Handle with Care
Your comping questions continue to roll in. Please keep them coming and I’ll try my best to get round to them all eventually.
One question in particular keeps cropping up, it’s your ‘number one’ query by a long way, but you’ll probably all be as surprised as I was when you find out what it is. Unless you’re someone who has asked me the question, of course! So this month, I’m dedicating my entire column to the question – what preferences and traits do the different major handling houses have?
Sadly, in today’s comping world this is an impossible question to answer with any degree of certainty. The modern handling house is a completely different beast compared to the one of old, and so it’s not a good idea to apply a particular formula to a particular address. For a start, you’re probably not even going to know what the handling house’s precise role in a promotion is these days. It might just be a ‘mail drop’, whose sole task is to collect all of the entries for a competition together in one place and then send them on elsewhere for processing and judging. It might carry out the processing and data collection, but not the judging. Then again, it might deal with every aspect of a competition including the judging and even beyond to the fulfilment stage, awarding prizes and sending out winners’ lists. Chances are, we as mere compers are never going to know what exactly will happen to our precious entries and how many different departments and pairs of hands they’re likely to pass through. So it’s dangerous to try to appeal to one particular handling house by, say, modelling a tiebreaker on a style that was successful in an earlier competition run at that same address. The handling house’s remit and input may be completely different the second time around, your research will thus be fundamentally flawed, and your painstakingly targeted slogan will fall on stony ground.
It hasn’t always been like this, of course. Before the dawn of sophisticated databases, outsourcing and other ever-changing fashionable buzzwords, we compers always knew that the big handling houses would more than likely deal with every aspect of a competition, right from its initial conception all the way through to the bitter end. Staff turnover seemed low, with the same names cropping up on judging panels and at the bottom of winners’ letters. You got the feeling that these were a small band of dedicated ‘professional’ judges, who would be involved at every judging session arranged by that company. Of course there would be independent judges, but these would be properly guided and influenced by the professionals. As a result, handling houses in the good old days tended to develop a ‘house style’. If you could somehow tap into that, and a company’s particular preferences, then the prizes would start rolling in. This is the reason why, if you look at old slogan books from the 80s and earlier, the name of the handling house dealing with the competition is usually listed with some prominence. That way, you could keep track of the type of slogans that particular companies were favouring, and take note of any subtle changes that came along.
This is not possible nowadays. Handling houses tend to be vast places, with different, often inexperienced staff dealing with different promotions. And the level of input that a handling house has in actually judging a competition can rarely be determined.
As marketing becomes more and more of an exact science, we can never know what a promoter’s precise targets and aims are when they run a particular promotion. How much say will they demand in the final results? Will any factors other than simply the best slogan determine the winner? If a promoter suddenly decides to focus on the health benefits of a product rather than its flavour, say, then that list of winning slogans from a competition that they ran on exactly the same product just a month ago when ‘taste’ was the keyword, using exactly the same handling house, and exactly the same lead-in sentence, becomes immediately irrelevant and obsolete. So judging standards seem to be inconsistent and sometimes, frankly, downright poor. Marketing moves so fast these days, that any romantic notions of handling houses calling the shots and insisting that competitions stay independent and ‘in house’, remaining true to traditions of the promoter that have remained unchanged for generations, must sadly be forgotten.
Many older compers reading this probably remember the old Ray Smith handling house (PO Box 9B, East Molesey… ah, my eyes are misting over already!). This was a handling house of the ‘old school’, which dealt with hundreds of comps from many of the big names. Everything that company did was scrupulously fair, and a comment that Ray once made in an interview has always stuck with me. He said that he was beginning to notice a change in promoters’ attitudes to competitions. Whereas in the past they would have been happy to let a handling house just get on with it, they were now demanding more of a say. For example, some companies – even seemingly reputable ones – would try to insist that ‘no purchase’ entries in a draw were overlooked in favour of paid-for entries. Ray would always refuse, but I’ve often wondered since then how many other handling houses would be so conscientious and immune from such pressures – especially in today’s more cynical business environment, with multi-million pound contracts at stake!
Not every handling house today is a massive warehouse on an inhospitable industrial estate (sorry – “business park”!) in the middle of nowhere, of course. There are still some smaller concerns out there, and some promoters even occasionally try to run a competition themselves. And these are the kind of competitions where we can probably make more of an impact if we try to tailor our entries. A promoter running their own competition will often have little experience, and so a more ‘formulaic’ slogan (dare I say “chestnut”!) may do well. A handling house looking at entry forms all day every day should be able to identify and dismiss the more obvious chestnuts (although you wouldn’t think it when you look at some winners’ lists!). But a small promoter dipping their toes into comping for the first time may well be truly bowled over by the uniquely original concept of “connoisseurs selecting” their “expertly perfected” products, or of the hilarious idea of their company “making men too”! So, a hoary old chestnut or mundane couplet can indeed be a valid strategy in these cases.
One step up from the DIY promoters, we have the smaller handling house – or ‘consultancy’ as it might grandly label itself. This company will perhaps administer competitions quite often, so should still be able to filter out the more obvious chestnuts. But, with a smaller staff and more consistent ‘hands on’ approach, it might be possible to identify a few patterns from comp to comp. A good example of this is Colourways in Hertford, who currently handle many of the Walkers competitions among others. Their winners’ lists often favour rhyming slogans that mention store, product and prize, so it could be a good idea when you see their address to try something along the lines of “dreaming of (prize) my family adores, buying my (product) at (shop name) stores”. OK, something much, much better than that, but I’m sure you get the idea! And they’ll possibly read this and completely overhaul their methods, so you’ll probably be on a hiding to nothing anyway. Which only serves to illustrate just how uncertain and temporary this kind of strategy can be.
So, my advice to anyone thinking about trying to “second guess” the mechanics of a handling house or a judging process is simply – don’t!
There are just too many unknowns and inconsistencies in today’s promotions and fulfilment industry to make such a strategy robust or sensible. By all means try a couple of slogans that you think, based on your “studying the form” of previous winners’ lists, might give you an advantage. But don’t depend on it! You should always submit at least one “personal” slogan too. One that you’ve constructed in your usual way, that stands on its own two feet and that you feel good about for all of the right reasons. And without any thoughts of tweaking or adapting it to fit – so you think – a particular template or formula that probably doesn’t even exist. Easier said than done, of course – so good luck!
Smid x
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