An industrial-strength software company conceals a major product introduction with cleverness
Sometimes you can’t be sure what an ad’s real purpose is.
Is it really to persuade you that the company is offering a product or service that you can’t live without?
Or maybe it’s just to let readers know, “Hey, look at us. We’re really an important, sophisticated company, so you really should buy our stock.” In the latter case, nobody involved may really care whether the ad does a good selling job or not.
Take the Micrografx ad shown here that I have chosen for this month’s makeover. It’s hard to believe that the company expected any concrete results from it. Often, I think, an advertiser rationalizes this low expectation by insisting, “Oh, we’re not looking for any visible sales results. We just want to make a lasting favorable impression.” But it’s hard to believe this ad had much effect either in terms of results or in terms of a lasting impression.
The headline is a joke – an intentional joke, that is. It’s mildly amusing, but without much relevance to the real message.
One method I have always used to test the worth of a headline is to paraphrase it. If the paraphrase still expresses what the ad is trying to say, that’s an important point in its favor. If it doesn’t, something’s wrong.
When we paraphrase this headline, what is it really saying? “One picture is worth a thousand words”? (In this case, 21 words, to be exact.) Oh. Thanks a lot. Or in today’s vernacular, duh.
The same headline could have been used just as appropriately (and ineffectively) in an ad for that trail-blazing Macintosh program of 15 years ago, MacPaint.
And in this case, ironically enough, the headline seems to be talking about the necessity of a picture (like the Mona Lisa) to convey certain things – but it is actually advertising computer software that in many ways doesn’t involve pictures at all. A great deal of the software is devoted to more mundane matters like producing easier, better flow charts.
The typography of the headline reflects a design fad that has been slavishly followed by agency art directors for several years now, and which has always absolutely baffled me. It consists of making each word or phrase in the headline a different size, with no rhyme or reason. David Ogilvy would shudder, and so do I.
The fact that there is usually no results measurement and accountability makes it only too easy for such a waste of precious advertising money as this to occur. Nobody can prove it wasn’t a good idea.
In my makeover’s headlines, I have taken into account three basic considerations of direct response headline writing:
1. WHO is the prospect? In this case, unfortunately, there are multiple prospects within a company, so I have dealt with this as gracefully as I can by flagging various job categories in the top lines.
2. WHAT are we selling? Your best prospects are those who are interested in buying what you have to sell. If you’re selling collectible scale-model automobiles, you’ve got to let readers know right away or some of your best prospects will pass right by without noticing you. So I make it much clearer that this ad is about software.
3. WHY should someone want to buy? Pardon my platitude, but provide a benefit. If possible, an ultimate benefit, one of the basic motivations of humankind. In this case, the ultimate benefit featured is power, whether personal or corporate.
Then I wanted to point the reader strongly to the URL at the bottom, so I added the second part of the main headline.
I literally had to use a magnifying glass to find out what those little squares at the bottom of the Micrografx ad were and to read the captions in 3-point type. Turned out they were pictures of the software boxes and descriptive captions.
I have made these product shots big enough to be recognizable, and the captions and body copy big enough to be comfortably readable. Then I signed off with a strong display of the URL the ad asks readers to visit, and a command to visit it.
I didn’t try to improve the body copy because frankly, the product is so advanced I hardly know what they are talking about. No doubt more could be conveyed there by a writer more knowledgeable than I.
Although the quality of the Web site is not relevant to this column, I will mention that it too was disappointing. Although the site describes the company’s graphics software and offers it for sale, almost no graphics at all are displayed, except for little icons and logos. Instead of putting the whole story there, it actually invites visitors to send away for more information!
Maybe that’s just a trick to capture a prospect name for a sales call. Otherwise, someone should tell this software giant about software called Acrobat Reader, which permits complete catalogs and brochures to be scanned, uploaded in compressed form to the Web site, downloaded and decompressed by the visitor, and printed out in the original format.
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