What to Say. How to Say it.
Run ads with personality!
Make your marketing and advertising simple, vivid and consistent — style, sound, look and words. Your storefront, your trucks, your website, your ads – everything!
Buy attention with personality. Get in front of people as much as you can. Give it time to work.
Ads
I started writing advertising in 1981. I’ve probably written over 10,000 ads. Here are a few of them.
Click to play/view
Along the way, I’ve learned a few things.
There are no guarantees in advertising. It’s a game of increasing preferences and probabilities – to gain attention, communicate and sell.
Too often advertising just imitates other advertising. It isn’t winning attention and vividly communicating something specific and memorable.
Advertising isn’t a design contest or a creativity contest. All the creativity in the world can’t make up for a misguided message.
Strategy first! What to say. Then, words and creative ideas. How to say it.
Don’t get stuck in the land of targeting and testing. That’s data science. Without the expertise and discipline date science requires, targeting and testing is too often self-sabotage.
There’s a simple 1-2-3 advertising formula:
- A vivid ad campaign. The message must be clear, the offer must be good enough; something people actually care about.
- Run often enough and long enough. Repetition matters. A pretty good ad that runs a lot will out-perform a brilliant ad that doesn’t run enough.
- Delivered to a relevant audience (where you advertise). When ads don’t work, this always gets the blame. (“Tried radio. Doesn’t work.”) The real problem is probably #1 or #2 or both.
How do you write great ads every time? I don’t know. How do you write hit songs? But there are dos and don’ts and things to know and understand.
Things I’ve learned from people who are a lot smarter than me.
“Many a small thing had been made large by the right kind of advertising.”
— Mark Twain
“People don’t pay attention to advertising. They pay attention to what interests them. Sometimes that’s your ad.”
— Howard Gossage
“People spend money when and where they feel good.”
— Walt Disney
“Talk to people about stuff they care about; the way they actually talk to each other.”
— Roy Williams
“I never met an ad that was too simple or too specific.”
— Bob Hoffman
“Your job isn’t to show how good you are. It’s to show how good the product is.”
— Julian Koenig (writer of Volkswagon’s landmark 1960s “Think Small” ad.)
“If it doesn’t sell, it’s not creative.”
— David Ogilvy
“Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time.”
— Henry Ford
“The media (where you choose to advertise) doesn’t make the ad work. The ad makes the media work. ”
— Roy Williams
Work with me!
I make and manage radio campaigns on ten radio stations in western Massachusetts.
I also do freelance ad writing for TV, web, email, print and outdoor billboards.
Call me: 413-575-5651