Repetition can build reputation

Here’s a quick piece of advice that can make your advertisements really make you money. Repetition builds reputation.

We’d all like one advertisement to do all of our work for us… and sometimes it will. I once created an advertisement for my tour company where I was trying to get over decades of fear for our arch enemy the USSR – the Soviet Union, AKA evil empire.

I took a head on approach, one I often find best. My headline was “Are you afraid to travel to Russia?” To the right is a similar advertisement I just created for another firm now wanting to take people to Russia. The body copy plays positively on that fear and shows how others have fear and if you don’t you’ll get a great adventure, great deals and no crowds to bother you.


We got a huge response. But, we kept running that ad and running and running. It always worked. In fact, while there was a drop off from the first time we ran it, after a few more times of running it in a newspaper the response began to grow.

Why? Some people responded from the shock value. After a while others responded because if we kept advertising we must be someone worthy of taking them on a tour. Our repetition built our reputation. That first year we sold more than $6 million in tours. We did more later.

The lesson is two fold:
1. Work toward the best headline with the most attention grabbing words addressed to the audience as possible. Don’t do a tombstone headline that’s all about you. Make it about them.

and

2. Run the dang advertisement again and again. If you ad doesn’t work the first time, change it. Change it until you get it right. If you have a good product, make the ad about them and not you, grab attention, build them up with benefits, get their emotions going and make it easy to respond (that’s all part of the AIDA code that I’ve taught here), you will make sales.

For heaven sake don’t blame the media you’re using. Somehow others are using it successfully. Why not you? It is because your ad sucks. So, make it unsucky.

If you need me to create an ad for you, I will, but I’m not cheap unless you consider the money you'll make from my ads. My wife Elizabeth does all the graphics because she is an excellent artist with superb taste in colors, spacing and attention grabbing graphics. And, she knows that NO ad is worth its salt that begins the creation process with graphics. I first write the copy and then she makes it come alive.

Too many art directors get it backwards – they create a graphic and let you fit the words around their pictures. Pure foolishness and ego. Words sell. Pictures attract. You can email Elizabeth at our company, Marketing Artists, for a discussion of your advertising needs. Here's her email: lizstoddard@gmail.com

Do the right job in creating the ad and then start building your reputation through repetition.