Now here are two adverts I plucked from our local paper that suggest School Principals should agree not to write adverts if I promise not to be a School Principal! But before I castigate the persons who either wrote or approved the adverts I must say they got the media right… the local paper is a great choice because it’s read by mums and circulates in both schools’ catchment areas.

However that’s the only congratulations I can hand out because look at the shocking waste of expensive advertising space taken up by huge graphics (pictures). There is little real information of value to capture the attention, stimulate the interest or create the desire of the target to make them take action.

Fancy using just a headline and a graphic to take up good usable advertising space which could have contained some great reasons that the school is the right choice for a parent.

The headline for a start is a real waste of space… a good old-fashioned simple headline like “Parents! The school you and your child will love!” would get attention and lead to people reading the rest of the advert. The copy could then outline the answers to the five most common questions parents ask about the school because they are obviously the critical issues that parents are looking for.

In the second advertisement we see a huge graphic with the real criminal offence of lots of reversed out of white printing in the graphic serving as some sort of headline. Once again the copy could have dealt with some of the really important things that parents would discover on the school tour and emphasise they will get answers to all their questions because they will meet the academic team face-to-face.

I haven’t checked but I wonder whether either school tests and measures their advertising by asking this simple question “How did you find out about us?” whenever they get an enquiry and then recording the answer. Information like that is so important because it means that, if they discover their advert is working, they can keep on running it.

Quite simply, that’s the function of a great advertisement… to generate enquiries you can turn into sales.

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