The bigger they come, the harder they fall.
Grand old IBM, the Hercules of information technology, is apparently so ensnarled by its own committees that it can lend powerful information-technology help to billion-dollar companies but can't put forth a decent full-page ad to tell the world about it.
What does the reader see here?
Most of the page is taken up with a bleed photograph of the lonely Arctic tundra. And moping around there, out of focus, are a herd of bored-looking and boring caribou.
But if we look closely, there is a small in-focus rectangle in the upper right corner containing an airliner, presumably a Finnair plane.
I'm a great believer in the visual of an ad expressing or reinforcing the message presented by the words.
So what is this picture suggesting to us? Finland is an empty, depressing country? And they have planes to fly you over it and get you the hell out of there?
But wait. It's not fair to consider the illustration without also considering its marriage to the headline. “Finnair sees it,” it says.
A careless reader (and the ad doesn't motivate you highly to be careful) might well construe this word-and-picture combination to mean “The people in that Finnair plane several miles up can see the caribou down below sharply and clearly even if you can't.”
Actually, the headline is part of a case history series that uses “sees it” as a theme — a kind of pun, I think, meaning, “Do you get it?” Or “The future is coming. Can you see it?”
Beware the seductions of the ad series. It's true that it can gradually build up and strengthen a theme. But it also can trap the advertiser into doing dumb ads that are forced to conform to the theme and that nobody “sees it” but the advertiser.
OK, maybe the body copy can help us out. But there's just one problem: It's almost invisible. You can't read it. It's set in 8-point wide measure white or yellow sans-serif type against the pale halftone background (a favorite of art directors, maybe because it keeps the reader free to enjoy the beauty of the design without being distracted by words, words, words).
However, in the line of duty, I got out my magnifying glass and persevered. “It's on demand business,” it begins. “And it's how Finnair got their customers flying on the ground.”
Then what follows is a succinct, neat case history — so neat, in fact, that I stole the whole thing for my makeover.
So often, it would seem, in the basement office beneath the conference room where the marketing committee struggles to commission or approve an ad that makes no sense, a lonely copywriter turns out some prose that's really pretty good as far as it goes. But by the time it reaches print, the committee-approved typography doesn't let it reach the reader's consciousness.
Oops, another problem. In a newspaper article, the text of the story plays off the headline. When you see a story headed “Man Bites Dog,” you expect that the copy that follows will explain when, where and how a man happened to bite a dog. But in the body copy of this IBM ad, there is no mention of Finnair “seeing” anything. One is left to wonder what it is that Finnair sees.
And even though free-ranging caribou are a big cattle industry there, think how the Finns — some of the smartest and most highly educated people in the world (like Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux, the personal computer operating system that threatens to topple mighty Microsoft) — must groan at seeing their country symbolized by caribou on the tundra. It's almost like symbolizing the United States by showing an Indian chief in headdress smoking a long-stemmed pipe on the Utah flats.
In my makeover, I give the Finnair story readable display topped by a headline which promises (and delivers) a payoff, and by a dramatic photo of Finnair employee teamwork which I had the good luck to find on the Internet. Then I follow the Finnair story with an abbreviated explanation of IBM e-business on demand and what it can mean to your company.
The need: A business has to be able to stay ahead not only today but also tomorrow.
The promise: With our help, your company can successfully move into — and succeed in — the future.
The solution: IBM e-business on demand.
The proof: The Finnair story.
Product definition and explanation: I had to read, at the IBM Web site, several thousand words about e-business on demand that made my head hurt. Fortunately, I finally found a few paragraphs that boiled it all down and that required only minor editing.
I was tempted to squeeze in a few more case histories, but resisted. After all, this is presumably one of a series of ads — which, properly handled with one case history in each, could be a really interesting and productive series that could strengthen the image of IBM's sub-brand, e-business on demand.
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.
