Bad advertising will waste your money

There’s a lot of bad advertising about. If you copy it you will waste your money. Advertising is (or should be) salesmanship, pure and simple. Its function is to sell – to persuade its audience to accept the proposition and, eventually, to buy.

It is quite amazing that expensive ad agencies are turning out advertising that fails to follow the basic rules of selling, even ignoring that well-known maxim, WIIFM – what’s in it for me? Amazingly, it gets past a succession of people who should know better: from the copywriter to the creative head, to the account team and finally the advertising manager at the client end.

To see how it should be done, look at ‘direct response advertising’. It is designed to get immediate action, and its effectiveness can be readily measured. It has to answer three questions quickly: what is it, is it for me, how do I get it?

In other words, first tell me the proposition. What are you selling? Then make it relevant to me. Finally, tell me where, how and from whom I can get it. The supplier or retailer fits into the last part.

Yet, the current crop of TV commercials contains at least three that begin with the very same error. They all start with “At XYZ company we ...” And they are all big names, with big advertising budgets and a long history of advertising that should have guided their judgement. Here are their opening lines:

At Sainsbury’s all these ...
At HSBC we can help ...
At Wickes we know ...
This last is made worse by the closing slogan, “It’s got our name on it.”

The focus of all these ads is on themselves. It presumes that each of those companies has such a presence in the market that the mere mention of their names will produce a Pavlovian response from well-conditioned customers. That amounts to self-congratulation – not a good basis for selling, especially in these tough times when traditional loyalties are already being tested.

Good copywriting follows the process of persuasion. And a good copywriter knows how to sell. If you’re looking for one, let’s meet for copy.
Phillip@pkpcommunicators.com