Not Practicing What It Preaches?
“YOU CAN’T save souls in an empty church.”
That was a cardinal principle of an ad theorist I’ve always idolized, David Ogilvy.
To this I would like to add my own modest contribution: “Even the best business-to-business advertising is frequently boring — to non-prospects.”
What Ogilvy meant was that your print advertising can’t persuade prospects to like or buy your product if they can’t or won’t read it.
Such may be the case with this ad for Accrue Software.
Three lines of type, each made up of the word “Click” repeated continuously, intersect over a sea of — guess what? — the award-seeking art director’s favorite means of expression: white space.
Below it is a block of reasonably good catalog copy set in what looks like 7-point sans serif — not exactly inviting but not totally unreadable — with a small heading: “And then?”
So what the ad is trying to say in a visually dramatic way is that lots of people may click on your Web site listing. But what happens after they enter?
At the bottom of the page, for people with really keen eyesight, is a sign-off in what appears to be 5-point sans serif, inviting a phone call or Web site visit.
This is by no means the worst ad I’ve examined for my column. But a company whose bread and butter is measuring Internet advertising effectiveness deserves — and we should expect — something much better.
Direct response ad pioneer Victor Schwab was fond of quoting what Dr. Samuel Johnson declaimed in auctioning off a brewery: “What we are selling here is not vats and barrels, but the possibility of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.”
What Accrue is selling here is accountability: software that’s able to track every step of visitors’ “buyway” through the advertiser’s site, making it possible to measure the return on investment of every component.
It’s the kind of thing that has caused the firm’s annual sales to skyrocket from $2 million to $20 million in the last four years.
But is the software company practicing what it preaches? Has it tracked the number of responses to this ad and compared that with the results of another approach in a true A-B split-run test?
I’m not privy to the facts of the case, but I seriously doubt it.
The URL in the sign-off copy (www.accrue.com/click13-us) consists of the home page address plus eight added digits, suggesting that the addition is a key code. I tried it and found it to be a dead link, making me think the address might’ve been used as a key code to track the number of responses the publication produced, then abandoned when it was no longer needed. It’s virtually impossible to believe that this was a key code for an A-B copy test, although it’s quite feasible. If this were the winner in such a test, what would the loser be?
In my makeover, I have (a) advertised the brand in the headline; (b) selected the prospect (readers seeking to improve results at their company’s Web site; (c) dramatized and humanized the benefit with a personalized case history (Ogilvy’s early experience with Gallup readership studies taught him that people like to read about people); and (d) put it all in inviting type. To this I’ve added a basic explanation of the product, proof of its value in the form of a list of some of its most famous users, and a more readable display of the call for response via telephone number or URL.
Those who think my ad is boring compared with the “exciting” design of the original should hark back to the principle I cited at the beginning of this article. To prospective buyers of Accrue software, a clear, readable, believable promise of improvement in the measurable effectiveness of their company’s Web site is never boring.
Which ad would do better in a true A-B split-run test? Since advertisers like Accrue seem reluctant to find out things like this, you’ll just have to run the test in your mind.
THOMAS L. COLLINS was co-founder and the 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 copywriter in Manhattan.
To send your comments, opinions or suggestions, write me at 424 West End Ave., #11-B, New York, NY 10024, or e-mail me at [email protected] .
Network
