Wednesday 28 July 2010

Advertising. Made Easy

Making adverts for your business, club, tennis association or cabal, doesn't have to be expensive, time consuming and fraught with modern, asymmetric hairstyles.

By following a few simple rules you can create your very own crowd-pleasing communications in-house, powerful enough to send even the most extrovert advertising paladin of Madison Boulevard and Whoreditch into a horribly shrieking, smoke-engulfed tailspin. Aaaiiieeeeee!!

Take this classic advertisement for Ford Cars for example.



It's a blinder, isn't it. And in some ways the perfect advertisement. But exactly how the fuck and why?

Well for one, it's got a nice big picture on it. Use a picture on your advert and you won't go far wrong. It can be of anything you like too - a horse, a foot, a beautiful actress, or even a worm. It doesn't matter. Because people will look at anything. As long as it's big and recognisable, stick it up there right in the middle of the ad, even if it looks quite foolish or ugly.

Secondly, get yourself some words. Don't worry too much about these though. As literacy levels in the UK plummet (fall quickly) to an all time low, the fewer words you use in your advert the better. Just be sure that at least one of the words you use is the name of your product, service, or factory outlet etc. By making a direct reference to the image above, and implying their products are desirable to families, the Ford ad tries to be a bit of smartarse in it's choice of words. But you needn't be so earnest. It's the number of words that matters in advertising, not what they say, and six is probably about your limit these days.

SUMMARY:
Making advertising is easy. Just put the name of your product next to a picture and let people make their own conclusions. If they like it, great. If they don't? Well, they're obviously not your target market.

Any questions?

2 comments:

Sell! Sell! said...

Funny and perspicacious.
A winning combination.

John said...

Hey thanks man. As an avid reader of your own EXTREMELY insightful bloglet, I am duly flattered.

Perspicacious, eh. With that kind of vocabulary I bet you've botched a few ads trying to make the words fit the picture haven't you?