How to Write a Good Ad... anyone can!

(to read the ad to the left, just click on it.)

To write a good advertisement first know why you're writing it.

Here are some of the choices:

1. To gain notoriety

2. To become familiar to the audience

3. To make money

4. To give recognition to someone (like my great university faculty)

5. To at least pay for the cost of the advertisement and gain notoriety, some branding and positioning.

6. To position our company, university, product in the minds of our consumers in a certain fashion

7. To brand our product

I'm sure there are more reasons but these are the ones typically given. Some overlap.

If your reasons are 1,2,4,6, or 7 you are about to spend an enormous amount of money. That's what it takes to brand a product. To do that you or the art director will copy Madison Avenue and the Fortune 500 advertising departments figuring if they do it then it must be good. Often you'll copy them just because you see their work everywhere and it has oozed into your subconscious mind and been riveted to your creative thougts. They are the archetype.

But, that doesn't mean this type of advertising is for you. Frankly, it's not. Forget Madison Avenue. It's not that their advertising is wrong or improper. It's just wrong for you. And horribly expensive. To truly brand a product -- make your name a household word like Kleenex or Jell-o, it takes a minimum of three years and $30 million. I'm counting creative time and costs, placement time and costs and repetition.

Unless you have Fortune 500 and Madison Avenue time and resources don't try to copy them. And don't let your art director cower you into feeling lesser for suggesting advertising is NOT about pretty pictures and award winning layout.

For you, the typical small business person or university director, budgets matter. Costs matter. You need results and you need them now.

Here are the quick requirements for your advertisements:

1. It must catch the eye. Call that Attention.

2. It must immediately tell the reader or listener what's in it for him. How will she benefit immediately? Call that Interest. Nothing interests us more than something that benefits us.

3. It must generate emotion. Selling is not an intellectual exercise. People buy because they are emotionally stimulated to do so. They reconfirm the buying decision through intellect, but, first, you must generate emotion. That can and should be through a combination of your visual and graphics and your written word. Call that Desire.

4. Now that you've got their attention, shown them how they will benefit and gotten their juices flowing. Now they're ready for you. You must have in clear, bold space how they should react... do you want them to e-mail you, call you, or write to you? For the most part the best things to do are the most immediate. Call. E-mail or click on this website.

Call this Action.

Look at the advertisement at the top from New England Conservatory of Music. It's by far one of the better advertisements I've seen in Classical Singer. It follows most of the correct or effective principles. Mainly, it is one of the few ads that is about the client, not about the advertiser. Ask yourself if your ad is about YOU or THEM. You aren't important. Your customer is. How you benefit them is all that matters.

Will this ad work? Probably, but I don't know. Does it have a chance to work far better than the others who copied Madison Avenue? Absolutely.

The names of the game, however, are tracking and adaption.

Create the ad based upon the best principles as I've given you above, publish the ad, then track the results. The adapt. See what you can change to make it better.

Hopefully you more than make your cost of advertising. Within a few days you'll have your results to know about how many sales or responses you get. Every advertising medium has a pattern. In direct mail that goes first class, within 10 days of mailing you will have received 50% of your total sales. It's often called the "doubling day." The rest will come within days and weeks to come. The "tail" can be long but the predictability is consistent. With 3rd class mail doubling day is usually 15 days and in some cases 20. It's an erratic mail delivery method so you'll learn from trial and error when the doubling day is.

But you must track the results to know how effective you were. It is not enough to say "I don't know how many sales but it gave us good visibility." That doesn't pay the bills. You must rework the ad so it makes sales or gets responses.

In my next blog I'll take any responses you have for the quality of the New England Conservatory advertisement and then discuss exactly why it was a great effort on their part. I'll also have suggestions on how they could make it even better... and by better I mean... yep... more trackable response.