A good ad based on sound direct response advertising principles invites the reader to pause for a brief visit. It says to the reader's eye, “Come in. Pull up a chair. Let's have a conversation about a matter of interest to you.”
And if it is properly done, it's a two-way conversation. For as the advertiser is making a case for the product or service being advertised, the reader is silently responding throughout:
“That's right.”
“How true.”
“Good point.”
“I never knew that.”
“That makes sense.”
The ad layout and illustration are the décor and furniture of the “room,” comfortably presenting and reinforcing the point of the advertisement.
The Amtrak ad for its high-speed Acela train provides a good example of how readership and response can be hurt by failing to observe this principle. Instead of pleasantly and persuasively inviting in and talking to likely prospects, it advertises at them.
A good part of this failure is due to the “advertisey” design. Once again we see the work of an art director who is more interested in design tricks rather than in the reader. Reasonably good explanatory copy is hidden by very, very, very fine print.
You certainly can't read all that fine print in the reduced-size reproduction here because I could barely read it in the full-sized original.
Here's what it says:
BOSTON. NEW YORK. PHILADELPHIA. WASHINGTON, DC.
Step aboard Acela Express and your time is yours again. Whether you're in First or Business class, you'll find everything
__WORK
you need to work, relax, or both. Plug in your laptop and catch up on emails, meet with co-workers at a conference table
__RELAX
or get a bite in the comfortable Café Car, Basically, everything you can't do on a plane. Earn valuable points for every trip
__ALL OF THE ABOVE
when you join the Amtrak Guest Rewards program. Call your travel agent, 1-800-USA-RAIL or visit us online to learn more.
www.amtrak.com • Keep Moving • acela (logo)
Note the cute device here. Those key words in caps are sprinkled at random through the copy as a design element, so the reader has to figure out that they must be skipped over if you want to read the copy in one continuous flow.
And what's this about “[You can do,] basically, everything you can't do on a plane”? Does that include playing pingpong? Was the copy chief, if any, out to lunch that day?
Every year some speaker at a major advertising conference stands up and issues a call for more accountability — namely, how do we know advertising works, and how do we know which advertising works better than other advertising?
Meanwhile, advertisers and agencies have studiously ignored the path to advertising accountability laid out for them by David Ogilvy more than 20 years ago. He showed how even brand advertising like that for Dove Toilet Bar could be improved by scientifically split-testing different appeals and measuring which produced more responses. But no one followed in his footsteps. Presumably, agencies and advertisers didn't want the harsh reality of actual results to interfere with their freedom to be “creative.”
Today we see the consequence most commonly in business-to-business advertising. In these days of Internet advertising, B-to-B print ads usually include a call for responses in the form of an invitation to visit the advertiser's Web site. These replies could easily be tabulated and then compared with the number of responses produced by a different ad in a split-run test.
But it seems that nobody is bothering to do so, and the result is too often a print ad in which self-indulgent creativity is allowed to run wild — at the expense of the advertiser and its shareholders.
This Amtrak ad is certainly not one of the worst examples by any means. But at the same time it could certainly be made to produce a much greater return on investment through careful testing.
When will they ever learn?
THOMAS L. COLLINS was co-founder and first creative director of Rapp & Collins and is co-author with Stan Rapp of four books on marketing. He is currently an independent marketing consultant and admaker.
If you see a direct response ad that you think is crying out for a makeover, clip it out and send it (unfolded, if possible) to me at 166 E. 34th St., #17-B, New York, NY 10016. To e-mail comments and opinions: thomas.l.collins@verizon.net.
