Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

Quick, how many copy points can you fit into a 60 sec­ond radio spot? The answer should be one.

But many ads that really suck the big one are about two or three things – maybe even more. This is real easy to observe in a print ad. Just open your local news­pa­per (if you still have one). You’re bound to find on the first cou­ple pages an ad with some­thing neb­u­lous resem­bling a head­line and, beneath that, five to fif­teen bul­let points describ­ing every­thing the com­pany does under the sun. These “ads” are more like a busi­ness plan than effec­tive mar­ket­ing communication.

News flash busi­ness plan pub­lish­ers – your poten­tial cus­tomers don’t care about your plans to make a mint from them. They don’t care how you make money. And frankly, they don’t even care if you do make money.

They’ll only care about you if you can make their life bet­ter. And con­fus­ing them with a bunch of point­less infor­ma­tion won’t do that. It will just annoy them and make them want to buy some­thing from your com­peti­tor instead.

Besides being strate­gi­cally wrong, these ads are supremely flawed in exe­cu­tion. Now imag­ine you are at the hard­ware store and you need to buy some­thing to cut steel. Would you buy some­thing that also sawed wood, picked your teeth, had a mag­ni­fy­ing glass on it and also promised to file your fin­ger nails? A Swiss Army knife is good for a lot of things but it’s not a great knife (espe­cially for cut­ting steel).

Now pic­ture of sin­gle rein­forced blade with­out any tricky gizoms. Just a long nar­row piece of forged steel attached to an ele­gantly designed han­dle. It does just one thing and does it bril­liantly: it cuts through the bullshit.

To keep from suck­ing, that’s what your adver­tis­ing must do. Cut through all the clut­ter and bull­shit while mak­ing a sin­gle minded case for pur­chas­ing your product.

There’s been a lot of hand wring­ing lately about what an adver­tis­ing is and what it should be in the dig­i­tal age. That con­ver­sa­tion should not muddy this water. Because when you strip away all the dis­cus­sion about tech­nol­ogy, adver­tis­ing needs to engage a cus­tomer and inform them about a prod­uct or a ser­vice. Sim­ple, uncom­pli­cated, well-executed mes­sages in what­ever medium will do that. Ugly, com­pli­cated, poorly-executed mes­sages won’t. Period.

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This entry was posted Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 3:24 pm and is filed under advertising, creative. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.