Unfortunately, there's a lot of handsome, even hip,
advertising sameness on display in the nation's periodicals, so
you have to wonder how much of it gets passed over because of its
monotony and, thus, invisibility. No, not every car ad displays its
sedan against a backdrop of the desert, mountains or sea, but most
do. Not every inkjet printer ad shows a color print of a cockatoo
or clown sliding out, but few don't. And let's be honest,
the predictably stylish fashion, liquor and fragrance ads do a
better job of promoting the cheekbones and chest hair of their
models than the products themselves.
Where's the originality out there? Where's the "try
harder" mentality that's needed to grab the attention of
the indifferent readers who typically breeze through a magazine
with little regard for the ads it contains?
The
answer is in advertising efforts like the one shown here, developed
for Computer Associates, a data management and application
development company in Islandia, New York. The challenge was to
characterize how losing one's PDA doesn't necessarily mean
losing the data it carries (assuming, of course, you use Computer
Associates' enterprise management software).
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The company's ad agency, Young & Rubicam, could have
pulled that idea off in a jillion visually mundane ways. Instead,
they decided to trick up a shot of a snake that swallowed a PDA
device. It's an A+ image that is virtually impossible to ignore
and almost guaranteed to stop the reader.
How did Young & Rubicam's advertising art director pull
it off? There is standard-issue graphics-manipulating software that
enables the "sampling" (onscreen cloning) of the
snake's skin and can be used to electronically upholster the
PDA, making it look like it's actually inside the snake.
Maybe you're saying, that's great for a big company like
Computer Associates, with an advertising budget large enough to
hire a hotshot ad agency to do original thinking and designing for
them. But what can an entrepreneurial company with a more modest ad
budget achieve? The answer is: Nothing less than the same.
How? Start by developing a collection of ads like this that
break the mold. Use it for inspiration each time you and your team
sit down to develop advertising. Say to yourself, "We need to
come up with something at least this fresh to get the attention we
want." When you hold up ads like this as a benchmark,
you'd be surprised how they can ratchet up your own idea
generation.
Jerry Fisher
is a freelance advertising copywriter and author of Creating
Successful Small Business Advertising.