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141Chapter 10: Mastering Advertising Basics and Media Planning

ߜ Know your objective and stay on strategy.
ߜ Be honest.
ߜ Be specific.
ߜ Be original.
ߜ Be clear and concise.
ߜ Don’t overpromise or exaggerate.
ߜ Don’t be self-centered or, worse, arrogant.
ߜ Don’t hard-sell.
ߜ Don’t insult, discriminate, or offend.
ߜ Don’t turn the task of ad creation over to a committee.

Committees round the edges off strong ideas. They eliminate any nuance
that any member finds questionable and crowd ads with details that
matter more to the marketers than to the market. An old cartoon popular
in ad agencies is captioned, “A camel is a horse designed by committee.”

Capturing Prospects with a Media Plan

It’s a harsh reality that many prospects disappear on the route between your
advertising and your cash register (for proof, see Chapter 17). But with a
strong media plan, you can increase the number of prospects you bring into
your sphere of influence — and almost as an automatic result you’ll increase
your number of new customers as well.

Make media decisions based on answers to these four questions:

ߜ What do you want your ad to accomplish?
If you want to develop general awareness and interest, use media that
reach a broad and general market. On the far end of the spectrum, if you
want to talk one-to-one with those who have expressed interest in your
product, you’ll want to bypass mass media in favor of direct mail or
other one-to-one communications (see Chapter 13).

ߜ Who and where are the people you want to reach?
When it comes to advertising, trying to be all-inclusive is a bankrupting
proposition. The more precisely you can define your prospect (see
Chapter 2), the more precisely you can choose your media vehicles.