I’ve learned this on the tennis court, the golf course and from the analytical end of direct response results: No matter how lousy your game is, somebody out there is worse.
Witness trade advertising by newspapers, magazines, cable and broadcast stations and Web search engines. Too much of it is like the shoemaker’s children who have no shoes. Here we have media whose purpose is to provide a selling environment for advertising, and a lot of their own advertising is…well, to be charitable, it’s execrable.
But running far ahead in the race to produce lousy advertising are manufacturers and vendors of computers, software and peripherals. They might have two excuses – their products’ lack of visual appeal and digit-head nerdiness – so they can say that they, their advertising agencies and their targets don’t know any better.
It’s probably secondary radiation, but what other reason could Sun Microsystems have for the ad in its “dot-com” campaign, in which the dot is a double-jointed man curled into a ball, with the legend – I’m not kidding – “Our application server will help you do things never thought possible.” Obviously that doesn’t include effective advertising.
Computer Select Web shows a baby tossing a professional wrestler in the air: “Suddenly your challenges are easier to handle.” Maybe, except for the challenge of creating an intelligible ad.
Seagate Software has a puzzling campaign. Here’s the head of a cute dog, fur and ears pinned back by the wind. The headline:
“You know,” mused Henry, “if we dogs could share our combined knowledge with each other, we could take over the world.” Until that day, Henry would patiently wait.
So help me, that’s the headline. I haven’t changed a word.
What is it supposed to mean? The body copy makes a droopy attempt to make sense of it, beginning: “Fortunately, dogs have yet to attain more powerful means of sharinginformation. With Seagate Info-7, however, you can.”
To compound the felony, the next Seagate ad shows the rear end of a short-haired dog digging in the sand. The headline:
Although he knew his current position was, to say the least, compromising, Oscar’s urge to dig deeper was too strong to resist.
So is our urge to reply: Yuck.
Any number of those who read my nasty comment will defend these ads. On what grounds? That they catch the eye, as pictures of dogs tend to do…or that they’re provocative. Guys and gals, I reject both those rationales as totally specious and beg you to do so too. Otherwise, advertising and marketing admit defeat, settling for boiler-plate attention-getting instead of aiming at the core of salesmanship: a positive response from the most people who can and will buy what you have to sell.
Cabletron Systems also uses dogs, and is a puzzlement. The message is clear, if primitive: “Still Begging for More Bandwidth.” The full-color, full-page, full-bleed illustration: a group of dogs. The body copy opens with a subhead, “The SmartSwitch 6000 From Cabletron,” followed by “A high port density, low-cost wiring closet switch that will satisfy the hungriest appetites.” Oh, I get it. The dogs are hungry. Gee, what an inventive concept for selling a way to eliminate network bottlenecks! One of the great lies of our time would be: I wish I’d thought of that.
I’ve been bewildered by Compaq Computer’s peculiar advertising for quite a while, and as I recall I’ve commented on it in these pages before. None of us should be surprised by a Wall Street Journal headline – “Compaq Posts $184 Million Loss on Weak Sales” – not after seeing the ad headed, “Everyone Is Going Ape for Compaq Monitors.” Guess what the illustration is.
A trade ad by a company named Keynote has this powerful headline: “Are You Losing Customers or Revenue Because Your Web Site Is Too Slow?” This head is strong, it’s pointed, it’s clear, and it grabs by asking a question. So what’s the problem? The photograph over which this message is set: two feet sticking out of a morgue sheet, with a tag on one toe, “Office of the Medical Examiner.” The tag identifies the body as “Unknown customer, age 35, male,” and so on. Yup, power seeps out because they got cute with the illustration. If your question is, “What illustration would reinforce this point?” an easy answer is, “If you can’t think of one that isn’t childish, who says you have to have an illustration?” Ponder that.
Hey, I’m not arguing for dullness. I’m not even issuing a blanket indictment of parallels, despite the Unisys “Nice Break” ad that shows two people at a pool table and Cabletron’s “How to Take on Those Monster Apps” ad that shows, sigh, a monster. The point isn’t to stifle creativity; it’s to channel it with relevance so the reader senses a unique benefit.
Or, far more simply: Do you have a clearer, more dynamic way to make your point? Yes? Then why did you choose the fatuous route?
Are these judgments harsh? Probably. If confronted, would these advertisers rebut with “The ad pulled very well”? Probably. That’s the stock answer. So OK, I’m out of sync with this throwback trend. I revel in being out of sync, because in my opinion – and yes, it’s just an opinion – any communication is damaged when it deliberately avoids The Illustration Agreement Rule:
Illustration should agree with what’s being sold, not with headline copy.
What would be surprising if we weren’t numbed to all this is that these ads are in trade publications, where attention-getting has to be backed up quickly by a reason to do business and where the offer should be paramount over the glitz.
Nobody told these guys that getting attention is a means, not an end. But – gulp! – the end is yet to come.
Can you imagine any piece of direct mail to these same target individuals, using these same sophomoric themes? What an easy litmus test!
To those who think cleverness for the sake of cleverness is a better sales technique than cleverness for the sake of selling something, I have a suggestion: Instead of pinning that ad on the wall of your cubicle, pin up your rAsumA. Before long you’re going to need it.
Network
