The Charm Plus ads

When I saw an old friend posting homemade ads for a seminar she was putting on, I knew I wanted to help her out some something more polished. Her strengths are helping people polish themselves, and mine are making pretty pictures on the computer. As it happens, this one would come in as a trade – she gave me a personal one-on-one charm session and I gave her these ads.

It started with the male ad. This is pretty close to how I envisioned it, although I’d originally pictured him straightening his tie. Once I started looking through the “dapper fellow straightening his tie” section on Shutterstock, I wasn’t happy with what I was finding… but this image came up and I knew. Yeah, it’s what I was looking for. It was pure 007 adjusting his cufflinks after boarding the train in Skyfall.

I also wanted a female ad. I’d imagined the image of the woman going “shhhh” with a finger to the month to tie in with the “secrets” in “CHARM secrets”… but they just weren’t working. So, I just went with a nice looking woman in nice clothes instead. I’d hoped to have more symmetry in how the images were being cropped, but the change in focus from cufflinks to just the woman in general meant that cutting the image off at the neck wasn’t going to work.

Years ago I did a pamphlet for another hair salon, and the owner gently chided me to set aside my more masculine design style and design it more for women. I kept this in mind working on this one and made sure the font choices contrasted against the male ad. So, they’re clearly designed as a set, but each has their own vibe.

I also wrote her some copy to post with the ads. I wanted to cover: her history and credibility, identify some demographics that have benefited, pitch the invitation and offer a source of more information where people can read the testimonials.

Having recently enjoyed a one-on-one-session-on-Zoom, I can personally attest that these people are in for a charming treat.

There’s just the one at the moment, but I’m aiming to create a series of these. If there’s one thing you know, it’s the value of giving away some knowledge. Don’t give it all away, but give enough to have some value and tease your audience with the promise of even more being made available should they buy into your call to action. So, my plan, is to get buy-in from Benita to supply me with some key quotes and ideas that she knows she’ll be covering in her seminars – it will help turn them from “sight unseen” to “oooh, what I’ve seen so far is good… show me more!”

<insert Futurama TAKE MY MONEY! meme…. you know the one>

So Benita felt a little self-conscious using her own name in the ad. So, I tweaked it a bit to make it a little more universal. If we were going to micro-target specific people, we could conceivably make each ad completely bespoke with their name in it. That would likely be a bit much in terms of time and resources, if not a little creepy. Not entirely charming.

I continued exploring the series of ads, this one tackling a body language issue I encountered in another job, where two people supplied photos of themselves. Each one featured themselves with crossed arms, but where one of them appeared confident and authoritative, the other just appeared petulant and micromanaging. Definitely not charming.

This one had roots in my own personal interactions. At some point I noticed that I tended to deflect compliments with humour (“awww, shucks, y’all”) and I realized that it may not have been taken all that well by the complimenters. During my charm session with Benita, it came up… “just say thank you”. It certainly belongs in our set of charm lessons here.

This one I’d call a work in progress. I’ve got a draft sent to Benita with a request for her feedback and either a rewrite on what exactly is being said, or pointers on how to improve it. I’m a graphic designer, conceptualist and copywriter as needed, but I’m well aware that I’m not a charm school instructor, and defer to her experience here.

Got some feedback on this one… some push and pull. Have a new draft off to Benita. We’ll see how it goes.

March 15, 2024

Found a solution. Ultimately she felt I was giving away too much in my example. Save some for the seminar. That’s the question though. How much is too much? A two hour seminar is going to be loaded with information, and it will be deeper than you’re going to give away in a couple ads, so I personally was not concerned with giving too much away. But, ultimately these were her advertising so she had to be comfortable with what, and how much, she was sharing.

March 25, 2024

So Benita got in touch… ticket sales are a little sluggish. Some of this may be that the event is still a few weeks away and people tend to purchase these things more last minute. But, even so, rather than count on the last minute purchases, we decided to push forth with some new avenues of thinking.

Firstly was the idea of “Charm Plus One”. She’d already mentioned that she was giving discounts to people who sign up with a second person, though she was hesitant to advertise that. Now, we’re going to advertise that.

And… time to bring out the big guns. I’d been wanting to do something with some movement in it for a while. My plans were to animate the “Name” ad, and I still plan to… but for the moment, we decided to aim higher. Benita contacted a telegenic former student to deliver a series of testimonials, which I added the event branding to. Video will certainly capture some attention, and the subtitles were a necessity… I can’t speak for everyone, but I know there are times when I’ll watch a video in silence and just read the captions to follow what they’re saying…

March 27, 2024

Hailey’d actually provided five testimonials. I’d just done the first one. I realized that I needed to make some changes though, if I were to do all five, since they would basically all look the same to anyone who hadn’t yet clicked on it. So, I broke them apart by colour, and added little quotes taken from her testimonial to distinguish each one from the next.

March 29, 2024

The event’s getting close and sales are still a little sluggish. I’m really starting to think about this… how to reach people, how to offer something of value and entice them to want to learn more. And it’s also got me thinking about personal interactions and how they can be most effective. And something that comes to mind, that I’ve heard elsewhere but I’ve also absolutely felt in my own interactions, on both the giving and receiving end… the importance of listening to the other party. Listening so you can actually hear what they’re trying to say, but also so they’ll be more receptive to what you’re saying. And this one balances giving some valuable knowledge away with witholding something equally valuable – the flip side to the equation… where what’s being witheld can only be learned at the seminar.

This one is more of a mission statement… something I think I should have done from the beginning. If I’d been contracted ahead of the seminar’s advertising launch, I’m sure it would have come to me as essential to get out there before the advertising blitz. But the blitz was already underway when I got involved, so I hit the ground running. So, yeah… this one’s more personal and is meant to establish more of a personal connection with Benita’s target audience, and also to address potential misapprehensions of the more negative side of “charm training”. It can indeed be a tool for manipulation in the wrong hands, but that’s not why she’s been invested in it for the entirety of her career. So, it’s my hope that this more personal message may strike a chord and attract some additional interest.

April 8, 2024

Wow. Life got a little busy and I actually did a lot that didn’t get updated here.

I came to a realization that there was an opportunity to draw attention to the fact that what’s “charming” is not actually universal and what may be engaging coming from one person may indeed be offputting coming from another. So, I created this ad addressing that idea, and the idea that Benita when working as a teacher and mentor helps a student highlight the elements of their own personalities that have the most potential to be “charming” and work to accentuate those, while shoring up some of their weaknesses. As it says, some things are actually universal and can be taught, but some are unique to the student and are to be nurtured.

Now… this one. This was nerve-wracking, I’ll tell you. Took me two evenings to shoot it. First evening I spent a good chunk of time staring at the camera looking for the whatever to actually start talking. I eventually said “Not tonight” and shut it down. Next evening, I tried again and pushed through to make it happen.

Yes. That’s me recording a video testimonial. One that’s garnered hundreds of impressions on LinkedIn (way more than my usual posts do). This was me stepping outside of my comfort zone (actually a theme that will form the foundation of a follow-up video post I plan to do). Where Hailey’s testimonials would appeal to younger audiences, this was paid-promoted to people more age-adjacent to me.

Certainly it could have been more “perfect”. I could have done multiple takes or edits to smooth out some of the pauses, stutters and repetitions… but I ultimately decided that it might just be good enough, and authentic and relatable, as it was.

While I can’t currently identify them, I’m told that someone contacted Benita and commented how much they liked the campaign she’d been running, especially “that video testimonial with that man”. I’ll take that as the compliment it is, just say “thank you” and run with it as encouragement to continue doing stuff like that, not only for Charm Plus, but also a related video for Big Brothers Big Sisters, but ultimately I think it’ll kick off a series that I plan to record for myself.

LAST CHANCE

Sometimes a little last-minute pressure can help produce sales. Amazon uses it with their “Only 1 left in stock!” warning to nudge you to just go ahead and buy that album on vinyl that you’ve been eyeing. It’s something I’ve done over and over again for Big Brothers Big Sisters in the waning days of their fundraising campaigns. And… I did it here too. I thought I was done with it, but here the job pulled me back in for one more promo piece.

So this one is a bit of a “tie it all together” ad… it has the content of the first ads I ran for the campaign, it has the image of Benita that I developed later but really should have been the kick-off ad, and it acknowledges that there’s just one seminar left.

So, that’s the campaign. I’ll find out in a few days how both events sold, and I’ll be putting together a case study on the whole thing, where I take a look at what I did, what worked, what didn’t work, what I would have done in hindsight and what I would have done had I joined the project earlier and had a chance to properly assess all the options available.

But, for now, I’m satisfied with the efforts that went into this, and Benita’s happy with them… and as I’ve told her, these seminars can just be the beginning… the groundwork being laid for an ongoing Charm Plus resurgence in the digital age that can include further seminars, webinars, one on one Zoom classes and other opportunities. There’s lots to leverage, from publicly recognizable former students who’ve gone on to accomplish noteworthy things who could offer testimonials, to media contacts, to the Charm Plus website, Instagram and Facebook channels… so much potential.

Looking forward to where this goes next.