Dogs and Wine

A short note at the beginning…The art association redesigned their ads and look much better and the Willamette noodle company dropped their fax number out of their ad. Perhaps I’m having an effect, or just coincidence.

I wanted to start out with a good ad today. Peaceful Puppy Paws does a good job. They do three things good here.

1. Contact info is clear and powerful at the bottom

2. Headline (which is also the company name) and picture draw you in immediately no guessing

3. Bullets are quicker and easier to read than body text. The three bullets are interesting, compelling and to the point. Well done.

Under the bullets and the contact info there are colored boxes that may have looked good on the proof, but once the newsprint soaked up that color it was kind of faded on the final product, so a little more color would have not faded as bad. Not really a criticism, just note for future, newsprint fades color.

Compare that to the ad that appears directly beneath in this month’s Salem Monthly…there are lots of problems here it is hard to know where to start.

1. Black on red rarely works. The Red background tends to eat up the black and make it very difficult to read. Here is an old trick, hold the paper at arms length and see if you can read the print in your ad, if you can’t you have a problem. I have a difficult time making out what the scripted fort says under the logo even up close.

2. Too many graphic elements weaken the impact of this ad. You have 3 logos, 4 cut out photos of product, a photo of the front of the store, a photo of wine glasses, and two boxed subheads. The problem is everything is now so small, you no longer know what the ad is about.

3. Every ad needs to have a compelling reason to act. What is the call to action here? Why read the ad and why act.

A more effective ad would have been a headline of “Over 40 Gift Packs to Choose From” Subhead of “Starting at only $18.00” Use one photo of a gift pack. Drop the red background, the photo of your store front and the wine glasses and 2 logos at the bottom.

The main point here is when you have less space you have to trim your message. Simply making everything smaller rarely results in good advertising.