Advertising isn’t ALWAYS just about sales. Sure, advertising more than not, is promoting a new product of service and the objective of the advert is to inform the public of this new or existing product or service, but at its core, advertising is about communicating. The message has to be more important then the product or service. Why? Well, quite simply, the product is rarely new or unique, so make the message exactly that.
There is a chapter in the advertising hand book that speaks to the hard sell – its in chapter 17 named “Retail”, just after chapter 16 named “Your client wants the logo bigger, so make it bigger”. Retail advertising is the platform used to show off a product and bring to your attention the cost of this particular item. Habitually, retail is used for your FMCG products, but it also showcases the best that the motor and travel industry have to offer, to mention but a few.
With all the adverts we see on a daily basis, it’s in the best interest of the advertiser to find a way to stand out from the clutter. On a 12 kilometer drive in Johannesburg on one of the major motorways, we drive passed over 600 adverts. After finding this out, I did the drive myself and made a feeble attempt at trying to remember at least 15 of the 600 adverts. In the adverts’ defence, some of them will the lamp post adverts, which is an A0 sized board attached to a lamp pole, and those are sequenced by 5 boards per advert. So if you pass 100 boards, there are roughly 20 adverts to be seen. Some were even for the same brand, so we can further filter the trash to say that you drive past 80 – 100 adverts. That being said, there was an advert for a fruit juice, DStv, a hair shampoo, more DStv adverts and something else that I can’t remember. Nothing about the adverts was unique and distinct. Based on pure volumes, I remember the adverts I saw, not the impact it had on me while I was driving. And that, is where a large portion of the problem is heavily rooted.
If we see an advert for shampoo, if it’s a brand we are loyal to or familiar with, there is a likely chance that we will either start paying attention, or we will start to illustrate a degree of interest. If you take that same product, you create an advert that tells a story, that demonstrates how this shampoo is going to make a difference in your life, that does more than just telling you buy this product because its cheaper than its competitors, then you have something that all advertisers strive to acquire – my attention.
Adverts, on TV specifically, used to be 60 second movies. Not because the budget allowed for it, or because a new technique was being used, but because the company, product or service advertising wanted to tell you something. Perhaps it was because the market for that particular product or service wasn’t flooded yet, so it wasn’t about getting the most value for your money, it was about the story telling and using the product or service as a vehicle to enforce the story and deliver the message, all the while tapping into the potential consumers subconscious desires to now want to have the product.
Yes, retail has its place and it fills most of the content that was cast a gaze to, but we need to remember that we are still humans that want to hear a story. It’s been an integral part of our DNA for centuries. Cave men and Egyptians did it. They gave us a small insight into what the world was like back then, never once mentioning that the marble used to floor the palace of Rameses was on special for a third of the price for 2 days only, while stocks last and that it was available on credit.
tyronewraight 