Making adverts work

Here you see two adverts that appeared in my local paper, an excellent choice if you want to get to into the letterbox of every home in the newspaper’s circulation area. Whether the paper gets read, and therefore your advert seen, is another matter of course. But for my money, local paper advertising is very effective if local people are your target. BTW they both run across the bottom of the right hand page of the paper… an excellent location to be seen.

Of course you need to apply a modicum of common sense and remember the good old AIDA rule for adverts to be effective and encourage people to buy.

Let’s look at the first one for the hospital.

Is the local paper a good choice for advertising? I’d say “no” coz it is most often the patient’s doctor who makes the decision on the hospital. That’s generally based on what hospital the medical specialist uses. It’s a case of the patient going where they are told in most instances.

Advertising the hospital to the general community is probably wasted… a handful of specialists may read this newspaper. So where should that hospital advertise? Logically, in somewhere that specialists read, listen to or watch; maybe you direct mail them or engage with them through social media. Not the local paper!

And as for AIDA… the copy does nothing in the way of communicating convincing information; it’s just a series of motherhood (feel good) statements. I guess though seeing it in the newspaper gave the hospital management a lovely warm feeling even though nobody noticed. And you can get that feeling by wetting yourself in a dark coloured suit.

Now let’s look at the mattress advert.

Well, in a nutshell it does the job, not as effectively as it could, but effective nonetheless. The headline gets the message across. It could have been even more effective with something like “Factory clearance: Save up to $2,500 on mattresses!” Then add a subheading like “Every mattress slashed by up to 70%!” to amplify the message.

Then I would have loved them to tell a story along the lines of “Yes, because we were able to pick up a major retailer’s cancelled order at a rock bottom price you get the huge savings. Quality mattresses in all sizes for less than half price. We must clear every mattress in the store to make way for new stock etc, etc.” The proviso is of course that the story must be true. I’d have liked the art for the advert to have been done by a graphic designer. On the other hand, a cheap looking advert does convey just how cheap the mattresses are!

Two adverts… one did nothing; one made money! If it was your money paying for the advert which would you feel good about?

The lesson for us? Advertising works but it needs a commonsense approach.