How to create advertising that sells | Hacker News Reader

How to create advertising that sells

lannigan.org

79 pointsdaverol35 comments

I make direct response digital ads for B2B companies for a living and companies spend tens of millions of dollars promoting the ads I make because they work so well.

The most important part of making a digital ad is what I call the Visual Headline, or the text on the ad image.

https://pasteboard.co/gAxVYKbjH9kc.png

Basically you just need to test out big positioning text, it makes up 75% of B2B ad performance.

Do you any recommendation(s) (books) for marketing, advertising or both?

"Being Direct: How to make advertising pay" by Lester Wunderman is my favorite marketing book.

How to sell advertising that sells:

Prerequisites:

- get out of my face

. ...and ears...

- stop profiling me

- stop following me

- just get out of my life, entirely.

Done? Good. Now pick up an old "Computer Shopper" magazine and see how it was done: all info, no lifestyle. Make people want to read your advertising copy and they will read it. If they are in the market for the products you're selling they will consider you as an option if the price is right and the product seems to fit the bill. Don't lie, don't exaggerate, just inform.

In other words, this will never happen because neither the prerequisites nor the recipe fit the bill when you're selling desire and pipe dreams.

Everyone thinks that they are immune to advertising. But study after study shows that’s not the case. Those overbearing ads played ad nauseam work. Those idiotic spam emails selling boner pills work. All that invasive tracking and fine targeting works.

Pleasant it might not be, and its ethics are dubious… but on the whole, it helps sell shit (though advertisers are notorious for using inflated and half baked metrics to overstate the return on investment for their services).

Coca-cola and Geico and the cheesy injury lawyer in your hometown don’t buy advertising on a lark. It makes them money.

Advertisement exploits common psychological triggers to achieve a non-consensual outcome at the expense of the consumer being manipulated.

There's a balance yet to be found between freedom of commercial speech and the imposition of reasonable limits on deliberately manipulative content.

Influence ratings displaying the percentage of difference in various metrics between a standardized "just the facts" product description (think nutrition label) and the refined ad might be useful and reasonable. Ad metrics and platforms should be required to publish a catalog of their customers, copies of ads, history of demographic targets, party, pac, and funding and so forth.

If metrics are useful to sellers, they'll be useful to buyers, and we can legislate transparency and regulation.

Advertising certainly has effects, they are just not the effects you imply and can not be said to make them work. This is the effect advertising has on me:

- I no longer watch broadcast television, at all

- I no longer listen to broadcast radio other than sometimes in a car. In that case I find commercial-free stations, switch channels when commercials come on and switch off the radio entirely if there are no commercial-free alternatives.

- I do not subscribe to any physical magazines, newspapers or other publications

- I do not "consume entertainment", I couldn't care less about recent movie releases - most are a mix of "progressive" propaganda with product placement anyway?

- I block digital advertising 'quite effectively' as in 'I never see ads'. I do this by having effective content blockers, proxies for channels like Youtube, I do not use things like Facebook/Twitter/whatever. No Google, I use my own instance of Searx. Effective spam blocking on my own mailserver, spam is as rare as hen's teeth here.

I can go on but the reality is that all advertising has achieved is that I quite effectively shield myself from exposure to it. If that is what you mean with "working", well... it'd make me wonder why they spend so much money on creating effective resistance against their own products. I guess I'm not the target market? In that case, neither are my family members who use my services.

I understand that advertising works for those who sell it. As to whether it works for those who buy it, who knows...

Spam ads (e.g. a windshield repair shop on the radio playing all the time) are probably useful for discoverability. That is probably self-evident.

However, the big question is if they receive more profit from extra jobs than the ads cost.

Hacker News community takes on advertising never fail to entertain

I swear it has to be satire at this point.

Agreed

Reality can be entertaining. Do you work in the industry?

That's the kind of advertising I'd like too, but your tone suggests you're blaming the industry. But, could it be that it just works better than the "wholesome" advertising (for lack of a better word)? I think the problem, if it can even be called that, is more widespread than just the sellers. It's the sellers, the buyers and our culture in general. Not sure how one could address that, but blaming someone in particular isn't it, I think.

This is how it’s done with influencer herding. You conceal the strings that puppet them. People trust the messages more that way until the strings show. Then you discard that puppet and make a new one.

People are obsessed with feeling special, feeling informed, feeling unique. How about giving me a product that's all those things? Give me what nobody else does. Give me a flagship phone with a headphone jack and a 16:9 screen, give me a laptop with mouse buttons, give me a 3:2 desktop monitor, give me a videogame with one price tag that's made to just be a good game.

> give me a videogame with one price tag that's made to just be a good game

I suggest you look into the Nintendo Switch, which has not only good games but also a wide screen and a headphone jack. And buttons!

That’s not the job of advertisers, the subject of this article. They don’t make the products. They just help sell them.

The marketing department exerts significant control over product development.

This article wasn't about creating a marketing mix. It was specifically about advertising, which is just a subset of marketing.

Nah, they'll give you a shitty phone, 0.1mm thinner, advertise a lot of features that you don't need, and you'll pay the higher price to cover the cost of advertising.

> Our Mercedes-Benz advertising is positioned to fit nonconformists who scoff at "status symbols" and reject flimflam appeals to snobbery.

I guess it depends on the market, but driving a Mercedes to me screams status symbol and snobbery.

Keep in mind this was written in 1982 and was therefore based on work done for Mercedes-Benz in the late 70s and early 80s. I don't know if this was an Ogilvy ad, but it purports to be from 1980:

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c3/21/d5/c321d520ec1207059c42fcbca...

By the 2000s, their dealerships' guides for top-end models (i.e. G class) spoke about how you had to get a new style once you bought a G class as you had become a new person.

Perhaps MB should go back to their roots.

The positioning change over time and space. Taxis in many European countries are frequently Mercedes because they are comfortable and last a long time. I don't think that would fly in the USA. Likewise BMW used to make inexpensive fun cars (like the 2002) but now they target a more affluent audience in the USA.

There are many examples of products that are plebeian in one market and premium in another, between countries with similar incomes.

I have found that there are people that hate these status symbols (especially in fashion) so much that they would buy a shittier lower quality no name product.

I find it ironic when the actual brand they could have bought would be cheaper and probably better quality manufacturing control etc.

Visible logos and unique designs are loud tribe identification tokens. Their absence has the same effect, just for different tribes.

The lack of an expensive logo adds a lot of value for those people.

I agree, it depends on your brand personality to identify in what kind of customers and life style you want your consumers to buy.

Yes! It does depend on the target audience!

But remember doesn’t even matter if the person buying the Mercedes is doing so because they’re a snob and want a status symbol. All that matters is that they they scoff at snobbery and status symbols — and that the ad works on them.

> 8. Be suspicious of awards. The pursuit of creative awards seduces creative people from the pursuit of sales.

I don't know if such awards are common all over the world, but I have always found them puzzling. You should already be happy and feel awarded if you help your client with great sales.

The same thing with movie and music awards. You make something and you reward should be the joy of knowing that the people are enjoying your performance; easily measured in many ways both in former days and now. Instead these artists get multiple awards: The recognition in "the market", the payment, the awards . . .

I would rather see awards given to people unselfishly caring for other people; people working unpleasant shifts in the scorching sun or blistering cold to make the society a little better . . . They should have awards!

Here in the UK, if you have a digital agency that isn't 'award winning' then you don't really have a digital agency.

If you are advertising, don't forget your existing customers. For many products (consumer products like cars or food; business products like SAAS or corporate furniture) selling to the people who have already bought your product is at least as valuable as using it to find a new customer.

For repeat sales (ketchup) it's good to remind people so that when they are at the shop they'll remember to buy it again (assuming they liked it). Same works in business: we bought Dell and the CFO was happy so next year I'll call Dell and see if we can expand our deal.

Also, before social media, it was important that Chrysler specifically advertise to their customers so that they would tell their friends how happy they were with their Chrysler.

Did you notice that most of the claims in this article are stated as facts but not explicitly supported by data? There is good reason for that. Advertisers have strong opinions about advertising but outside of the digital marketing space they have few ways to get good feedbacks. They do market studies but it’s very hard to decisively link sells to advertising. It’s something to keep in mind when sizing your advertisement budget.

None of these rules are for digital advertising as this article was written in 1982. This is also an advertisement, not a paper on JSTOR so you're not going to find citations. Many market studies are proprietary as there's no reason to provide information you paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for to the competition.

You are, however, correct, in that there is such a thing as advertising that is wasted. This waste is what has sparked the creation of the hypertargeted ad market we live in today.

>Did you notice that most of the claims in this article are stated as facts but not explicitly supported by data? There is good reason for that. A̶d̶v̶e̶r̶t̶i̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ programmers have strong opinions about a̶d̶v̶e̶r̶t̶i̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ programming

Still works

1 comment in 2 hours.

Guess the title at least did not sell that well (I too did not even read the article).

I mean in fairness it is a pretty terribly written article.

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