2:58pm
3 Blocks East of the Mississippi
Check out this Parker Pen ad from the 1970s:
I ran across it on LinkedIn.
People were saying it’s brilliant…
That today’s silly marketers prefer white space and would never write so much…
And one person whined that the item, Parker Laque, had its name split across two lines, right there at the end.
The horror!
I find the ad fun to read. And ads that are fun to read get attention.
Here’s an ad I found on Facebook for a bolt-action pen. Is this ad fun to read?
A few features, sorta some benefits if you know your refills.
Lots of technical specs crammed in the ad.
But nothing there to move the reader’s emotions.
Which is a shame, because everyone writes something, at some point. And it’s nice to have a good tool to do it.
Right now we’re seeing people tire of A.I. and technology in general.
There’s a resurgence in analog that seems to have started with vinyl records some 25 years ago.
Now CDs and even cassettes are hot again. Dedicated cameras. Dumb-phones with the purpose of texting and calling, nothing more.
Seems to me that the very personal, universal act of writing ——which I do, every day, with paper and pencil (and sometimes pen)—— could be a better angle for this bolt-action pen.
Because the features only attract some buyers. For most people, a pen is a pen… until it’s more.
(Parker knows this. Apparently they supplied the pens used to sign the Spanish–American Treaty in 1898, among other international agreements.)
Instead, this ad ignores the real-world experience of writing with a heavy pen… the fidget aspect of the bolt-action… the sense of permanence that writing on paper gives in a way a computer never will…
To me, that seems like an ad angle worth exploring.
Jeffrey