Advertising Design Essentials
One of the hidden costs of advertising is advertising design. In local media it can cost more than actually running the ad if you go to a professional ad agency; even a full-page ad in a magazine can cost a considerable amount in "creative" costs.
And frankly, it’s most often a waste of money.
Why?
Because most advertising design is done by graphic designers, even if they're working for an ad agency; and while they might be great at graphic design, they’re not advertising and marketing specialists.
And advertising design is a specialist job and requires specialist skills.
This is not a criticism of graphic designers per se. You’re simply allowing them to do a job for which they are not trained. Worse yet is to allow the advertising department of the magazine or newspaper take control of your advertising design. Always remember their job is to sell advertising space and then, only secondarily, please YOU with the look of the ad. And in neither case are they worried about your results. Once you’ve approved the proofs of your ad, their job is done!
They are not knowingly cheating you, because they genuinely believe what they tell you about advertising and advertising design.
But the advice they typically give you, about needing full colour, flashy graphics, a fancy logo at the top of the page – and multiple insertions to build "brand awareness" – are all wrong.
In almost all cases you’re better off doing your own advertising design.
You see, the advertising copy sells; the graphics just "tell" (or more often get in the way). So to increase the effectiveness of your ads, you need to concentrate on getting the copy right.
Quite simply your advertising design should resemble mail-order advertising. It’s not pretty (which is why graphic designers are the worst people to do it), but it is effective.
And while the detail of your design and layout (fonts, etc) will be largely dictated by the standard adopted by the media you’re putting the ad in (because you want it to blend in to the background editorial as much as possible so it looks less obviously like an ad), it must always contain these elements:
• A bold and compelling headline
• Strong body copy
• An offer
• A call to action
• Clear and unambiguous directions on how to respond
In terms of appearance it should look very much like editorial copy, with subheadings and pictures which are relevant and used sparingly.
You can either learn to do this all yourself or hire an experienced direct response copywriter. This won’t usually cost you any more than getting a graphic designer to do it and you results will be much better.
Some copywriters go the extra mile and will deliver your ads "camera ready" to the newspaper or magazine, so it appears in print exactly how you want it to. If you can find a copywriter who does this, then stick to them like glue, because they’re worth their weight in gold (assuming their copy is good, too!).
And that, in a nutshell, is effective advertising design.
Have a look around the rest of this site and see some of the specific advertising secrets strategies you can use to increase your profits starting TODAY!
Happy Advertising!
Chris Cardell
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