The good ad is not the one that looks the best, it's the one that sells the best. Generating sales is the primary reason why small businesses and large corporations allocate a percentage of their capital resources to advertising. Like a good salesperson, ads not only make consumers aware of your products on a regular basis, they communicate the value and benefits of your products or services. They also give your products or services a unique, positive personality or brand recognition.
No one likes to be around strangers. Advertising brings awareness of your product and its superior qualities to potential customers. When a person reaches out to a product on a store shelf, you can bet he or she will most likely choose a product they are familiar with rather than one they don't know or believe to be inferior. Good advertising makes your product the obvious choice.
If advertising did not work, there would be no ads on TV, radio, newspapers or magazines. Advertising does work! Even bad ads will at the very least, achieve one objective -- they let people know you exist. The peculiar thing about advertising is that once you start...you can't stop. It's very much like body building. To maintain your optimum physical condition, you can't stop exercising. Likewise, to maintain awareness of your products and the higher sales it generates, you have to keep advertising. Consumers have no loyalty and forget very fast...once you stop advertising, you're history!
A newly hired sales person knows very little if nothing at all bout your company, your customers or your products. Before you send him out...you make sure he is properly trained. The same is true about Advertising Agencies. You can help your agency create more effective ads by taking the time to inform them about your products, your markets and your customers.
Some agencies, whose conference rooms are adorned with wall to wall ad awards, may not bother listening because they feel they can sell anything better than anyone. The fact is, any agency can and will create better "looking" ads than you can, but they can't sell your products better than you. If you want better, more effective ads, take the time to inform your agency about the benefits of your products or services.
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TRADE AND CONSUMER ADVERTISING
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We Create Ads That Work
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The two functions of an ad is to inform and to sell. We don't create nice-looking ads, we create effective ads.
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• Magazine Advertising |
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• Direct Mail Advertising |
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• Media Placement |
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• Outdoor Advertising |
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• Advertising Campaigns |
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• Online Advertising |
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• Trade & Consumer Ads |
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For more information, please contact us at 585-271-8080
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The most obvious reason for a good ad is that it multiplies your sales. The less obvious reason is that a good ad is the most cost effective ad. Creating a good ad not only takes time, it requires a very special talent. We have seen customers who want to allocate as little resources as possible to the creation of the ad and are perfectly content paying the going media rate to display what ultimately is a very poor looking and likewise, a very ineffective ad.
Let's do some math. The better the ad, the more effective it is. The more effective it is, the more sales it will help generate. The perfect ad is 100% effective. Perfection, however, is rather difficult if not impossible to achieve. Let's assume you created your ad on the cheap and it is only 25% effective. Media companies do not care how effective your ad is, they bill you for the exposure to their mass audiences. Let's say the magazine you are advertising in has 50,000 readers. If your ad is only 25% effective, your message will only be noticed by 12,500 readers or 1/4 of your potential market of 50,000.
On average, a full page color ad in a trade publication may cost you around $5,000 or about 10 cents per reader (with a 50,000 circulation). If your ad is only 25% effective, it is actually costing you 40 cents per reader!
As we said earlier, to work, advertising has to be repetitive. When an ineffective ad is repeated, the effectiveness or ineffectiveness factor is compounded. On average, ads are repeated 6 times. Using the above example, in a single insertion, we can see 3/4 of the one-time insertion rate or $3750 is being thrown right out the window. Repeat the ad six times and you are throwing out a whopping $22, 500! More than enough to create a few good and very effective magazine ads.
The fact is, if an ad helps generate sales, it's worth every penny you paid for it and then some. But it doesn't have to be expensive. Sure you can run a double spread in full color and pay up the kazoo, but if your ad says nothing of importance to the reader, you've just thrown away some good money. Page size, full color or additional spot colors are merely tools to help gain attention from the reader, and it's only for a split second. Once you've got his attention, then what?
You can have your sales person do a song and dance to gain attention too, but when it comes to actually selling the product, he'd better have more than a song and dance. He's got to know the product, the customer and the business!
We've created small black and white ads that have surpassed full page color ads in readership. How did we do it? We wanted to know too, so we checked the full page color ads we beat. What we found was not surprising...the ads had no story to tell, not even a sales pitch. In some, the visual didn't even relate to the product. They tried to be witty or entertaining. What surprised us were the advertisers -- Fortune 500 companies who should have known better.
Some ad managers are seduced into the "award- winner" trap...allowing the agency to create ads that look and feel good as if they were created for a beauty contest. The famous ad man, David Ogilvy, never submitted his ads for awards. Ads are created for one reason and one reason only...to sell product.
