Three Paths to Purification

Sometimes I am 99% certain that my makeovers will produce a better return on investment than the original ads. But not always. Occasionally what I have blocked out is merely a creative hypothesis that deserves to be tested.

Such is the case with the ad for Waterwise water distillers that a reader recently sent me. Coincidentally, there was an ad in Newsweek recently for another kind of water purifier, one by Brita. It used a drastically different creative approach than both the Waterwise ad and my makeover.

These ads and mine exemplify three common approaches to product advertising. Let’s call them the shotgun, the case, and the visual metaphor.

• The shotgun ad fires a whole blast of selling points at the prospective buyer in the hope that some of them will hit their target.

• The case sets forth a credible, persuasive sales argument to a jury of carefully visualized prospects, leaving (within reason) no stone unturned to make the sale.

• The visual metaphor displays a highly creative visualization of the benefit or brand experience — a “stopper,” most appropriate for influencing purchase when a buyer is faced with a choice between or among brands of a similar or identical product, like toothpaste or auto makes and models.

Several sales pellets are used in the original Waterwise shotgun ad, including “Guaranteed purest water!” and “Lower heart disease risk!”

“Guaranteed purest water” is a very strong claim.

The close-up photo of a mouth and a stream of crystal clear water does convey visually how appealing pure drinking water can be.

The picture of the “free 28-page report and catalog” should look more three-dimensional. (I featured the same offer without illustration in my makeover; I couldn’t bring myself to call it “a $10 value.” Such a strain on credulity might hurt as much as it helps.)

The ad wouldn’t win any awards for creativity, and neither would mine. And the original doesn’t present an organized sales argument aimed at carefully visualized prospects. But it still has a certain rough-hewn effectiveness. Its biggest problem is that it seems to lack a subject or a big idea. In seeking to talk about everything, it ends up talking about nothing.

David Ogilvy was fond of saying, “Unless your advertising is based on a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”

My makeover, although it seeks to overcome that limitation, may not do so as well as it should. I was trying to make the case to two prospect groups at the same time:

• People who are a little worried about their drinking water’s purity but not yet worried enough to have done anything about it.

• People who are worried and who already have chosen bottled water but are annoyed by the cost and inconvenience.

It might make more sense to go all-out in appealing to the first group in one ad, then go all-out in a different ad tailored to the second group, and then test both ads.

In the copy, I took a radical step. I decided not to use the phrase “distilled water” or identify what is being advertised as a home water distiller.

My reason was that the idea of drinking distilled water did not seem very appealing. To many, such a beverage might seem pure but dead. Contrast it with the description by a customer that I used in my testimonial quote: “Tastes very much like fresh mountain water from a crystal clear spring.” My intent was to first get the prospect really excited about the product’s promise so the “bad” news later on (at the Web site) wouldn’t seem so bad.

In the third ad, the one by Brita (not pictured here), the visual metaphor shows a Brita customer levitating for joy over drinking Brita-purified water. The only copy is a tiny white headline at the bottom saying, “Feel what better water does for you” and two words next to the logo: “Water yourself.”

It may seem weak and misguided when unaccompanied by any “case” arguments or “shotgun” pellets. I’m also troubled by the way brand advertisers are getting away with outrageous claims by making them entirely with a visual. But don’t rule out its possible effectiveness altogether. It bypasses our logical, wary right brain and barrels straight into our weakly defended, intuitive left-brain cells.

Coupled with a right-brain argument, it might work. As it is, it fails to make the reader feel like doing anything except maybe choose a Brita over a different brand of purifier in a superstore. But it does almost nothing to reach out to people who are not so motivated already that they will march into a store or go online to compare water purifiers. So which of these approaches would you have chosen?

THOMAS L. COLLINS ([email protected]) 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.