Altered State Don't restrict your ads to the same clichéd images. Break away with visual special effects to create more bite.
By Jerry Fisher
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of handsome, even hip,advertising sameness on display in the nation's periodicals, soyou have to wonder how much of it gets passed over because of itsmonotony and, thus, invisibility. No, not every car ad displays itssedan against a backdrop of the desert, mountains or sea, but mostdo. Not every inkjet printer ad shows a color print of a cockatooor clown sliding out, but few don't. And let's be honest,the predictably stylish fashion, liquor and fragrance ads do abetter job of promoting the cheekbones and chest hair of theirmodels than the products themselves.
Where's the originality out there? Where's the "tryharder" mentality that's needed to grab the attention ofthe indifferent readers who typically breeze through a magazinewith little regard for the ads it contains?
Theanswer is in advertising efforts like the one shown here, developedfor Computer Associates, a data management and applicationdevelopment company in Islandia, New York. The challenge was tocharacterize how losing one's PDA doesn't necessarily meanlosing the data it carries (assuming, of course, you use ComputerAssociates' enterprise management software).
The company's ad agency, Young & Rubicam, could havepulled that idea off in a jillion visually mundane ways. Instead,they decided to trick up a shot of a snake that swallowed a PDAdevice. It's an A+ image that is virtually impossible to ignoreand almost guaranteed to stop the reader.
How did Young & Rubicam's advertising art director pullit off? There is standard-issue graphics-manipulating software thatenables the "sampling" (onscreen cloning) of thesnake's skin and can be used to electronically upholster thePDA, making it look like it's actually inside the snake.
Maybe you're saying, that's great for a big company likeComputer Associates, with an advertising budget large enough tohire a hotshot ad agency to do original thinking and designing forthem. But what can an entrepreneurial company with a more modest adbudget achieve? The answer is: Nothing less than the same.
How? Start by developing a collection of ads like this thatbreak the mold. Use it for inspiration each time you and your teamsit down to develop advertising. Say to yourself, "We need tocome up with something at least this fresh to get the attention wewant." When you hold up ads like this as a benchmark,you'd be surprised how they can ratchet up your own ideageneration.
Jerry Fisheris a freelance advertising copywriter and author of CreatingSuccessful Small Business Advertising.
