You Are Your Customers' Salesman, Not an Artist

Too often I happen to see on LED screens (yes, even on ours) some ads that were objectively terrible: transition effects, cluttered text, horrible color combination, unclear promotion, lack of contacts like phone or website…

And sometime I get potential Customers who saw that particular screen, complaining about the “image quality”.

How do I explain to them it does not depend on the screen, without looking biased? And most important, how can this advertising agency get paid from its Customers?!

Next time you create an ad for your screen, please remember to simplify and specify: I‘ve seen thousands of ads that were too complicated or too generic. I’ve never seen one that was too simple or too specific.

Remember that you’re a salesman, not an artist: if you want to be an artist, god bless you and good luck. But first you probably need to quit your day job.

To make good advertising you must be able to sell something with the ad you create. And that's important, not just for the sake of creating "good advertising", but because is the only way to make sure your advertisers renew their contract next month.

Ok, so now we established that your job is to be the salesman of your Customer - using your LED screen properly.

In order to do that, you must create ads that will help him to sell more of what he offers: if you fail doing sot, on the long run your Customer will realize that he could spend his advertising money on another medium or just use them to go out with friends.

Now, this is not an easy task: if it was easy, anyone would do it - that's why you are paid good money from your Customers.

There are many things you should do to create effective advertising (and in case you didn’t notice it yet, investigating such techniques is the main aim of this blog), but the very first thing you should do is identify your (Customer's) target, the final user.

This isn’t easy either because most of your advertisers don’t know who their "target Customer" is... so if even they don’t know, then why should you care?

Because if you don’t find it out, your advertising won’t be effective, your Customers won’t renew their contracts and you'll have to spend resources finding new Customers rather than milking those you already have.

How to identify the "target user" will be the topic of a few posts to come, but here are some hints you may want to consider:

• Advertising messages should be created for, and directed at, the Heavy Using Customers in your category.
• Women make [almost all] the financial decisions and they buy [almost] everything—commercial as well as consumer goods.
• People over 50 comprise 29% of the population and they control 77% of financial assets (and they are the target for 10% of all advertising!!!)

Now, I know that the profile of your target Customer must be way more accurate and that these are general facts that not necessarily describe your final user... but you can not ignore them either.