Maven's Maxims:
- If you don't have a goal, you can't reach it.
- If you don't have a target, you can't hit it.
This Emcor ad is a good example.
First of all, it has a jumble of elements which don't invite walking through it easily from beginning to end.
But a further problem is that it isn't clear who it's addressing and what it wishes to accomplish. Is it talking to potential clients for its services? Then why not say so? Or is it talking to possible stock market investors with a message that hopefully will make Emcor stock more desirable?
By not focusing on these objectives, if fails to attract either audience or accomplish either purpose.
But I appreciate the difficulties the creators faced. Sometimes a global corporation is so big, so diverse and so complex that it's hard to describe its attributes clearly and simply. Still, that's what ad people get paid big money to do.
While working on my makeover I had to decide the answers to these questions. Because I had no way of knowing which audiences and aims were most important to Emcor's management, I tried to answer all the needs in a single ad.
I simply could have redesigned the ad typographically to double its readership and effect. But I thought it would be worthwhile to see if other things couldn't also be changed to make the company more attractive to both potential clients and investors.
First of all, I wanted to convey a sense of the company's bigness. Implication: We're bigger because we're better. But we're also better because we're bigger.
To do this, I included a number of hot buttons. “Fortune 500.” “Most admired.” “Crew of 26,000.” “$4.7 billion global leader.”
Then I looked for a way to summarize, in plain English, what the company does. Well, Emcor takes care of planning, installing, operating and maintaining the various systems necessary for a satisfactory work environment. In other words, to paraphrase my headline, Emcor's crew is always doing its job so everybody at a client's company can do theirs.
Because the original ad's jumbled illustration was a space hog, I kept just enough of it for my story. I got rid of those horrible tiny white letters of text which are obligatory in Art Director School and used the increased space available for a “dinner-table discussion” of exactly what Emcor does and why that's key to the companies and organizations it serves.
I learned everything I could at Emcor's Web site and boiled it down enough so it could be presented in nice large type. To make the story even more inviting, I added several boldface lead-offs to aid quick reading. When I'm fighting to make the text large enough without crowding other essential elements, I find that lead-offs work almost as well as internal subheads without eating up as much space.
I kept all Emcor logo information at the bottom — not very readable, true, but at least no worse than the original. But I felt that not very much had been accomplished by the second logo devoted to the company's KidSafety program.
Hey, this was another way to give this giant service corporation a likable human face. Why not devote a panel to featuring and explaining it? So I included a reconstruction of one of the missing-child posters displayed on Emcor's 5,000-truck fleet and added a brief explanation.
If I were an investor, I'd think this sounded like a pretty good company and maybe one I should look into as a possible addition to my portfolio.
And if I were part of the management of a large enterprise with hundreds or thousands of employees working indoors, I'd feel good that we had a contract with Emcor if we had one — or wonder why we didn't.
In either case, I would be more inclined to log on and find out more about Emcor — and those missing children.
THOMAS L. COLLINS (thomas.l.collins@verizon.net) has been a direct marketing copywriter, admaker, agency creative director and co-author of four books on marketing. He is currently an independent creative and marketing consultant based in Portland, OR.
