Quick: What's your headline?
Pssst. Come here. Yes, you. Come here. Closer. Draw the shades, lock the door, and listen to this. Ready? Here goes:
Most business-to-business advertising sucks.
How can you tell when you’re creating (or reviewing) one of the many, many bad B2B ads out there? The answer can fill multiple blog posts. But here’s one tell-tale sign: the space-wasting redundancy of taking the two most important elements of the ad — visual and headline — and having them repeat each other.
Let’s say your visual is a CFO bound and gagged. Your headline should NOT be “Are you being held hostage?” The visual already says that, so why in the world would you waste precious ad space by parroting it? The headline, instead, should complement the visual in more clever — or at least less lazy — fashion.
You just paid thousands to run this ad in the Wall Street Journal. And you want to say the same thing twice?
An example: Take a look at the teaser ad to the left. The street sign visual screams “Cloud meets big data,” right? Then, inexplicably, the headline re-screams the same darned thing. Wasted space, wasted media dollars, and a wasted opportunity to use the headline to advance the story that the visual began.
The headline could have been a provocative call to action (“Watch what happens to your business when the Cloud meets big data.”) Or, wouldn’t it be cool if the teaser ad’s headline actually, you know, teased (“Las Vegas, May 9, emcworld.com”). At the very least, add something of value by putting the company name in the headline (“EMC2 is proud to bring big data to the Cloud”).
Peoples, virtually all advertising begins with a creative concept, which often includes an image and a copy line to go along with it. Those two elements should complete each other, not repeat each other.
What do you think of this? I’d like to know.
Perhaps true, but more than a skosh on the patronizing side. The way I read this article:
“You probably don’t know what you’re doing. I will show you what you are probably doing wrong. You need a great writer like me to show you how to do it right.”
My advice would be to talk about the Top 10 mistakes in B2B advertising. Or perhaps you might approach it from a good-better-best standpoint rather than a bad-worse-terrible standpoint.
Of course you lose the shock value that comes with negativity, but at least you won’t come off as an irascible, albeit clever, critic casting stones from the ivory tower… YMMV
I def feelz ya, AdGuy. Snark is a Fatt Lipp trait, for better or worse. As for content itself, I aim to keep posts at or around 300 words, so sometimes nuance is forfeited for the sake of brevity. Thanks for the most excellent comments, though. Sometimes I wonder if I go too far. I need folks like you to chime in with a “yup ya did” every now and then, to keep me on the straighter and narrower.
On the other hand, some people really need to hear it (and see it) in it’s least embellished way in order to grasp the idea fully. I’m all for telling it like it is and sometimes breaking out of the expected ways of communicating. Do like the Good-Better – Best approach…”Top 10″ list for anything is near the top of the the Top 10 Most Over Used Concepts” …it’s vanilla.
For the tied up guy…
how about
“Just shut up already, leave your ego behind, and let me do my thing.”
Snark is your trademark but regardless, you make a great point! I learned something
new and will incorporate the point going forward.
The bottom line is that this is a classic B2B marketing challenge and the most effective way to reach this particular group is to go offline and use interruptive marketing tactics that can effectively catch these prospects’ attention. ………..
Vita Yaukatch