Come to a Head
Once you've got a great headline for your ad, don't skimp on the details.
When you need great advertising ideas, where do you turn? By
"great," we don't mean the irrelevantly brilliant
advertisements that win awards for creativity and make handsome
artwork for office walls. Those often cost a lot to design and
produce, but that doesn't mean they sell worth beans. The great
advertising ideas we're talking about are the ones you can
potentially spot every day, whether you're reading a newspaper
or turning the pages of a glossy magazine. Each month in this
column, we'll spotlight a currently running ad that promises to
teach you a lot about producing your own effective advertising.
Because the buying public is so bombarded with ads on a daily
basis, consumers are desensitized to all but the most provocative
of them. This column's goal is to ferret out those head-turning
exceptions, discuss what makes them draw attention, recommend how
you might sprinkle some of their stardust on your own efforts, and
even suggest how they can be improved.
Case in point: Consider the ad shown here for Silk, a popular
soy milk manufactured by White Wave Inc. in Boulder, Colorado. The
headline, "Put A Smile On Your Prostate," gets a solid A+
for its unexpected, whimsical approach to touting the product's
health benefits in an era of rising prostate cancer. The smiling
cereal is also eye-catching.
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To make this ad even better, I'd beef up the body copy. This
ad would be much better off if it answered the question, "Why
choose this soy milk over others?" According to the Silk Web site, Silk
was rated the best-tasting soy milk by the American Taste Institute
just two years ago. That's quite a selling point—and
should be clearly stated in this ad. Another fact worth including:
Silk is manufactured from the whole soybean, which is supposedly a
superior way of extracting nutrients compared to the ground version
used by competitors.
There's a lot you can take away from this ad. The headline,
"Put a smile on your (fill in the blank)" would convey an
effective message for any number of products that offer improvement
of some kind. Even variations, such as "Make your (fill in the
blank) smile" or "Is your (fill in the blank) smiling
like this one?" would work.
But remember, grabbing attention isn't enough. For a really
effective message, make sure to point out why your product is
better than the competition's.
Jerry Fisher is a
freelance advertising copywriter and author of Creating
Successful Small Business Advertising.