B2b advertising is complicated, but it shouldn't look that way. The best work strips away the complexity and reflects the essential nature of an advertiser's pitch in an effort to engage the audience.
An ad that sparks an instant sense of recognition—largely through the adroit use of a strong image—puts the audience on track to absorb further downstream the details of the selling proposition, which may come in the form of information on a website, in a spec sheet or a white paper, or by way of a sales call.
First impressions are everything in advertising. That's why simple—even for a product or service that's inherently complex—carries the day. Front-loading the sales process, in the form of an ad that exhausts the reader's curiosity, is a recipe for failure.
Chemical giant BASF makes engineering plastics for a number of industries, including automotive. It's gritty, technical stuff, yet BASF makes it all come alive with a colorful and arresting image of plastic car parts arranged to look almost like a butterfly.
The elegant image is accompanied by a burst of text that simply states the selling proposition: “Car parts made with BASF plastics can be used instead of metal parts to make vehicles lighter and therefore more fuel-efficient. This means lower emissions, less fuel consumption and less money out of people's pockets.”
Shell describes how it's developing a variety of sophisticated technologies, such as unlocking difficult-to-reach oil, to keep cities warm. But rather than illustrate its efforts with the typical oil company visuals of platforms and pipelines, Shell features a slice-of-life image of urban residents braving a snowstorm.
It's an inviting, human image, even for people in the Northeast and Midwest who have just survived another seemingly endless winter. Image and text work seamlessly here to tell the story of Shell's efforts to build a better energy future.
Dell has a suite of intensive virtualization strategies designed to help colleges and universities centralize their IT operations and create a more engaging academic experience. Instead of attempting to visualize an intensive virtualization strategy—whatever that might possibly look like—Dell features the very approachable image of a student strolling across campus equipped with a red laptop and a book bag.
The copywriter contributed to this intelligent effort with the wordplay headline: “Graduate to the next level of technology.” Dell does a fine job of boiling down what could have been a numbingly technical pitch into one that draws the target audience of IT directors and other specifiers into the story.
At the other end of the scale are a couple of ads that lack clarity. The first, from Motorola Solutions, shows a mundane street scene with an electronic screen in the middle of the road. Headline copy states: “A few seconds from now, police surveillance cameras will see two little girls walking to school, an elderly lady walking her dog and a suspicious man loitering around the corner a few blocks up. Your moment is coming. Are you prepared to rise?”
The copy goes on to explain to a target audience of first responders that Motorola Solutions can integrate mission-critical voice systems with broadband that streams intelligent video to deliver a single operational view of every situation. Unfortunately, the image and the message never coalesced in a coherent manner. It left us scratching our heads.
Another way to undermine clarity is to overwhelm an ad with too many visual and text elements. Epson tries to compress the entire sales process into a single ad for its high-definition projector. A simpler, more focused execution would do a better job of driving readers to the website, where details would be better-addressed.
At the other end of the scale are a couple of ads that lack clarity. The first, from Motorola Solutions, shows a mundane street scene with an electronic screen in the middle of the road. Headline copy states: “A few seconds from now, police surveillance cameras will see two little girls walking to school, an elderly lady walking her dog and a suspicious man loitering around the corner a few blocks up. Your moment is coming. Are you prepared to rise?”
The copy goes on to explain to a target audience of first responders that Motorola Solutions can integrate mission-critical voice systems with broadband that streams intelligent video to deliver a single operational view of every situation. Unfortunately, the image and the message never coalesced in a coherent manner. It left us scratching our heads.
