Which is worse? The wildly inappropriate or the totally incomprehensible?
One of these ads is bad. The other is abysmal.
If you wish your ads to work they must fit the context and the subject. The ad for SIPPs is bad because it doesn’t look serious, fit the publication it ran in or speak the right language for the audience.
That is all about positioning, the greatest factor in success after what you sell. The wrong positioning confuses people and destroys your credibility. If you don’t treat a serious subject seriously you insult your audience’s intelligence.
Money is a serious subject. “Money Week”, where this appeared, is the best printed medium of its type in the U.K. It is intelligently written, but at the same time controversial. It is for people who think – or think they think.
The unbalanced ad layout might just about work at a supermarket check-out with a better choice of colour. It fatally oversimplifies what is, if properly explained, a logical argument.
And of course, they have completely ignored the one question in every prospect’s mind. Why should I choose Selftrade? Who are they? What makes them better?
The best people in the U.K. at explaining such matters in the right way with the right amount of detail are Hargreaves-Lansdown. That is one reason why year after year they steadily steam ahead of all their competitors.
The Lenovo ad is also inappropriate, but also clueless in almost every other respect.
Let us set aside the insane headline, “The Book of Do”. Is that some newly discovered part of the Bible? Or something to do with toilets?
But in any case, the medium is wrong. Why a poster? Crazy if you wish to sell something complicated like a computer. And the proposition – if you can call it that – is in a layout which looks like the product of a deranged mind.
Reversing type out over a photographic background is the perfect way to make reading impossible; and if it is on a poster people are driving past – well, words almost fail me.
The one thing they might usefully have said is that they have a new computer. That is buried in the bottom left hand corner – which eye-tracking studies show is the last place people look.
But of course only someone like me who delights in collecting examples of marketing folly would ever look that carefully.
As Lenovo is a Chinese firm maybe the ad is translated directly from Mandarin, but I fear that home-grown ineptitude is busy here..
It’s all a mystery; and once again, I am forced to ask, who pays these people? Why?
It really makes me roar when people kid themselves that marketing is a profession and call themselves “officers”. Most would barely make lance-corporal.
Medieval doctors had more clue about what they were doing than this lot.
Perfectly summed up by the fact I’ve seen 20 of the Lenovo ad in various mediums this week but until I read this I thought they were ads for Samsung tablets.
You’re very generous about the pension ad. No brief taken and no experience of conversation: ‘Thousands of people could run your pension.’ So what? Could they do it all at the same time? Where would they run it to? Can you ‘run’ a pension? ‘The best person is you.’ How do you know? I couldn’t plan my way out of a paper bag? ‘Invest your money wherever you think it will perform best.’ Well, if I knew that, I wouldn’t have put it in private pension. And who’s the Trustee/Administrator? I thought I was running this thing. And how come you put the financial caveat in the body of the copy? Did you run out of words?!
You are right. Self trade’s lay out is bad and could have been written lot better. But at least, we know who the target audience is and it has a call to action at the end.
Lenovo ad is totally incomprehensible. Utter waste of money. I wonder which moron gave the approval for this ad to run?