Creativity—what works?

The five golden rules of successful advertising

This heading may seem inappropriate. Surely advertising is an industry where creativity, originality and innovation mean everything? How can there be rules?

In fact, as all our research helps to demonstrate, there are five basic principles that can ensure effective, focussed creativity. They are the criteria by which we judge our work. Despite their simplicity, a great deal of business-to-business advertising breaks them with alarming frequency and for no apparent good reasons.

1. An advertisement cannot start to do its job unless it gets attention. Successful advertising is highly visible and different. Invisible advertising is unsuccessful and me-too.
2. Visibility is not an end in itself, but a first step to success. High attention can easily be gained by bizarre images, bare flesh, children, animals, well-known faces. The important point is relevance.
3. Every advertisement must be clearly branded. If your advertisement is not working hard for you, it may well be working for your competitor.
4. An advertisement works harder if it is part of a coherent, long-term campaign, aimed at reinforcing the values of your brand. Long-term consistency will pay off much better than one-off brilliance.
5. Readers will give their attention only to advertisements that offer an answer to one question: What’s in this for me? This is why every advertisement must make a promise. Our clients’ customers do not buy products, they buy benefits.

What makes advertising work?

Our research has also given us some clues about specific ‘do’s and don’ts’. The following list is by no means exhaustive but it does set out some of the things we know about effective advertising.

• Many of the successful techniques of consumer advertising work in business-to-business: promising a benefit, news, testimonials, recognising a problem, giving helpful information, and so on.
• Advertisements must communicate quickly. The average reader looks at a press advertisement for 2.5 seconds. People do not pause to de-code ads that have no immediate meaning. And quite a few people have literal minds.
• Web users are bombarded with banner ads. Instead, think of web advertising as a “pull medium” offering a service that benefits consumers. Our banners for hotels.com let the prospect investigate room prices at different locations. As a result, click throughs rose by over 300%.
• Creativity equals memorability. Research into memory shows that an image is more easily recalled if it has one or more of the following properties: exaggeration, humour, absurdness, sensual appeal, colour, great simplicity, movement.
• If no unique benefit exists for a product or service, the campaign should try to pre-empt the high ground. Find out the key benefit for your market and promise it more clearly, more memorably and more effectively than your competition.
• Testimonials always work well if they come from experts in reputable companies. Athletes, comedians and other irrelevant celebrities steal attention from your product and lose credibility (“I bet he never drove a fork-lift truck in his life”).
• Demonstrations always score above average in recall. It pays to visualise your promise. It saves time. It drives the message home. It is memorable.
• Problem/solution is also an above-average technique. You set up a problem your reader recognises and prove you can solve it.
• Never cheat with demonstrations and problem/solution ads. Your market isn’t stupid
• If your product is new, tell people. Your market is always on the look-out for new products and new ways to use old products.
• Headlines get five times the readership of body copy. Your headlines must offer something to the reader.
• ‘Flagging the sufferer’ is an excellent device. When a product or service is consumed by a readily identifiable group of people, it pays to flat them with your headline: ‘Brand Managers’, ‘Over 30 and no pension?’ and so on.
• Long or short copy? Readership falls off rapidly up to 50 words, but drops little between 50 and 500 words. If your promise needs long copy, don’t be afraid to use it.
• Body copy is seldom read by more than 10% of readers of trade and technical publications. But that 10% represents your prospects. What you say to them determines your response rate. Body copy should use short sentences (around 12 words), short paragraphs (no more than three sentences), and Anglo-Saxon, rather than Roman words (say ‘use’, rather than ‘utilise’). Above all, copy should talk to the reader as an individual in the sort of language he would use himself.
• Photographs tend to work harder than line illustrations. They are more believable, more memorable (and help generate more response).
• Story appeal can be built into pictures. The best results are achieved by photographs that suggest a story. The reader says to himself, ‘what goes on here?’, and reads the copy to find out.
• Captions should appear under all photographs. They get twice the readership of your body copy. Captions should make an important copy point.
• There is no such thing as a boring product, only boring advertising. Products and their benefits are always interesting to a potential buyer. Advertising that tries to trick the unconcerned reader into being interested misses the point and is destined to fail.
• In advertisement layout, less is more. Every advertisement needs a focal point and one big picture works better than several small ones.
• The role of typography is to make an advertisement logical and easy to read. Copy that is reversed out (printed white on black) or overprinted on illustrations gets lower readership.
• Outstanding creative work is not for the faint-hearted. If a campaign is genuinely original, it is obviously untried. Creative advertising requires the commitment of agency and client.