Good Products Are the Best Ad Campaign
Your advertising is the cooking, your product the ingredients. The latter has to be good.
I came across this great archive of vintage advertising the other day. You can spend hours combing through these very earnest attempts to sell product to the masses, most of which, today, cause raised eyebrows, giggles and disbelief that advertisers ever thought these kind of appeals would work to persuade anyone to buy anything.
Looking at these old-fashioned ads makes you wonder about the new-fashioned advertising we are exposed to today, and how much of it is going to be the source of giggles and disbelief in the future.
And how soon the future will arrive. The cartoon accompanying this blog post is from the talented Hugh McLeod, and sums up how I feel about 99.9 percent of the advertising being tossed at consumers today.
But where’s the line in the sand? Advertising still needs to attract attention, and let consumers know how to take action. It can’t be boring. It still needs to get noticed, or it’s a waste of time and money. Too flashy and kooky makes for laughable ad campaigns. Too boring and factual makes for ineffective ad campaigns.
I think the line in the sand is being redrawn. I’m not sure where it is going to land. My money is on a move towards more straightforward, factual appeals. Moreover, if we build good products and services in the first place, and simply tell people about them, people will buy.
The quality of the product or service itself is the best ad campaign possible.
The moral of this story? Don’t try and sell crap. Sell good things, and tell people good stories about those things, in a way that respects their intelligence, and they will buy your product.
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