them another ad that outperforms the control.
At which point, they’ll have a new “control” — and start testing against that.
To get a gig as a copywriter where you’re tasked to “beat the control” means you’re going to enter into one of these gladiator fights to the death. You’re going to write an ad or promotion that goes up against their current top performer, with the hope of knocking it off.
If you win, fame, glory, and riches are yours. If you lose, woe is you. At least in copywriting, you live to fight/write another day.
This “beat the control” process still goes on in the top direct marketing companies to this day…
Many haven’t changed the process in decades.
They’re always maintaining a control for a given product — and when you’re hired as a copywriter, you’re hired to knock off the control.
And you know what? It works.
Especially for the folks still in the mail, or still using expensive media for their advertising.
You can’t just keep running fresh, untested ads with the hope it’ll stick. You put your money behind your best performer, and roll that up and out as aggressively as you can while it’s performing. And all along the way, you’re trying to find something that will work better. Particularly before the response to your previous promotion starts to fall off — ALL promotions eventually fatigue, in some markets faster than others.
With all that said, here’s why I say…
It’s time to remove ourselves from “beat the control” thinking!
“Beat the control” thinking is designed for expensive media. And it works. It ALSO works online, as so many sharp direct response marketers have proven.
But it limits you.
Because there are many direct marketing approaches online that don’t fit into traditional “control” thinking.
For example, a point I got from Perry Marshall…
Offline, you’re sending to a “universe” of prospects, represented by the lists they’re on. Your knowledge about them is pretty dang limited — especially about their current state of awareness. You’re also relying on a one-shot advertising message to convert.
Online, with AdWords for example, you know what keyword someone just typed into Google. You know what ad they clicked on to get to your site. And between keywords, you may find a drastic difference in audience.
And so while these 2 or 3 or 15 audiences — represented by the keyword they found you through — may all end up buying the same product, they may need a different path to get there.
One keyword may represent researchers. Folks early on in the purchasing product, who would be hard-pressed to purchase immediately even if presented with A-list copywriting.
Another keyword may represent urgent buyers. They just need a compelling offer and they’re in — regardless of any information you may want to throw at them.
Offline, you could never manage these multiple states of awareness and direct them to your product in a way that “fits” with the current conversation going on in their head. So you’d shoot for the broadest message that converted the most.
Online though, you can adapt multiple aspects of your communication and follow-up funnel for each audience.
In essence, this gives you a much more nuanced “beat the control” scenario — because, depending on the economics of it, you could create a different control for each keyword/audience, rather than at the product level.
Alternately, “campaigns” and “controls” are apples and oranges…
Some of my most successful, most profitable projects I’ve done with clients are campaigns, not controls.
We weren’t in a situation where it made sense to have a control out there, and to try to knock it off with yet another sales letter.
Instead, we had a product we wanted to launch and shut down within weeks. Or we had a timely news event we wanted to structure a promotion around.
The possible variations are endless. The point is we were looking to do something that wasn’t necessarily evergreen, and wasn’t set up for a “control” scenario.
And that was okay.
We used the same sales-multiplied thinking a copywriter has to use to beat a control, but applied it to a well-structured marketing campaign.
The timely nature and urgency of it all actually made it more successful than it would’ve been if we simply put a new sales message in front of the audience.
And it made a bunch of money.
Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula is a good example of this.
It doesn’t rely on “control” thinking. And yet, if I remember right, it’s now been responsible for total sales in the billions of dollars for folks who’ve followed his campaign-driven approach.
And while Jeff is certainly familiar with the idea of a “control,” he’s built a system that doesn’t rely on A-list copywriters or control-based thinking to generate some huge successes.
Which leads me to…
How to win in a post “beat the control” world…
There’s a really important concept from developmental psychology I picked up that describes the process of moving from one stage of development to the next.
It’s captured in these three words: differentiate, transcend, integrate.
The idea is that every stage of development is there for a reason. Like a skyscraper can’t have its highest floors without its lowest, higher stages of development rely on lower stages of development to exist.
To move from one stage to the next, first you must differentiate yourself from it. You must recognize that it’s not the only way — not the only way of seeing the world, not the only way of interacting, and so on.
Then you must transcend the lower stage in favor of the higher. You must understand the details of the higher way of seeing the world, interacting, etc.
And finally, for healthy development, you must integrate the relevant items from the previous stage into this new and higher stage. Whatever still works in the context of this new stage should be kept — because it holds you up at this new stage.
Here’s how this is relevant to the “beat the control” lesson I just explained.
Smart, sophisticated direct marketers today have recognized that “the control” is not the only way of doing direct marketing anymore.
There are things you can do now that you weren’t able to do with more expensive, slower, higher-effort, less-targeted media.
And you’re well-served to look at those opportunities as separate from “beat the control” — and be able to leverage them on their own merits.
Because in the context of these new opportunities, “beat the control” is dead.
And yet, in some situations, “beat the control” is still incredibly relevant. And even in these new situations and with these new opportunities, “beat the control” THINKING will contribute to your success.
It’s only in allowing yourself to get stuck in “beat the control” as the top and only model for direct marketing success that you end up leaving a ton of money on the table.
“Beat the control” is dead. Long live “beat the control.”
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
Editor, Breakthrough Marketing Secrets
