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Companies
spend billions of marketing dollars each year to design memorable ad
campaigns. But what does it really take to make your business's name or
message stick in a prospect's mind? These methods will make your next
campaign memorable:
·
Engage prospects.
The more time someone spends with your ad, the more likely he or she is to
remember it. "Vivid processing leads to better storage of memory,"
says Elizabeth F. Loftus,
University
of
California
,
Irvine
, distinguished professor of psychology, author of 21 books and an expert on
memory malleability. The best ads get the advertiser or brand into the minds
of prospects as they consider different possibilities.
How
can you get prospects to spend more time with your ads? According to Philip
W. Sawyer, director of Starch Communications, a Harrison,
New York
, testing firm specializing in readership studies, the most memorable print
ads have messages that grab the reader. Those ads include headlines that
contain a benefit and a strong visual focal point, such as a close-up of a
model looking directly at you. One large photo works best in magazines,
while in newspapers, you can use multiproduct visuals. A Starch
Communications study on behalf of the Newspaper Association of America
showed that when three-quarters of ad space was devoted to illustrations,
recognition rates improved by 50 percent.
·
Add color and contrast.
For magazine readers, high-contrast images also boost recognition. When
Starch Communications tested two identical ads for Stolichnaya vodka—one
with a white background and another with a black background—twice as many
people remembered seeing the version with the black background, even though
everything else in the ad was the same.
Testing
also shows that, on average, larger ads in print media are more memorable.
However, a creative ad in a small space can be more memorable than a so-so
one that takes up a full page.
Some
colors enhance memorability in print media-including sky blue, golden yellow
and shades of blue-green. Red is a good spot color in newspapers, where
Sawyer says color increases recognition by 20 percent. But there's new
information about four-color ads in magazines: A few years ago, color ads
earned 24 percent higher recognition scores than black-and-white ads. Now,
full-page black-and-white campaigns are breaking through the clutter, and
four-color ads have lost their advantage.
·
Communicate frequently.
Repetition is important to memorability. At the Washington University School
of Medicine in St. Louis, psychologist Mark E. Wheeler conducted a study of
memory in which a word was paired with a picture or sound many times over
several days to test subjects' recognition rates. He says exposure to
information in different contexts helps you remember it. So when you see a
message in different formats, such as a print ad, a billboard and a TV
commercial, he says, "You associate the different impressions, and that
helps you retrieve the information when you need it."
·
Use memorable benefits.
Ads that grab and hold a prospect's attention are those that immediately
communicate a benefit that answers the question, What's in it for me? The
bottom line, says Sawyer, is that features aren't memorable-benefits are.
"If you have a headline that states a benefit, people will read it,
remember it and clip it out of the magazine or newspaper and hold onto it.
And that's the trump card for everything."
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