Make
Unforgettable Ads
Find out
what the latest research can teach you about creating ads your prospects
won't forget.
By Kim T.
Gordon
Companies
spend billions of marketing dollars each year to design memorable ad
campaigns. But what does it really take to make your business's name or
message stick in a prospect's mind? These methods will make your next
campaign memorable:
Engage
prospects. The more time someone spends with your ad, the more likely he
or she is to remember it. "Vivid processing leads to better storage
of memory," says Elizabeth F. Loftus, University of California,
Irvine, distinguished professor of psychology, author of 21 books and an
expert on memory malleability. The best ads get the advertiser or brand
into the minds of prospects as they consider different possibilities.
How can
you get prospects to spend more time with your ads? According to Philip
W. Sawyer, director of Starch Communications, a Harrison, New York,
testing firm specializing in readership studies, the most memorable
print ads have messages that grab the reader. Those ads include
headlines that contain a benefit and a strong visual focal point, such
as a close-up of a model looking directly at you. One large photo works
best in magazines, while in newspapers, you can use multi-product
visuals. A Starch Communications study on behalf of the Newspaper
Association of America showed that when three-quarters of ad space was
devoted to illustrations, recognition rates improved by 50 percent.
Add color
and contrast. For magazine readers, high-contrast images also boost
recognition. When Starch Communications tested two identical ads for
Stolichnaya vodka--one with a white background and another with a black
background--twice as many people remembered seeing the version with the
black background, even though everything else in the ad was the same.
Testing
also shows that, on average, larger ads in print media are more
memorable. However, a creative ad in a small space can be more memorable
than a so-so one that takes up a full page.
Some
colors enhance memorability in print media-including sky blue, golden
yellow and shades of blue-green. Red is a good spot color in newspapers,
where Sawyer says color increases recognition by 20 percent. But there's
new information about four-color ads in magazines: A few years ago,
color ads earned 24 percent higher recognition scores than
black-and-white ads. Now, full-page black-and-white campaigns are
breaking through the clutter, and four-color ads have lost their
advantage.
Communicate
frequently. Repetition is important to memorability. At the Washington
University School of Medicine in St. Louis, psychologist Mark E. Wheeler
conducted a study of memory in which a word was paired with a picture or
sound many times over several days to test subjects' recognition rates.
He says exposure to information in different contexts helps you remember
it. So when you see a message in different formats, such as a print ad,
a billboard and a TV commercial, he says, "You associate the
different impressions, and that helps you retrieve the information when
you need it."
Use
memorable benefits. Ads that grab and hold a prospect's attention are
those that immediately communicate a benefit that answers the question,
What's in it for me? The bottom line, says Sawyer, is that features
aren't memorable-benefits are. "If you have a headline that states
a benefit, people will read it, remember it and clip it out of the
magazine or newspaper and hold onto it. And that's the trump card for
everything."
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Contact Marketing Expert Kim T. Gordon, author of Bringing Home the
Business, at www.smallbusinessnow.com.
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