Create Effective Print Ads

My goal is to help you maximize the value of your marketing communications. It takes the same amount of time and money to deliver a strong message as it does to put out a weak one, so shoot for a message that quickly and clearly conveys a meaningful benefit (value) to your audience.

The more competition you have, the more important it becomes to distinguish yourself from your competition, and to do so in a way that communicates value to your audience.

Here are three key considerations:

1) WHO is your target audience? "Anyone and everyone" is a no go. You have to direct your best efforts toward a narrower market than "everyone." You get far more value for your advertising dollars when you do this. It will serve as a beacon for all that you do. What media should I use? Having a well defined target audience will make answering this question much easier.

2) WHAT basic message is your target audience likely to respond, to. Cost? Quality? Dependability? Convenience? Many companies can boast any of these attributes, but they choose one and position themselves around ONE. "Can you hear me now" by Verizon Wireless sticks to one benefit. Some of their competitors will repeatedly talk about lower cost. If you know WHO you're talking to, you'll have a better shot at coming up with the basic message that they'll respond to best.

HOW can I convey this basic message in a way that makes my offer even more compelling? This is where "it's not what you say but how you say it" comes into play. This is where creativity comes into play. Using art and copy to create a look, feel, tone and voice that conveys a certain personality, character or attitude that speaks well to your target audience. Look what the image of a cowboy, a horse and the words Marlboro Country did for Marlboro cigarettes.

Now, on to task of creating individual messages:

Many ads toy with their readers and make them "work" to determine what the advertiser is offering. Do not lead with "clever" wordplay or "intriguing" questions unless they instanly and clearly divulge a concrete benefit to your reader. If your headline, your visual, or combination of visual and headline do not quickly convey a viable benefit to your target audience, don't expect them to invest their time trying to figure out where you're going with it. Don't play games with people. Don't waste their time. Don't ask rhetorical questions (I hate it when sales people do this, and I'm not the only one).

Many advertisers lose clout by simply stating their basic brand promise as a headline. It's a good start, but try to amplify that message. I'll use Altoid Mints to illustrate my point. Their basic promise has, for as long as I can remember, been "Curiously Strong Mints." It's their tagline and it appears on every box of their mints. By the way, good taglines tend to convey the basic promise, as theirs does. They turned up the impact of this notion with headlines such as "Our mints can beat up your mints." It conveys STRONG MINTS in very strong way and puts a smile on your face, to boot. WHAT they say (strong mints) is clear, and HOW they say it makes it even more appealing.

When what you have to offer isn't really all that unique (this is more often the case than it isn't) you can still create the perception that it does by going into great detail about a common aspect of your product or service. Here's an example: Many years ago, an American beer maker went from fifth to first in sales by exhaustively detailing the process that made their beer "pure." Almost every beer maker at the time used the words "pure" or "purity" in their advertsing. But Schlitz did more: they went into great detail describing the process that made their beer "pure." Other beer makers could have told the same story because they used the same process, but instead they made the same mistake that millions of advertisers have made before and since: they used postive sounding words but did nothing to illustrate the claim. Remember this: sales words without something to back them up come off as nothing more than idle claims from someone who is trying to get your money. This is a crucial, especially when there's little to nothing that actually differentiates you from your competition.

An Internet provider sent me a direct-mail piece that said on the front panel, "Connect to your world the way you want to." What does that mean? I had no idea. I had to open up the direct-mail piece to find out what they meant. Turns out, that what the advertiser really wanted to tell me was their service would me to go online at the fastest speeds available.

"Fast Internet Speed" would have been better than "the way I want to." It's more specific than "the way I want to." Do you see the folly of "the way I want to?" It's vague and could mean a million things to a million people? For some people, it could mean "with a martini in my left hand." For others it could mean "in the nude."

Something along the lines of "Surf the Web up to 50 times faster for just twice the cost of a dialup connection," would have imparted something of value to me instantly, something I could appreciate.

As I stated earlier: Don't waste people's time. Don't play games with them.

And here's something else to think about: that advertiser spent more on their mailing than was necessary because their approach required a folding mailer vs. a postcard mailer. More material and more postage cost to send a message that toys with its target audience by leading with a vague, empty headline.

Do NOT rely on positive-sounding words. Unfortunately, adjectives (great, fast, dependable) and other single words meant to convey value (quality, integrity) do little to make anyone believe in such claims. Instead, define or exemplify these words without using them. Here's a famous headline that Rolls Royce used 60 years ago: "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Roll-Royce comes from the electric clock." That headline conveys the words QUIET and QUALITY without ever using those words and does it in far more compelling way. Superlatives (best, finest, coolest, etc.) are common offenders. My vote for absolute worst that we've all seen is: "Quite simply the best." Besides being unbelievable and blatantly self-serving, it's arrogant.

Much of what I've said here I stated earlier. It's importance cannot be stressed enough.

Don't state the obvious or what people would expect to hear from you. Example: an insurance company shows a baby with the headline, "Protect Her." This is exactly what we'd expect an insurance salesman to say, we all know what insurance is for, and we all know that the insurance company is going for our emotional hot buttons by telling us to protect our baby. If you offer insurance, use a headline that gives people a reason WHY they should choose your insurance company to protect their babies. Do not tell them to protect their baby. They already understand that and it's just what they'd expect an insurance company to say.

Now that I've told you to avoid using expected messages, here's an example of a great unexpected message.

The Brown & Haley candy company of Tacoma, Washington used a great headline for their Mountain Bars. By the way, if you saw an unwrapped Mountain Bar on your lawn, you might think it was something other than a candy bar. The headline was: "They're only ugly until you taste them." The visual was a woman screaming in horror. It's quite funny and it delivers a strong, positive message. And, we don't expect advertisers to state something "negative" about their products. Keep this example in mind for the Humor section of this article.

Example: If you sell a product or service that is a leader, DO NOT show a picture of a boxer standing in a boxing ring with a headline that refers to your product as The Heavyweight Champ of Whatever. In other words, don't illustrate points using things that aren't related to your product. If you're a boxing gear manufacturer or a sporting goods store, there would be logic in using a boxer. Chances are, you've seen a version of the Heavyweight Champ of blah blah blah ad that I just described. It's been used thousands of times, it's not unique. Sports analogies and other analogies that use borrowed interest are very common and usually not memorable. The picture will be remembered perhaps, but little else. Here's another example of borrowed interest that you've probably seen. The visual is Albert Einstein and the headline includes the word "genius" or "brilliant" in an attempt to cast a favorable light on whatever the advertiser is selling. Often, the point trying to be made is that you don't have to be a "genius" to use this product. If your product is easy to use, you'd get more mileage by showing a 10-year-old kid using your product (for example) and saying that it took the kid less than a minute to figure it out. Pictures of Einstein. Boxers, Heroic Icons, and other borrowed interest visual approaches are used in (weak) advertising all the time. So stick to visuals and words that directly relate to your product or service. Oh, one more thing, if your store is having a big sale, DO NOT show a picture of a whale with the words: A Whale of a Sale!!! Unless you're selling whaling boats or harpoons.

If you use humor to promote your product in a way that truly reinforces the benefit you're trying to convey, it can work well for you. Unfortunately, more often that not, it's used gratuitously. The humor is all about showing the world how clever the writer or advertiser is. It's humor for humor's sake. "Gee, people like comedians, so maybe if I can make people laugh, they'll like me and buy my product." This is not the case. Purely gratuitous humor usually weakens a message. If humor is going to work effectively, and it can, it has to (A) truly be funny and (B) it has to strengthen, amplify or emphasize the benefit message. Here's an example of humor that works. It's the same example I used in the section about not using expected messages. Brown & Haley used this humorous (and unexpected) message for their Mountain Bars. "They're only ugly until you taste them." The visual was a woman screaming in horror. Now that you've read this, adjust your radar to zero in on humorous ads. Chances are, you'll appreciate the ones that use humor non gratuitously a lot more than you'll like ones that use humor just for humor's sake, because you'll recognize that it's being used to make a strong point about the product.

Corny, goofy, lame-brain humor in a tavern or at the office is okay. In an ad, it's not.

This section is especially important If you're going to do a lot of print or web advertising that will use Headline/Visual formats.

There's no better example of a synergistic Visual/Headline combination than "got milk?"

Showing a cupcake with a bite out of it does nothing. Add the words "got milk?" and we experience a deep and pleasant connection with the ad. The words "got milk?" by themselves might serve as a reminder for mom's to pick up milk at the store, but when coupled with the cupcake, the result is exponentially stronger. This is synergy. The end result is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Here's a simple synergy test for your headline/visual combination. Cover the picture. Does the head line NEED the picture to make any sense or have any impact? If it does, you've got some synergy working for you. Then, cover the headline. Does the picture need those words to convey the benefit you're trying to convey? If so, then you've got some synergy.

Too often, you'll see ads where the picture does nothing more than mirror what the headline says. If that's the case, you might be better off running a copy-only ad with a big, bold headline. It will be cheaper and the picture you'd be cutting woudn't be doing anything to strengthen the point you're trying to make anyway.

Headline/Visual combinations that depend upon each other incite an interactive participation on the reader's part, which helps make the message more memorable.

NOTE: Achieving synergy in itself isn't enough; the message must also convey a viable benefit or value to the viewer.

There are many successful ads that aren't synergistic. They usually feature some very strong copy that does the trick, or a very strong visual that says it all. But if you pour over books of award-winning ads, you'll find that many of them have at least some degree of synergy working for them.

A common reason for weak ad content is an advertiser's refusal to conduct the impartial marketing research that may be necessary for them to gain insight into their target audience.

Focus groups comprised of carefully screened members of a particular target audience group help advertisers learn which of several basic appeals might work best. Another focus group may help that same advertiser decide which one of several ads would be the be best one for promoting that basic appeal they decided upon based on the earlier focus group results.

Big companies understand this and tend to use focus groups. They know that the cost of this research is little compared to the cost of spending millions of dollars on media to make the wrong pitch.

Many smaller companies will not hire marketing research firms. Compared to their ad budget, they deem it too costly. In some cases, they may not really need to. A river rafting business that only hires devout river rafters will have a far better understaind of who their target audience is and how to communicate with them than will a big institution or corporation.

Impartial input from total strangers that represent your target audience is worth having. Input from your friends and family is worthless unless they are part of your target audience group. Even then, it can be a problem because the opinions they give can easily be influenced by the fact that they love you.

If you have no money for research, do your own research in areas where there are a fair amount of people who represent your target audience. When I was in college, I asked people to tell me which of three ads for the same product did the best job of selling them on that product. You'd be suprised at how many total strangers will give you their opinion when it only takes a a few seconds of their time.

It's easier said than done, but "simple" really is important. The more quickly you can convey a strong message, the better off you are. There's so much information out there today that something short and sweet may be the only thing that will register with some people. No matter who you are, it's easier to process less information than more. The hard part is coming up with just a little information that packs a wallop. For example:

VISUAL: Peanut Butter Sandwich
COPY: got milk?

When creating Marketing Content make sure that, at the very least, it INSTANTLY conveys BENEFIT and VALUE to your target audience. Better still, have it do this in a UNIQUE and COMPELLING way that helps DISTINGUISH you from your competitors.

Craig Nelson can be reached at 360-793-1446 or craig2000@earthlink.net

I'll be happy to answer any quick questions you might have, free of charge. I'm also available for general consultation and advertising/marketing copywriting and concepting services.

View my profile & portfolio at: Linked In