An advertising
agency in
Albuquerque,
New Mexico.

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Here’s a thought that’s so obvious, it’s easy to overlook: Before you focus on making your advertising effective, make your product or service effective. Don’t think for a minute that the success of Apple, Nike, Target or any other famous brand is based exclusively on their marketing savvy. They have great lemons. So their lemonade – the advertising and marketing efforts – seems so much sweeter.

How many times has a friend who has recently seen a movie told you, “All the good parts were in the trailer.” Inevitably they are referring to an over-hyped movie with a large promotions budget that ultimately fails at the box office. So why does it fail? It has great marketing. Maybe even a big opening weekend. But it fails because the experience leaves the promise unfulfilled.

If you want any kind of long-term success, make your “movie” great. Great marketing and advertising works only when the experience or product lives up to the marketing. And the advertising is merely an extension – a caption – of what the ultimate experience will be. That is why you rarely see infomercials, with their ridiculous overpromises, work for more than a short period.

Your first and most important priority right now (and “right now” means at any moment, in any economy) is making your product, service or offering so beneficial that your advertising simply needs to capture that in the most efficient way. And then communicate it to the right people.

Advertising will provide you no long-term solution without your benefits living up to the promise.

Lemons first. Lemonade second.

 

In marketing and the advertising agency business, there is an ongoing learning curve to understand and implement new tactics. We constantly work to make sure we can effectively incorporate and implement new media and guerrilla options into our clients' campaigns. In the current environment, most of these popular tactics have to do with utilizing social networking sites and creating meaningful content channels via blogs, podcasts, YouTube, etc.

Many times, these new tactics are treated as ideas in and of themselves. For the record, these tactics are not ideas. They are just a new channel for ideas.

Ideas are the stuff that make campaigns successful, memorable and ultimately, famous. And here’s the truth about great ideas: They’re not easy. Creating meaningful, simple ones is downright hard. There is no formula, software or machine that will give you a great idea. It requires understanding of your objectives, personal knowledge of people, intuition, time, an unrelenting desire to “nail it," and honestly, it takes smart people.

Take time. Take care. And you will take your communications to new level with a simple, smart idea.

Once you have it, then get to work on how to marry your idea to the target through your tactics. But always remember that your idea is the foundation of your campaign’s success. Discard tactics that don’t allow your idea to flourish and aggressively seek those channels that do.

Now, if you ever hear someone say, “I have a great idea, let’s utilize social networks in our campaign," you can reply, “that’s not an idea, it’s a tactic. What’s the idea?”

 

If there is one thing a troubled economy does to marketing, it's to create the desire to try and be all things to all people.

The logic goes something like this:

A.) Our sales are slowing,
B.) Therefore, we need to appeal to a broader target,
C.) So, let’s make sure we cover everything in our messaging.

But what seems logical is not practical. New marketers tend to believe that you can present the facts (all of them) and get the desired response. However, there is a counter-intuitive truth in successful marketing. This truth is that the easier you make your message — the more understandable and digestible — the more likely someone will make a decision and/or take action.

So, when things begin to slow, the logic should go something like this:

A.) Our sales are slowing,
B.) Therefore, we need to appeal strongly to our target,
C.) So, let’s make sure we communicate our benefits simply and clearly.

Our job is to make the decision easy, even when people are uneasy about the economy. So, we need to make it simple by taking away all of the noise, all of the issues, all of the uncertainty, and make the decision to choose our product or service an easy one.

It’s sometimes tempting to include everything in a message. But ultimately, making the decision complicated during complicated times, just makes the decision easier to avoid.

 

© 2010 3 Advertising LLC, a full-service advertising agency in Albuquerque, New Mexico.