Why most advertising tries to say too much

Advertising has a difficult job. It generally arrives uninvited, competes with everything around it and then asks somebody who was thinking about something else to pay attention. So businesses frequently respond by putting as much information as possible into it.

Which is usually exactly the wrong thing to do.

One advert is not your entire sales presentation

Good advertising is normally an act of selection. Before designing anything, decide what you most want the audience to remember. It may be a product, a benefit, a problem, an offer, a name or a visual idea, but it should be something clear enough to survive the few seconds of attention you are likely to receive.

The advertisement does not have to contain the entire sales argument. It can lead people somewhere else for the detail. Its job is to give them a reason to want that detail.

Attention, comprehension and memory

Advertising needs attention, but attention alone can be remarkably worthless. The useful question is whether the right people noticed something they could understand and remember.

• Attract — give the intended audience a reason to notice it.
• Communicate — make the central idea easy to understand.
• Prompt — give people a reason, and a way, to do something next.

Impact does not necessarily mean being louder. A quiet advertisement surrounded by visual noise can be extremely noticeable. Difference is contextual.

Advertising also positions the brand

An advertisement communicates far more than its headline. Photography, typography, humour, casting, language, production quality and media placement all say something about the kind of company behind it and the kind of audience it expects.

You can advertise the correct product with entirely the wrong tone and still damage the brand.

Check the boring things too

Originality does not excuse sloppiness. Before publishing, it is worth checking some very ordinary questions:

• Is the main message immediately understandable?
• Is the benefit clear?
• Is the visual hierarchy obvious?
• Does the audience know what to do next?
• Does the destination actually work?
• Is the execution appropriate to the chosen medium?
• Is everything technically correct?
• Is it recognisably our brand?
• Has somebody who did not create it understood it in the way we intended?

Reading copy aloud remains another remarkably useful test. Awkward sentences reveal themselves when spoken and language that looked sophisticated on screen can suddenly sound as though somebody swallowed a brochure.

You have paid for attention. Use it to say something worth remembering.