OK, everybody, get out your magnifying glasses. This issue's makeover redoes a full-page newspaper ad, offering room for a lot of telling and selling. And while I've followed my rule of trying not to drop below a body-type size large enough for easy reading, it gets pretty small when that big ad is reduced enough to be displayed here.
Habitat for Humanity, made famous by the participation of Jimmy and Rosalind Carter, is a low-cost housing program that even conservatives can love. It builds or renovates homes and apartments for low-income working families with volunteer labor, including that of the future owners themselves, and finances the purchase of tools and materials with dollars donated by individuals and corporations. The new owners repay the cost with 20-year mortgage payments, so the money can be used again to build more housing.
It's a great story, but Habitat's recent full-page ad in The New York Times didn't tell enough of it to pay for the ad and show a profit (my guess).
The Habitat folks are probably not to blame. A line at the bottom says “Citi Cards is a proud sponsor of Habitat for Humanity,” suggesting that Citigroup paid for the ad. And probably nobody in that giant corporate bureaucracy really cared whether the ad worked or not. But the amount of money wasted on it could have financed the building of one more home for a low-income family.
It was the art director's inspired notion to make all of the copy appear to be stenciled in blurry type on plywood, as at a construction site.
The headline, “If You Don't Have That Much Experience Using a Circular Saw, Scissors Will Do,” is one of those creative hotshot word plays that challenges readers to figure out what it's getting at. No indication of the “product,” no prospect targeting, no hint of any reader benefit.
Then there's a giant coupon with three lines of totally unreadable copy set in blurred caps 100 characters wide, a place to check off contribution amount and for filling in name and address, and directions for contributing by phone, mail or Web site.
If you go to Habitat's site you find that there's a heck of a story to tell and it's been told very well. (My body copy is taken mostly verbatim from theirs.) But I daresay a pathetically small number of Times readers ever got that far.
In my makeover, I target a feeling rather than a demographic profile. I visualize the prospect as someone who wants to be a good person…who loves New York City…who feels guilty about the wide gap between the comfortable and the underpaid in the city…who may donate a little or a lot to a worthy charity designed to help…but may feel frustrated that it's not enough to make a perceptible difference in dealing with such enormous problems.
So my headline seeks to encapsulate that feeling of helplessness. (Start with a familiar problem, or your solution to a problem, or both.) And I include “or one company” because Habitat gets over 50% of its money from corporate sponsorship. Just one additional company sponsorship due to the ad might pay for the whole ad and more.
Then I show Habitat housing to convey to the eye what we're talking about. I tell the Habitat story. I include a whole section on benefits of corporate sponsorship and provisions in the reply coupon for putting the donation on a credit card and for making donations as a gift or to honor someone — all ways to maximize profitable response.
The guiding principle of this makeover? Leave no stone unturned to maximize response (as long as it can all be comfortably fitted into the allotted space).
Failure to observe this is the single most costly mistake made by print advertisers seeking to draw a profitable response from their prospective customers or supporters.
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 250 East 40th St., #40B, New York, NY 10016. To e-mail comments and opinions: thomas.l.collins@verizon.net.
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 copywriter based in Manhattan.
