Interview: Meredith Mathews, Half Price Books

Meredith is the in-house copywriter at Half Price Books, based in Dallas, Texas, the largest second-hand book dealer in the US. She won the Retail Advertising Conference award in 2007 from the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association for her retail merchandising campaign, which is based around strategically located signs featuring carefully targeted messages relating to the products on their shelves.

I work mainly as a copywriter, but look after some design elements, such as the way messages are set out and the colors we use for signage. The creative side of copywriting drew me to advertising after university. I found so much in it: the business angle, the graphic design element, the need to write in an artful way, but in a different form to pure poetry.

I do write personally; I like to explore core words and their definitions. I always wanted to know where words come from and like the process of copywriting. Some find it painful, but for me it is a free-flowing experience. When I’m looking at a brief I usually find a phrase, word, or idea pops into my head. I prefer typing because I can write faster and keep up with my thoughts more easily. I am constantly editing copy for Half Price Books, and I write a lot of it too. At every re-read I edit the copy to make it as concise as possible. The concept might come out quite quickly, but the best lines are crafted in the editing process.

Half Price Books is our retail business, and Texas Bookman is our wholesale business. Writing for Texas Bookman requires a shift in style into business-to-business language. The copy still draws on the same emotions and techniques, but takes a gear-shift in terms of the brand personality. We are experimenting with the voice to make it different from Half Price Books.

Our “Love, cherish, and let go” campaign was very exciting. Half Price Books buys as well as sells secondhand books, but found the majority of customers weren’t selling books back. The brief was to get them to start selling too. During the campaign – featuring lines such as “Already been where no man has gone before? Sell your sci-fi books.” – the guys in the stores were overwhelmed. People who had never sold back before were bringing boxes and boxes. The operations end of the business was delighted with the response!

I worked on the campaign with a senior art director, who also works in-house. We spent time in stores observing our customers’ behavior – we observed where they went when they came into the store, which is why messages are right on the shelf next to their books. This research gave us this new information, which led to the creation of the new campaign.

With retail signage, customers do not look above eye-level. All of our messages were positioned at eye-level, and we made each one specific to the genre, with lines such as “Is the suspense killing you? Sell us your thrillers.” and “All better now? Sell us your self-help books.” The campaign tagline was “Let go.”

We ensured that the campaign featured pure copy by setting each on a single-color background without any imagery. It was a tough job to convince the creative director not to include any imagery or photographs – these things usually feature a photo-shoot of people with books. We used four colors only, and we found that it was most successful when positioned at eye-level and when the copy just spoke a simple message.

We presented just the one creative idea to the marketing team. There was some resistance because it was a new approach not to use imagery, and was felt to be less of a hard sell, because the message was “sell us your books.” We argued that we have to give the customer credit that they’ll understand.

Another award-winning campaign was our “Banned Books Awareness” promotion. The lines used were deeper than the boss thought customers could grasp, but everyone liked them. They felt rewarded when they read lines such as “Banned Books Week. Celebrate the freedom to read with one of these hot books.” and “Side Effects of Reading Banned Books may include laughing, crying, questioning, anger, gratitude, and learning.”

My advice to young writers is to listen to your own voice even when working for a client – it may have been the spark that got you the job in the first place.