The Media Is Not the Message

By Roy H. Williams

"I'm in the furniture business. Which media should I use?"

"I'd like to target people who are afraid of the dentist. Can you recommend a good mailing list company?"

"My uncle uses television ads to attract new customers and they work really well for him. Television ads have made him rich. What's your opinion of TV?"

"No one in my town listens to the radio anymore. Everyone has satellite or an iPod."

"I tried advertising. It doesn't work for my kind of business."

People say things like this and expect me to have an intelligent response. What usually happens is that I stand there, dull-eyed, with my mouth hanging open. These are not my favorite moments.

When my brain finally recovers and I tell them the truth they need to hear, they act as though I've sidestepped their question.

Here's the truth they needed to hear. Maybe you need to hear it, too:

Relevance is what determines whether an ad works or not.
Every media fails when it delivers a message no one cares about.

Have you ever run an ad that failed?
Let's pull aside the curtain and look backstage to see what really happened:

1. The ad was so predictable that few people even noticed it.
SOLUTION: Get a new ad writer or remove the handcuffs from the one you've got.

2. Prospective customers noticed the ad, received the message and understood it perfectly. They just didn't care.
SOLUTION: Dump the irrelevant subject matter. Discover what people actually care about and talk about that instead.

3. The ad's message would have been relevant, but it was unclear.
SOLUTION: Remind your writer that creativity often gets in the way of clarity. Remind your layout artist that the prettiest ad is rarely the most effective. You're running a business, not a magazine. Make sure the dynamic duo understands that their continued employment depends on creating ads that sell the product.

4. You committed to an ad campaign that was shorter than your product selling cycle. If people buy your product once a week, don't expect your ads to return a profit during the first week. If people buy once a month, don't expect to break even on your advertising during the first 30 days. If your product selling cycle is longer than 2 years, you can expect to lose money on your ads – even if they're good – the first 4 to 6 months. You'll start pulling ahead during the second six months. Your real growth won't happen until you begin reaching that same group of people for a second year.
SOLUTION: Commit to an ad campaign commensurate with your product selling cycle.

5. The listener failed to be engaged because the ad was written from a cultural perspective other than the customer's own. (This is why Anglo-conceived Hispanic campaigns usually fail. Translating language is easy. Transferring cultural perspective is nearly impossible.)
SOLUTION: Hire a different ad writer to create the second campaign. Make sure the writer is from the cultural background he or she is trying to reach.

Bottom Lines:
Ads that fail in one media would usually have failed in any other.
The media is not the message.
The message is the message.
And the message is what matters most.

To deliver a pointless message powerfully is the definition of hype.

To deliver a powerful message pointlessly is the result of weak creative.

To deliver a powerful message powerfully is the first step in making a fortune.

Now go do it. And good luck.

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Nicknamed "the Wizard of Ads" by an early client, Roy H. Williams and his staff have often been the unseen, pivotal force in amazing come-from-behind victories in the worlds of business, politics, and finance. With more than twenty branch offices in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, Wizard of Ads, Inc., is now serving the advertising and marketing needs of business owners around the globe. For more information, visit their Web site at www.WizardAcademy.com or call 512-295-5700.

Published in Networking Today, June 2007

When Will My Ads Start Working?

By Roy H. Williams

The length of the "ramping up period" an ad campaign will require before you begin to see results is determined by the following factors, listed in descending order of their importance:

1. Product Purchase Cycle
   
2. Share of Voice Impact
3. Quotient of message
   
4. Media delivery vehicle
   

Product Purchase Cycle:

How often is the customer in the market for this product? Because we eat more often than we redecorate, ads for restaurants will yield results much faster than ads for carpet or furnishings. Nearly every person reached by advertising will eat at least one meal in a restaurant this week, but only one in four hundred fifty-two will be involved in any particular seven to ten year product purchase cycle. The longer your product purchase cycle, the longer you'll have to invest in advertising before you feel like it's working. The ramping up period usually takes twenty percent of the product purchase cycle to no more than forty percent. In other words, the advertiser selling a product a customer purchases once every five years will likely be one to two years into his advertising plan before he feels like it's really beginning to pay off.

Share of Voice: What percentage of all the advertising done in your product or service category is yours? To be perfectly accurate, a Share of Voice calculation must include such things as the intrusive visibility offered by an excellent location, previous years of consistent advertising, word-of-mouth recommendation by customers, etc, but generally speaking, your Share of Voice is loosely determined by the size of your ad budget compared to the collective ad budgets of your competitors.

Impact Quotient: How convincing is your message? Keep in mind that your customer won't be hearing your message alone. He or she will be comparing your message to the messages of your competitors. How strong is your competition? Urgent messages making "a limited time offer" will definitely elevate the Impact Quotient, but only for those customers who are currently, consciously in the market for the product. But the same "limited time offer" is likely to lower the long-term Impact Quotient for customers who are not yet ready to buy. The only thing the not-yet-ready customer is likely to remember from such ads is never to buy from your company "unless they're having a sale." Long-term, the most valuable ad is the one that delivers a message powerful enough to be remembered even by people who are not currently in the market for your product.

Media Delivery Vehicle: One commonly held myth is that we remember "more of what we see than what we hear." In truth, the opposite is true. A picture of your product (an iconic recall cue) delivered through a visual media will be noticed by readers and viewers who are currently, consciously, in the market for the product. Consequently, the response to silent, visual ads is usually immediate. But then it's over. Auditory ads, however, are retained in memory even when customers are unaware they've heard them. This is why you can sing along with nearly 2,000 songs you never intended to learn.

One could easily generalize that products with shorter purchase cycles should use visual media and products with longer purchase cycles should use auditory media, but like most generalizations, this one would be flawed because there are two other factors – Share of Voice and Impact Quotient – that make a lot more difference than your choice of delivery vehicle. Far more important than your choice of media is your choice of message.

As you can see, there is no perfect answer. The option that delivers the best result today will yield the worst result long-term. And the most tedious thing in the short run is the most powerful thing in the long run.

But isn't that how most things work?

Nicknamed "the Wizard of Ads" by an early client, Roy H. Williams and his staff have often been the unseen, pivotal force in amazing come-from-behind victories in the worlds of business, politics, and finance. With more than twenty branch offices in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, Wizard of Ads, Inc., is now serving the advertising and marketing needs of business owners around the globe. For more information, visit their Web site at www.WizardAcademy.com.

Published in Networking Today, November, 2004.