There are a range of skills that go into creating an advertisement. Apart from graphic design, artworking and other design skills, there is a way of thinking about how you make advertising an effective form of marketing. This involves psychology, research, ergonomics and usability. You can spend years studying entire degrees in advertising without doing much more than scratching the surface of this. However, like most things there is a Pareto aspect to advertising. About 80% of an advertisement’s effectiveness is achievable by getting a few things right.

What Are You Talking About?

The foremost rules of advertising go as follows:

1. You can say one thing well
2. You can say two things half as well
3. You can say three things badly

Most of the SME advertising work we do is initially a matter of unclutttering messages and isolating what is really important In other words, implementing these rules. And it is a difficult thing for an advertiser to accept. There are usually lots of good things about a product or service. It is tempting to list these and give them all equal billing because they all seem equally important. Adverts built on this basis tend to look like public service notices. You see no one thing for all the other things competing for attention.It is important to find the one thing that is most compelling about your service or product, say it concisely and emphatically.

Make Space

In doing this you should also allocate about 60% to 80% of your available space to saying this. Look at any quality advert and you will see a single thing said in headline format consisting of a few words and supported by a single image.

Tell people what to do

Amongst the few sentences you might include beneath your headline, typically to expand upon it, you should also tell people what to do next. In the trade this is known as a ‘call to action’.

4. Include a call to action

It might be to phone or go to a website, or to go to a shop, but tell them to do something.

Get Noticed

The next thing to remember is that an advert is designed to be seen. Hence rules 5 and 6:

5. Design an advert to stand out

With an advert, you are trying to be noticed. You use words and images to do this and you use size, style and colour within the words and images. A very conservative advert will leave you looking apologetic, characterless and completely camouflaged. Conversely, an outrageous ad might need to be tempered. You could get noticed for the wrong reasons. But on the whole, advertising is not for shrinking violets, it is about getting noticed.

6. Give your advertising a chance to be seen

If you cannot afford:

1. A decent sized space
2. The ‘right’ publications
3. Regular advertisements over a reasonable period of time

Then don’t waste your time and money creating an advert in the first place.

Size is not everything, but it certainly is something! Below a certain level you will just do more harm than good.

The right publications can be a difficult call. Advertising sales people are good at making whatever they’re selling sound like the right publication. It is usually important to make sure you buy for your own reasons rather than be sold to for their reasons.

In any event, you probably know where you should be advertising. You will know your market, the trade mags and your local publications and which of these will be relevant to your audience. But, on the whole, mass circulation to an irrelevant market is likely to be expensive but not necessarily effective. It is best to find a publication with the right readership and reasonable circulation.

the expensive side of advertising will be purchasing the space. However, you often need to apply some frequency to give your advertising a chance of working. You will need to chip away at a market. A one-off advert in a publication for anything other than a time limited special offer, is unlikely to pay dividends. It is as well to maintain a consistent presence. It will lower resistance to your brand because you will become a familiar name and lodge yourself in people’s consciousness. People are more inclined to buy something that they have heard about than something completely new.

When asked to present at a recent business forum, we were asked if we thought advertising was some type of Rocket science. Our response:

“Advertising is not rocket science, it is getting people to show up to the launch, expecting to pay for the pleasure of doing so.”

Creative Thing recently featured as the key marketing contributors in the BBC debate on Middle Age consumers. The debate was featured as a topic for discussion on BBC Hereford and Worcester on Howard Benthams Breakfast Time show. David Yates, Managing Director of Creative Thing talked of the difficulties in defining middle age.

“Middle age is almost an obsolete term. The current crop of people between the ages of forty five and seventy were originally responsible for redefining the way we now see the world.

“The generation who reinvented themselves as ‘teenagers’ in the 1950s are now in their seventies and are reinventing old age. They don’t tend to sit around complaining about the weather, they are off on cruises or climbing up Machu Pichu. Hot on their heels are the 60s Generations. These people are now in their sixties themselves but are fit and healthy. They have high expectations and by and large, retain many of the values that they helped to establish back then – certainly they are still refusing to fit into a middle-age stereotype.

“And every decade seems to follow the lead, even Punks are now in their fifties!”

David Yates went on to say that middle age was not so much a niche marketing concept as a mass marketing one. Thanks to the baby boom, the majority of spenders out there are middle aged. They hold fairly consitent opinions and in some respects they behave similarly to each other.

“One example is that they are more likely to respond to information through traditional routes such as graphic design and even web design. These can presented by companies in the form of brochures or advertising materials and sites. Marketing to the middle age consumer is just marketing – full-stop. Marketing challenges are more accute when trying to understand the current crop of sixteen to thirty year olds.

“They have seen it, done it, played the video game of it, MSN’d their mates about it, swapped text messages about it, chatted on the web about it, and moved onto the next thing before they even get the tee shirt to prove it!”

“What do these people need marketing messages for? They are not inclined to be consumer fodder and have a more jaundiced view of marketing. They operate outside of middle aged conventions and they own all the information they need or, indeed, trust.”

Creative Thing is always trying to see the world from someone else’s perspective. A typical graphic design agency approach is to second guess the clients. Creative Thing are the graphic design agency who research our customer’s customers. Ultimately they are the people deciding to buy and they are therefore more important to a designer than the client!

Graphic design starts at the very moment a company starts. Most people are thinking about their logo before they have worked out their pricing strategy. And that is a telling thing. The way you present yourself to the world will determine the way your customers perceive you.

And then life takes over. While creating your own newsletters and business cards may have seemed like a necessity when you first started your company from your kitchen table, continuing to do so limits your potential business.

Like it or not, people’s opinion of your company is often made in the first few seconds, and during that time nothing has a greater impact than the appearance of your marketing materials. You may have the best products in the world or offer customer service that is light years ahead of your competition, but unless your communications come across as being from such a company, people are not going to believe you. You can shout it from the rooftops, but you may never have the opportunity to prove it.

This is where the services of a professional graphic designer come in. Much in the same way that you hire an accountant to handle your financial matters or a solicitor to handle your legal matters, putting graphic design in the hands of a professional will return a far greater profit than the money you try to save by handling it yourself.

There are many details to graphic design that may not be apparent to someone outside of the industry. Choosing colours, fonts and images can often seem simple but this is because people often choose what appeals to them. To take it a step further, there are many nuances to the layout of a marketing piece that have a tremendous impact on it’s effectiveness. True graphic design is about creating something that will illicit a particular response, whether it be to convey a message or to persuade a potential buyer.

Creative Thing offers a complete range of graphic design services, from print media such as brochures, posters and signage, to logo design and web site design, as well as everything in between.

Graphic Design Worcestershire – was where we started. We now have clients across the world from next door in Upton Upon Severn in Worcestershire in the West Midlands to Tasmania and Sydney in Australia. We work with companies and individuals of all sizes, one-man-bands up to MOD and government contracts. Small companies, start-ups, SMEs and multinationals whether it be around our own region in Upton Upon Severn in Worcestershire and the West Midlands or further afield.

Website Design is apparently

The graphic design and coding of web pages, full websites and interactive web applications.

It’s a bit like the story of the man in a hot air balloon who descends and hovers above the ground to ask a passer-by where he is. The passer-by thinks for a moment and then tells him he is standing in a basket, strung beneath a hot air balloon, about twenty feet above the centre of a field. All the information is entirely accurate and totally useless.

While the question was open to all sorts of interpretation, the answer was completely obtuse. In web terms a better way of understanding where it all fits in is to couch the questions differently.

What can you do with a website? What can a website do? Why have a website?

All these are better questions.

What can you do with a website?: You can communicate, transact, manage, administer, promote, brand – the list goes on…

What can a website do?: Talk, listen, sell and buy.

Why have a website: Apart from the expectation, you can make everything you do right now more effective through using a good website well.

If e.g. you advertise online or in magazines, then a website can make that more effective. It extends your message beyond the quick hit and into the extended proposition.

If you retail, a website will help you to sell more goods to your existing customers, and allow you to approach them directly with offers rather than waiting for them to come into your shop.

If you have a service there is probably an expectation that you will have a website. Without a product you only have your ‘brand’ to show and people will form opinions about that and you based on it. Certainly it will be the primary source of research for any prospective client. You can organise your key messages in an unambiguous way, present them properly and leave the right impressions and information with the world outside.
Creative Thing is a unique design firm offering a variety of services from basic Website Design to low cost self-managing websites. We can provide complete e-commerce website development through our own sunsidiary company Starteshop from as little as £199. We have created and launched hundreds of successful websites, for many different types of businesses. We have the creative talent of a successful graphics agency, the technical knowldge of advanced web developers, the know how to get your site performing in Search Engines, and the ability to take your business and develop a compelling web proposition to move it forward.

Our website design clients range from small start-up companies to large corporations and everything in between. With our combined experience in graphic design, website development and e-commerce sites, you can be confident that whatever your project demands, our web developers can deliver.

I read a recent definition of Graphic Design:

Graphic design is the process and art of combining text and graphics and communicating an effective message in the design of logos, graphics, brochures, newsletters, posters, signs, and any other type of visual communication. Today’s graphic designers often use desktop publishing software and techniques to achieve their goals.

Examples: “A brochure that makes watching water boil seem exciting or a business card that entices the recipient to call instead of toss owe at least part of their success to good graphic design — it doesn’t matter if they were created with the latest hot software or an old ink pen.”

I can’t help thinking that this is incomplete. We may be based in Upton Upon Severn a small backwater that makes the news annually when the river floods, but graphic design is a universal experience which makes our view as valid as anyone else’s and more valid if you look at the experience we bring to graphic design – even from Upton Upon Severn. (more…)