What makes an ad great?

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Think of all the ads you have seen over the years. Think of the cool images and the cool headlines. Now think... did you go out and buy that product or just feel good about the experience.

The difference between a good and and a timely ad is probably the most profound thing in the marketing game. Hitting your target with exactly the right message at exactly the right time is so rare it's laughable. So how do great ads work if they don't actually get people to buy your product immediately.

Brand awareness comes into play. If someone is aware of "your brand" or the "concept of your service" you stand a higher chance of getting a response when that person or business is ready to buy.

So if you plan to make an ad start by thinking about the emotional message, something that will hit home. Don't think that if you put all the "facts" into the ad people will suddenly have to buy your product. The human brain does not work that way. The human brain likes to be entertained, so get a message that will poke a section of the brain that will entertain or stimulate. Love, family, wealth, fear, piece of mind, hunger, etc... these are all emotional responses.

If you are consistent in your communication eventually the emotion associated with your service will attached to your message. Your target market will associate that emotion with your message and remember it. Wendy's tag-line used hummer, "Wheres the beef" (First airing on January 10, 1984) Do you still remember the little old ladies?

If every time that you are exposed to an ad it makes your "feel" a certain way than that is a memorable ad, and in the world of marketing that's a great ad.

If your ad has something people can recall, refer to or use later that day to entertain your friends you have a great message and a great ad.

Next time lets talk about how to get a great message out there in front of people without killing your cash flow.

Don't drain you marketing cashflow

Lets talk about barter for a bit. I have been using it as a way to save money, for about 10 years now, and I still think it's a great cash-flow strategy.

I cut my bartering chops in Asia, which happens to be very into the concept of barter. I worked with Barter Card International on their branding and marketing for several years. They do about 2.5 Billion dollars in barter each year to put them in perspective and the pressure was on to build a sold presence in South East Asia.

With all companies that are in the midst of expansion they where very concerned with their cash-flow. The concept we came up with was to create ads that not only repositioned them as a business-to-business tool but to also raise their overall brand image to equal American Express or Visa, plus do it using barter.

This approach helped create an actual example of how the new barter systems outperformed the older one-on-one style of barter everyone has tried at least once in there life.

For the initial campaign we created 6 stunning images (in the Annie Liebowitz style). Using the actual owners of six businesses that where using barter to build up their businesses. The media buy was all print and covered many forms including full color and full page newspaper ads and glassy business magazines spreads. (The second year we expanded to radio as as well.)

We then used a Barter Card member PR firm to tell the story of how we created the ad series using 98% barter. A typical production and media buy breakdown (click on image for full size view) looked like this:

Photography - 100% Barter
Whisky for fire chief and men - Cash
Woman's wardrobe - 100% Barter
Location scouting and preproduction - 100% Barter
Design, production and art direction - 100% Barter
Media buy for magazines and newspapers - 100% Barter
Food for crew - 50% Barter and 50% Cash
Wrap party - 100% Barter

This way we where able to maximize our exposure with editorial content in followup issues of the papers and magazines. The Barter Card budget for the series of 6 ads including placement was just under $300,000 so that came to around $294,000 in Barter and the rest cash.

Think about how you could make barter work for your business by moving unwanted stock or filling downtime at your business to create barter credits that you can use to create marketing tools to inherence your cash-flow by your communicating barter and non-barter customers.

If you would be interested in checking out how the new barter systems can help your business just google "barter + your cities name" to find your local barter business. I use www.barterfirst.com because of the great customer service they have provided for my business over the years.

Next time lets lets learn about great ads.

The Classic Barter Situation

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Ok lets see how many of these things I can crank out without blowing too many brain cells.

Here a couple of old ads I did for my company in Hong Kong. We got them for free on a barter deal. We helped come up with strategic marketing ideas for the publishing of there "Marketing Directory" for the whole of "South East Asia". This is a great example of working with people (publishers) that need advice or services and can help get the word out for you.

The next entry will be about modern bartering techniques and how you can save a bunch of cash and lock in new clients.