Here's a riddle for you.
Name something that's costly and colorless. More often than not, it serves no useful purpose. Direct marketing merchants can't afford it. But it's greatly beloved by ad agency art directors.
Aw, shucks. If you're a regular reader of this column, you guessed it right away.
The answer is white space in ads.
Of course, it's not always white. It can be green or magenta or fuchsia.
The important thing is that it's empty. No words, no pictures. Just square inch after square inch of glorious emptiness — at a cost that can run as much as $5,000 per square inch or more in a top magazine or newspaper.
A case can be made for its judicious use and value in newspaper advertising, when it may help the advertiser's headline, art and copy stand out in a sea of surrounding closely packed editorial and advertising matter. Maybe. But even here a hardheaded direct marketing merchant would say, “Let the readers decide by voting with their dollars for the approach that works best.”
On the other hand, it's much more difficult to make a case for it in magazine advertising pages or spreads, where the advertiser doesn't have to compete so much for the reader's eye.
These grumblings are occasioned by the new ad series by Oracle, one example of which is shown here.
In each ad, the impressive results achieved by Oracle in a single case history are distilled into a headline — and that's it. In this case, “Dell Handles 125,000 Transactions Per Hour With Oracle.”
Then, just the customer's logo, the Oracle signature, the Internet address for more details, the company's toll-free phone number — and lots and lots of glorious white space.
Now I'm not saying this is a waste of money. It's a striking, effective poster with an important message, and it has real value. If it doesn't say more about what Oracle is and what it does, well, “everybody already knows that.”
But if everybody already knows it, why bother to advertise?
I see this ad series as potentially reaching two kinds of readers who are prospective customers: The boss and the geek.
The boss has to be reasonably knowledgeable about such things. But he doesn't have be master of every arcane detail. That's what he pays the geeks for. His worry is just about the bottom line. How, for instance, can his or her company affordably handle 125,000 transactions per hour?
But the geek, whose recommendations to the boss can tip the scales on the company's hardware/software buying decisions, loves all that tech talk like “We handed them a 9i cluster on Linux.” And can be influenced by it.
So here's my modest proposal.
Keep everything each ad in the series now has, except the white space. Trade that in for glorious details of the case history for the geek readers, as shown in my makeover — details of which will bore 99.9% of the magazine's readers stiff but sell the pants off the crucial .1%.
Now it's a win-win ad. You think the boss won't even look at the headline just because it's got lots of copy beneath it instead of all that expensive white space? That's absurd.
Oracle's ad will make the same impression on the bosses as before. Meanwhile the case history details will engage and influence the geek readers, who in turn may sell the boss on using Oracle.
It's just like getting two ads for the price of one.
Well, make that three. After all, some bosses are also geeks.
But “nobody will read all that stuff.” Then why did Business Week run eight whole pages on Dell in the same issue I found this Oracle ad?
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.
