Do you want your advertisements to work?

Advertising campaigns are expensive. If we ignore certain rules, we waste time, money and media space. As a creative industry, we designers, must incorporate science into our work. Or, we should never release them into the media. DezignQuest has made a series of advertisement critiques to improve your advertising.

When people speak of advertising, the label ‘creative industry’ comes easily to mind. As designers of advertisements, we must be creative. Also, we have a wide choice of media to choose from.

But advertising is as scientific as it is creative!

Surprised?   

No matter how creative we, as designers, are with our advertisements, it must be based on science! Not respecting the science will reduce the effectiveness of our advertisements and so reduce our profits.

With our advertisement critiques, we are looking to educate you on the elements of highly effective advertising. The best works produced by the creative industry were not only original, but also highly effective.

The first rule
Let us begin this series with the advertisement we see above. There are many things that we can say about it, but for this instalment, we will be focusing on the theme of “order”.

The correct order of an advertisement:

1. Headline

2. Sub-headline

3. Body text

4. Other details

This is rule is based on one of the Gestalt Principles – “Continuation”. The human eye naturally continues from one object to another in a line or a curve. If you jumble up the order, you will confuse the eyes of your readers and they will not pay attention to your advertisement!

Notice how the advertisement strikes the eye as disordered? There are so many separate pieces of information that fight for your attention that it becomes one big jumble. We don’t know where to begin looking and the entitlements for the runners were even repeated twice.

The advertisement was probably untested, so the organizers may or may not recoup the costs of advertising and organizing the run, but they could have roped in more runners if the advertisement incorporated the rule of “order”.

Despite being in a creative industry, we are still responsible to our clients and their customers. Advertisements that are disordered do not work!

The all-important last step
Before an advertisement is put into wide circulation via the various media, wise designers put it through vigorous testing.

Why?

If it costs $1 to advertise to a prospect, to advertise to 4 million prospects would then cost you $4,000,000.

If you didn’t test your work beforehand, you would be risking $4,000,000 and you may or may not earn back this amount !

But if you first tested on 5 000 prospects, you would only be risking $5,000 and you will discover how to improve your campaign so that you will assuredly earn back your advertising expenses and even more.

However, for a market like Singapore, the country is too dense populated to effectively isolate a sizable sample. In which case, advertisers for the Singapore market should still test their work on a small random group of people to at least establish an idea of the effectiveness.

As Claude C. Hopkins, one of the great advertisers of the twentieth century said, “In the old days, advertisers ventured on their own opinions. The few guessed right, the many wrong. Those were the times of advertising disaster. Even those who succeeded came close to the verge before the time was turned. They did not know their cost per customer or their sale per customer. The cost of selling might take a long time to come back. Often it never came back.”

Bear in mind that this quote came from a book that was first published in 1923. They’ve known about the importance of test campaigns more than 80 years ago! Stop gambling with your profits and make your advertising scientific. (Below, we’ve included links to tutorials in planning your test campaigns.)

Guarantee your profits!
When you are done reading this letter,

• Improve your advertising by applying the rule of “order”.

• Then perform the all-important last step of testing what you have produced.

At the end of the series, you will have a free downloadable checklist that summarizes the rules that we’ve talked about. Please print it out and keep it on your table at all times, so that you may verify at a glance if your advertising is highly effective before you release it into the media!

Please take just 5 minutes to type a short email to DezignQuest at info@dezignq.com or pick up the telephone and simply dial (+65) 6396 4125, so that we can make your advertising as highly effective as possible.

View our portfolio: http://dezignq.com/works/dq-portfolio-new.pdf

Further Readings:

The Gestalt Principles

11 Reasons why white spaces are good in graphic design

Claude Hopkins highlights the importance of test campaigns:
http://scientificadvertising.blogspot.com/2006/02/chapter-15.html

Tutorials in planning your test campaigns:
http://www.direct-marketing-essentials.com/marketing/21-test-advertising-campaigns.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4553175_conduct-direct-marketing-campaign-test.html

More advertising tips:
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/21628.asp
http://www.pipex.co.uk/marketing/news-and-features/top-10-advertising-rules.html

If you liked our article and wish to reproduce it on your website, blog, newsletter or anywhere else, go ahead and do it! Anyone may reproduce our work.

If you do, please :

• include a link to our company: http://www.dezignq.com
• then drop us a quick email afterwards telling us who you are

That’s all we ask, thank you for reading!

DQ.Ideas Newsletter

DezignQuest Pte Ltd

233 Joo Chiat Road, #03-01, Singapore 427491

Tel: +65 6396 4125

Fax: +65 6348 2317

Email: info@dezignq.com

www.dezignq.com