Advertising Should Motivate People to Action

I've never been a fan of "Institutional" advertising. I've been brought up on good ol' fashioned direct response advertising. That is, advertising that produces a targeted, measurable, actionable result. Advertising that acts like a salesperson would in front of a live customer...only multiplied.

Well, I'm very disappointed in an ad I've seen run on TV as of late. Maybe you've seen it? It's the latest Pentium III commercial? It's got the three guys from the theatrical group, "Blue Man Group."

In an attempt to let people around the world know how "powerful" the new Pentium III is, they use the non-verbal act to try to demonstrate it.

The three "blue men" pop-up and they have "tv-like" monitors that they bang together and the words "Intel III" go into the box and the guy on the end
falls off the Pentium III structure.

"Wow! Must be powerful." (insert sarcasm here)

Well, as a computer owner, I know the Pentium adds power to my computer, but this ad does nothing to tell me what the new Pentium III does. I'm a little disappointed that the millions spent on this ad does nothing but "stupidly" entertain us.

It does nothing to inform me of what this little addition to my computer will do for me. Why is it important for me to have it? Couldn't they have said, "To learn more about the power of the Intel Pentium III, just go to our website..." or "for a free brochure on how the Pentium III can make your business run faster, smoother, easier, just call our toll free number..."

That would have been a little more beneficial to me than watching three blue guys bumping TV sets together.

In his classic book on advertising, "Scientific Advertising," Claude Hopkins states:

"Advertising is salesmanship. Its principles are the principles of salesmanship. Successes and failures in both lines are due to like causes. Thus every advertising question should be answered by the salesman's standards."

So, if that's true (which I believe wholeheartedly it is) and you were selling this product to a Fortune 500 CEO, would you send "Blue Men Group" to bang monitors together to demonstrate the point? Or, would you present every
feature and benefit this product had to offer that would save time, make things more efficient and make a significant difference in the way this CEO ran his company ?

I think the latter.

To sum up, John Caples once said that there are three steps to great advertising:

Capture the prospects attention - Nothing happens unless something in your commercial makes the prospect stop long enough to pay attention to what you have to say next.

Maintain the prospect's interest - Keep the commercial focused on the prospect, on what he or she will get out of your product or service.

Move your prospect to favorable action - Unless enough prospects are transformed into "customers," your ad or commercial has failed.

I don't know the statistics, but in my opinion this Pentium III ad did nothing to keep my attention, nor move me to action.

The purpose of all advertising is sales, sales, sales!

Great advertising starts by making every ad serve like a great salesperson.

Anything else, in my opinion, is just doesn't make sense.
©2001 By Craig A. Valine

About the Author

Craig Valine is the publisher of the The AwfulMarketing Alert Newsletter, "Where you learn GOOD marketing strategies by looking at those who do it really BAD."

To subscribe his free newsletter, go to: http://awfulmarketing.com/ezinesubscribe.htm

:To contact see details below.


questions@awfulmarketing.com
http://www.awfulmarketing.com