Content Marketing Today

Bad B2B Ad Endangers This Polar Bear

Avoid the 5 Perilous Print Advertising Mistakes It Commits

“Print Advertising is dead,” says a very smart small business owner friend.  Although print advertising may be more endangered than all those ice-loving polar bears some folks worry about, you can still create effective print ads   that prompt customers to take action. 

Unfortunately, this advertisement isn’t one of them.

The actual print version of this ad is a half page in an 8 1/2″  by 11″ trade publication that is aimed at the book industry.  That’s big enough to make a difference if the ad were not so flawed.

This polar bear ad certainly answered one classic and vital advertising objective–the dominant image of the polar bear does grab your attention. That’s great. But, in five important respects, the ad fails both in communicating a brand message and in inspiring action.

1. Readers today have less time than ever to figure out what an advertisement  means and why they should care. This ad simply does not provide enough information either visually or verbally to communicate why a prospective customer should  pay attention and even take action based on spotting the ad in the pages of a magazine.
2. The headline, “Introducing a Whole New Animal,” doesn’t give us a single clue about the point of the ad. The question from a reader’s point of view would be,”Why should I care?” And,taken literally, a polar bear is not a new animal. There is no benefit stated in the headline. In fact, it only makes sense if you know that the company does have a Brown Bear brand.  Unfortunate,if you don’t know about the company, you would learn that only by going to their website.
3. The polar bear image itself, although striking, provides only what is called “borrowed interest” for the average reader of the ad.  A typical example of that is when an advertiser use an image of a baby that makes you say “Awwww,” but has nothing to do with the product or service. There is a meaning behind the image come but, again, only for those who already know about the Brown Bear brand.
4. Not only is the polar bear image of secure, but there is no image of the actual product. The readers of this magazine will be potential buyers of book board. Therefore, they can relate to an image of a book or of the product itself. Such an image would convey immediately why a potential buyer should pay attention to the ad. 
5. Nowhere in the ad is there a description of what this product will do for the prospective customer. Here’s the sum total of what they had to say about the product: “A new technology in book board production.”  The obvious response from prospects paging through the magazine who actually read down as far in the adis this product description(which is also in white reverse type and, thus, hard to read)  would be, “Yes, but what’s in it for me?”

Effective Print Advertising and Content Marketing Are First Cousins

In each case,it is essential to understand what problems your products and services can solve for your customers. You must then communicate exactly how you can solve those problems in a compelling and relevant way.

The company in question, Circle Inc., probably makes fine products that do solve problems for its customers. Unfortunately, you cannot determine from this print ad what the new Polar Bear book board will help its customers achieve.

Therefore, you have no reason to proceed to the website to learn more about the product. As it happens, once you get to the website, they describe the new product, but they don’t really explain how it is better or more useful than their current line of products. Circle is proud of its products–and that’s a good thing–but this print advertisement communicates no customer benefit. And, even their website doesn’t communicate enough more benefit to close the deal.

The simplest and most essential concept to remember, whether in print advertising or in content marketing:

Make sure that what you communicate always answers the unspoken customer question, “What’s in it for me?”