There’s a new kind of print advertising stumbling onto the scene…or trying to, anyway. And it deserves a name, just as Lester Wunderman was credited for having named interactive brand advertising “direct marketing” long before the Internet.
What I’m referring to is advertising in magazines and newspapers that combines the power of the printed page with the power of an advertiser’s Web site.
This combination gives an advertiser the chance to expose prime prospects to five, 10 or 15 times as many pages of advertising without its costing five, 10 or 15 times as much. Plus the opportunity to identify and interact with these prospects.
The potential of this new advertising dynamic will never be realized until advertisers learn how to make the two work together, and alas it’s possible that many never will.
Again and again I see ads that have a poorly displayed and promoted Web site address, or that direct readers to go to the advertiser’s Web site for something they can’t even find when they get there.
Any suggestions, readers, on what to call this new kind of advertising? I sometimes call it tandem advertising, but I’m not satisfied with that at all.
These ruminations are inspired by the subject of this issue’s makeover, an ad for the Atkins diet Advantage bars. Once again we see a high-fashion ad where it takes a moment or two to figure out the joke. I’ve always had reservations about ads that readers have to figure out. They have better things to do.
We see the vertical rock face of a mountain. It’s something that athletic, outdoorsy younger readers can identify with, but not suburban housewives struggling to control their weight. Hanging down the side of the cliff is a salad bar, a rock climber and a trail sign.
The sign says, in pretty small letters for a headline, “Because You Never Find This Here, There’s…” followed by a not-very-clear photo of the product.
Now the reader has to put all this together to get the message: Because you never find a salad bar when you’re climbing the face of a mountain, there’s always our Advantage bar to take its place.
OK, it’s kind of clever and imaginative. But I daresay that many of the readers who flipped through that magazine — including good prospects — flipped past it without taking the extra two seconds to figure out the message.
Those who did and were inclined to read further found some acceptable copy in the panel at the bottom, although this cranky Maven would like to see some of that rock-face area used for a bigger panel and larger type.
Now let’s think outside the page ad box. Suppose we started over. What could we do in a new ad to use the Internet’s power to convert reader reactions from “Maybe I should do something about that sometime” to “I must do something about that now”?
My answer is to start with a stronger, more direct ad. The stronger the ad, the better the response, even in tandem advertising. So my makeover ad headline, “Atkins Salad Bar,” makes the point in a more straightforward way that when you can’t get to a salad bar, there’s the Advantage bar. No need today to explain who or what Atkins is, but the name in the headline reinforces that brand familiarity. The much-better product photo makes it clear that we’re talking about a yummy bar that many people would obviously prefer even if they could have a salad.
The pun on the word “bar” offers a striking paradox. There is a long tradition of successful direct marketing headlines that inspire the reaction from prospects, “Why, that’s impossible! But it would be wonderful if it were true!”
Here we have a new expression of that theme: “It’d be impossibly wonderful if eating this candy-like bar would be as good as eating a salad, but this ad is saying that in some ways it’s really true!”
Then after the basic copy story, the makeover sets about tempting the reader to visit the Web site, including an offer of a free sample. Admittedly, giving away a sample bar would be costly. But there’s plenty of allowable advertising cost per lifetime customer to make it affordable. Converts might spend several hundred dollars a year on Advantage bars, and the Web site and sample would help convert the merely curious into converts.
This approach also could help start or add to a database of prospects for not just Advantage bars but all of Atkins’ products and publications.
Wouldn’t that be better for Atkins than just a clever image ad? Wouldn’t it do at least as much to build brand awareness? This is the potential of tandem advertising — for want of a better term.
To e-mail comments and opinions: [email protected].
THOMAS L. COLLINS 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 Manhattan.
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