The 3 Key Elements of Excellent Advertising

I was asked a great question recently by a very bright young marketer who inquired about are the key elements that are needed to be present to achieve excellence in advertising. I find these type of questions great on two levels. Firstly they go to the core of the matter about what all marketers need to strive for to potentially succeed in putting an effective advertising campaign together and secondly, given its importance how rarely it gets asked at all.

Well unlike the expression, 'I'm not sure how to define it but I know when I see it', the 3 key criteria for advertising are both easy to define and can be easily identified when used appropriately.

The elements are:

1. A Hook
Simply put the ad needs stopping power which is the mechanism by which you can literally stop people as they are walking past or flicking through the magazine pages or scrolling through the website pages and stop them dead in their tracks at your ad. Look at the advertisement above from Audi. It stops you with both a visually striking piece but also the clever integration of Audi's logo within the word Joy as a key attribute attributed to driving such a wonderful automobile.

2. Relevance
Once your ad has managed to stop people (who are hopefully from your target market), you need to ensure that the means buy which you stopped them was relevant and aligned to the needs and expectations of the target audience or other wise they will feel as though they have been cheated and stopped on false pretenses. And again referring this back to Audi ad above the relevance is clear enough as the experience of driving an Audi is very real being a superbly engineered  motor vehicle.

3. Branding
The third and final element is branding. Now when I speak of branding I am not referring to only the corporate logo which is certainly present and strategically positioned in the bottom right hand corner of the advertisement (remembering that the eye reads diagonally down the page from left to right).

But it's also everything else that a company does consistently in terms of all the different design elements that are consistently used and that both consciously and intuitively alert us to the fact that we are looking at an Audi ad.

Examples include the colors used, the relative positioning of key blocks such as headings, pictures and text on the ad to convey its core advertising message. Again bu comparing the quality offerings that Audi give the market periodically you can see how consistently clean, efficient and uncluttered they are regardless of the model being promoted or the core message being espoused.

It's obviously not a coincidence that highly successful multinationals like Audi so routinely produce advertising of this quality that gains attention, raises awareness and ultimately drives selective customer demand for its wide range of prestige cars.

Now go and review you latest ad or the last 2 or 3 and with a (constructively) critical eye review the 3 elements we have discussed in this post and apply them to your advertising to see how you can make it even better moving forward.

And remember also that if ever you want to learn more about developing proven strategies for your business you can attend one of the fine VECCI marketing courses by clicking the link below:

http://www.vecci.org.au/business-solutions/training/short-courses/marketing-sales-and-service/winning-marketing-strategies-p


And until next time, good luck and good marketing.
Regards,
Daniele.

Social Media and Advertising. Friends or Foes

Yesterday as sometimes happens, I found myself participating in not one but two separate business conferences, and interestingly I was asked virtually the same question came up at both events. Specifically if advertising was still valuable now that social media marketing was continuing to play such a powerful role?

It's a great question and the answer lies in the fact that social media is as we all know, about engagement and forming networks of like minded individuals with a common interest, passion, problem or need. Advertising on the other hand is all about mass marketing and getting your message out to a wide group.

The problem is this. Advertising works by increasing the level of awareness of you, your brand or business generically and reinforces the relationship you have with your market if you have one. If you don't, it reinforces that as well.

In other words it will be like a blank billboard with little value if the connection is not already there to support it.

This fact was made clear to me several years ago when I had just taken over as product manager of some major pharmaceutical brands and on doing a review of past spending, I found that my predecessor had been poring in a half a million dollars a year to a specific medical journal despite the fact that the product appeared to be receiving little or no benefit from it.

on doing a little research with a group of doctors, I found that they all agreed that if they were not using a product then just seeing ads of it in the magazine would have no effect. In short, no relationship equals no sale.

Interestingly when I cancelled the remainder of those ads, I was able to redirect those funds back into an innovative program designed to give the doctors exposure to using the medicine in a specific group of patients, as a basis for (wait for it) forming a relationship. Result millions of dollars increased revenue that year.

So yes advertising can and is still an effective option today, but needs to be properly applied when there is already an existing relationship, to remind people of that relationship.

Hope this sheds some light on this issue. Please let me know your thoughts a s well.
And until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Daniele.