Never mind the beef, where's the "Magic"?

Here's a new social media (Facebook) post by a crowd calling themselves CameraMagicsa. Now, I don't know about you, but I've been looking for some magic in this post and it eludes me.

The copy is bland and boring. I mean, "great prices"? Or how about "we specialise in..." and then list just about every camera type available today. C'mon dudes, you can't "specialise" in everything.

Instead of the boilerplate cliches, why don't you spend some time thinking about what makes your business different to every other camera outlet out there? And then telling us about it. Why should I do business with you rather than the jokers down the road?  "Great prices!?" I think you'll have to do a lot better than that.

Do you really believe the copy you have in this yawn-fest is going to entice me into your shop? Do me a favour, answer two questions John Caples would ask of every ad he ever wrote:

• Would this headline make me read the ad?
• Would this ad make me buy the product?

Now, some nitpickers will say "this is a modern-day online promotion, the old advertising rules no longer apply. This post doesn't have a headline per se, it's not even an ad in the classic sense of the word. It's just a Facebook post and it's not trying to sell anything directly."

To which I say "Rubbish!"

They are hoping, that upon seeing this post, I will "Like" their shiny new page. In that sense this is a classic direct response ad. But...if they want me to "like" their page, they'd better give a compelling reason to do so. Which, of course, they don't.

And because they haven't done enough to entice me over, I'll never discover if CameraMagicsa really is magic, or just another badly advertised camera shop.