The lost art of making magazine ads
Published on 03/17/1997 under Ad Strategy
Bill Bernbach once said, "it's not just what you say that stirs people, it's the way that you say it."
Certainly, we advertising practitioners understand the tremendous boost that creativity can give to a communications program's effectiveness. But, for some reason, the people we labor so hard to please don't seem to share this objective.
I've come to this sad conclusion because there are far too many lame, uninspired ads running in business and trade publications these days. Somebody has got to be producing and approving this garbage.
As the Starch Advertising Readership Service predicted in a recent issue of its Tested Copy newsletter: Business-to-business ads will improve, because they couldn't get much worse. They went on to characterize b-to-b ads as "distinctly unvisual, cluttered, solipsistic, and unconcerned about product benefits."
Other than that, we're doing okay. (By the way, for those of you too lazy to reach for a dictionary, solipsistic means totally preoccupied with one's self.)
I called Phil Sawyer, Starch's senior v.p. for ad readership services, and asked him what we might do to turn this demoralizing situation around. His first suggestion was to keep things simple. "As much as we would like to think otherwise, magazine readers are not looking at ads the way they look at editorial," he said. "You have to offer an uncluttered layout with an arresting visual in order to give the eye a focal point."
His second suggestion was amazing only in that he had to offer it: sell the benefits, not the product. "Nobody is interested in product shots," he said, "show what the product will do for them." That seems incredibly obvious, but trade publications are chock full of ads with large product photos and copy that only touts product features. This assumes that readers are interested enough to make the short leap to what this means for them. Yeah, right.
Rick Kean, executive director of the Business Marketing Association, is one of many industry observers who believes that personal computers are at the root of this creative cancer. "Computers are the worst thing that's happened to us," he recently remarked. "Young art directors seem to be more concerned about special software and computer effects than they are in studying the client's product for something that would truly be of interest to the customer."
I agree, and so does Phil Sawyer. "The personal computer is a great democratizer," he said. "Unfortunately, just because you hire someone and give them a Mac doesn't qualify them to work up an ad."
Another industry observer, Bill McBride, president of Harvey Research, offers the interesting possibility that "magazine environment" may have as much to do with an ad's readership as the ad itself.
"There are a small number of select magazines that have intensely high reader involvement," he noted. "Usually the same ad will achieve similar scores from one magazine to the next. However, in these high involvement magazines, we've seen readership scores double."
The Harvey organization studied more than 300 magazines in 1996, conducting 25,000 face-to-face interviews, and getting reaction to more than 100,000 different ads. I guess that would qualify them to know a high interest publication when they see one.
One example McBride cited is FIREHOUSE Magazine, which is distributed, as you might guess, to firemen. He reported the average reader spends 91.7 minutes with FIREHOUSE, compared to only 27.4 minutes for trade magazines as a whole. You can imagine what this does to readership scores.
He noted that "Internet" magazines as a group are among this high involvement category at the present time. And if you could locate a fireman interested in the Internet, wow!
McBride does offer, however, some help for the ad practitioner. As a 20-year veteran of Leo Burnett and Ogilvy & Mather, he strongly urges us to look for the "inherent drama" in every product or service. "Don't borrow interest," he says. "Find interest within the product. Search for it."
According to McBride, the best ads start with the inherent drama (benefit), presenting it in a stimulating and relevant manner to the target audience.
This approach, of course, made extremely rich men out of Claude Hopkins and Albert Lasker, but who cares about ancient history anyway?
I do. My recent column on Fairfax Cone (1/20/97) provided four imperatives of good advertising: (1) clearly state the proposition, (2) demonstrate how the proposition is of interest to the reader, (3) fashion the proposition so it appeals personally to the logical prospect, and (4) express the personality of the advertiser. And that was written in 1949.
David Ogilvy, our industry's preeminent list-maker, provides five questions to help recognize a big idea:
1. Did it make you gasp when you first saw it?
2. Did you wish you had thought of it yourself?
3. Is it unique?
4. Does it fit the strategy to perfection?
5. Could it be used for 30 years?
And the "King Kong" of Big Ideas, legendary adman George Lois (as quoted in my 11/18/96 column), tells us that ads shouldn't just sell products, they should change the world. Don't laugh -- that's the standard he lives by.
So yes, I think we can learn a lot from history, and the sooner we start doing this, the better.
One thing that David Ogilvy has been very strong on is the value of long copy, especially to a highly selected business or industrial reader. For some reason, this technique has disappeared.
I analyzed three of the latest ad industry annuals that showcase creative excellence, and of the more than 100 business-to-business magazine ads I identified, 80% had body copy of 75 words or less. At least 20% had copy of 10 words or less. And many of these ads were by large, multinational companies.
How can you present a selling proposition with 10 words of body copy?
You can't. Which brings me back to my opening concern: somebody out there is approving all this bad advertising. We need to ask you a big favor -- QUIT IT!
Set your standards higher. If you're using people to produce ads who have no experience, please stop. If you've squeezed your ad production budgets so tight there's no room for creative thinking, loosen the purse strings a little.
As an industry with a proud history, we know how to produce good ads. It's time we started doing it again.