Great Ads

It's now awards season in the world of advertising. In the past 30 days some half-dozen calls for advertising competition entries have shown up in my mail. These have included the One Show (New York), The New York Art Directors Show, The Summit Awards, The British Design & Art Direction Show (London), The Communicator Awards, The Healthcare Marketing Industry Awards and most recently the American Advertising Awards, formerly the ADDYs. This last one is a national competition that starts out in local advertising federations across the country.

Why all this preoccupation in the industry with awards? Well, undoubtedly some of the competitions are driven primarily by the desire of some individual or organization to make money. Entry fees range from $50 to a $150 per piece. People all over the country who create and approve advertising enter these competitions. As a little math demonstrates, millions of dollars in entry fees and preparation expenses are involved. Other competitions, such as the ADDYs, are driven primarily by the desire to set standards for excellence and recognize those who achieve it in their work.

But what drives the people who enter the competitions to spend all that money? In my experience as an entrant, winner and judge in several of these competitions, it's part ego and part good business. On the ego front, who doesn't appreciate being applauded by their peers for good work? On the business front, winning awards for excellence demonstrates to your clients, bosses and prospective clients and bosses that you are at the top of your field. It means you can create advertising for them that is among the best in the town, state, country -- or even the world.

"Hold on," I can hear some readers asking, "What does some 'beauty contest' for advertising matter anyway? All I want my advertising to do is sell."

It's a fair point. But it misses some important realities. One, unless you are running a direct response campaign, it is almost impossible to accurately isolate the effect of your advertising. You may have excellent advertising that is stymied in the marketplace by other factors: poor distribution, inappropriate pricing, limited media exposure, natural disasters, fragmented or uncoordinated total marketing, uncompetitive quality, surly employees or poor customer service. Any of these can torpedo great advertising. Even in direct marketing, if you price your product too high and/or don't staff your inbound message center sufficiently, you can have a gigantic flop on your hands, no mater how good your ads are.

Second, most advertising has a greater goal than immediate sales. It also aims to build a base of brand image and equity that will sustain the advertiser in the future (The art of branding was discussed in the September 1998 issue of Southwest Florida Business). It recognizes that very few people may be in the market for your product at the precise time they see your ad. And when they do try your product or service, their experience with it will be colored by what your advertising leads them to expect. Therefore, the long-term impact of your creative approach is fundamentally important.

Either consciously or subconsciously, this sense of long-term, brand-building value is usually the basis of most advertising awards judging. This is what can be described fairly as constituting a great ad.

Let's explore some of the criteria a judge looks for in these competitions -- standards that you can apply to make your advertising more effective. But first, a thought for the statisticians among us: If you assembled all the advertising that ever won awards in one pile and all the advertising that never won awards in another pile, which pile do you think would have the highest incidence of marketing success associated with it? Which pile would you want your advertising to be in?

Or look at it this way: every advertiser pays about the same amount for a unit of space or time in the media. Yet, some advertisers get 10 to 100 times more impact and value out of their ads. Great creativity is the difference -- it is the kind that usually wins awards.

Now, what is it that makes an ad great?

A benefit-oriented idea or concept: An ad is not just a listing of features or a collection of claims. Creative advertising has a point of view, reflected in a concept that summarizes the brand's position and personality and communicates the product's or service's customer benefit.

A fresh way of thinking about that benefit: If your advertising is a copy of your competition's advertising because it seemed to work for them, you better be prepared to spend a lot of money to overwhelm their message. Otherwise, you are in danger of merely reinforcing their message and image at your expense. Or, almost as bad, you will be talking past people, not to them. Clichés and over-used ideas do not stick with people. Usually they don't even penetrate your target's first level of consciousness.

A respect for the reader/viewer/listener: If you don't respect your target enough to treat them intelligently, why should they respect you or what you are selling? Respect is reflected in many ways. One is tone of voice. Most of us don't enjoy being around people who shout or hammer on us all the time. We don't appreciate people who feel they have to tell us how to build a watch, just because we've asked what time it is. We avoid people who are self-absorbed, take themselves too seriously and don't have a sense of humor.

A reward for paying attention: Give your customers and prospects a reward for the time they spend with the ad. Focus on benefits, what's in it for them. My friend David Ogilvy always maintained that one of the most important words in advertising is "you." If your ad is focused on the "you" of your customers, either directly or inferentially, it will be much more successful than an ad that focuses on yourself. It also pays to reward your reader/viewer/listeners for hanging around until the end of your message, even if they are not in the immediate market for what you are selling. It will pay off later, when they are ready to buy.

For some more mechanical rules:

Headlines: Keep them short, punchy, relevant to your customer and your product or service benefit, and give them a twist that hooks the customer's mind. Only use longer headlines when you have enough space, you have enough story to tell and when the point you make is worth asking your reader to stay with you. Remember, ads and stories have headlines. Resist the temptation to run an ad without a headline unless you can dominate the space graphically and the picture tells more alone than it would in concert with a headline.

White space: This is your friend. Almost never will a cluttered ad draw more attention, be more widely read or be more memorable than one that is clean, simple, single-minded and balanced. To paraphr