Seven handy hints for succesful ads

Adrian's 7 handy hints:

1. Be simple. Be simple. Be simple.

Too many ads and commercials we see at the Review are just over-complicated. They are either trying to say too many different things at once, or else not enough effort has been put into making things easy for the audience.

Messages that are clearly and intelligibly expressed always get scored higher by the Jury.

So keep asking yourself when you are working on an ad: how can we make this even simpler? What can we take out?

As Bill Bernbach once remarked: 'it's not how short you make it, it's how you make it short'.

2. Give your ad an unexpected twist.

Does something happen in your print ad or commercial that the audience wasn't expecting? If it does, its WCR score will be higher, simple as that.

Every creative team's mission should be to induce that feeling of 'A-ha' in the viewer by building in a clever piece of thinking - a 'twist' - so that they are taken by surprise.

Ads that don't do this are seen as flat and two-dimensional, so tend to score lower.

3. Show us something we haven't seen before.

So often in advertising the challenge is to express the same old selling messages in new and untried ways. That's what we really get paid for as an agency.

Just occasionally, a mould-breaking piece of work comes along where the jury can honestly say 'we've never seen anything like that before'. As a result, the ad will score far higher.

Moral: try to make your advertising look as little like advertising as possible.

And above all, don't copy someone else's approach. Imitation is the sincerest form of theft.

4. Make your layouts elegant and uncluttered.

A frankly unacceptable number of print ads get low scores at the WCR because the layouts are so ugly-looking.

Badly-balanced headlines, too many elements scattered across the page, poor photography, unsightly typography... the list of 'sins' that we see print advertisements commit is long indeed.

But, ah, when a simple, beautifully crafted page appears before the jury, you can almost hear the joint sigh of relief that goes up, and the ad is duly rewarded with a higher score.

5. Beware the 'standard award-winning layout'.

You may be tempted to think that resorting to the 'big visual, tiny logo, no words' formula is the only way to devise an award-winning ad nowadays.

The trouble is, every other team around the world is beginning to share exactly the same view. With the result that more and more advertising shares a kind of global 'sameness' - check Archive Magazine and you'll see this phenomenon at work.

There's nothing wrong in reducing an ad's elements to the very minimum. The Daily News poster from Lowe Brindfors that's reviewed this month is a good case in point.

But to do that and nothing else is simply to deny yourself the myriad creative possibilities that the printed page can offer.

The 'standard award-winning layout' can, in fact, be quite dangerous. It's all too often the layout used in scam advertising, leading awards juries to believe your ad is possibly a scam itself, and so mark it down accordingly.

6. Er, just one thing. Can we actually understand your ad?

Quite often we see pieces of work on the WCR jury that break the most fundamental communication rule of all: we don't actually comprehend them.

This is not a lack of understanding because of some cultural or language issue, but because the team has expressed their message in such an oblique or badly thought-through way that their audience will simply fail to 'get' it.

An advertisement's prime duty once it has been noticed is to be understood. And if the audience fails to grasp the message you are trying to get over, all you've done is to waste their time and the client's money.

So here's a tip: when you've written a commercial or print ad, take the script or the layout to the team across the corridor and ask them this question:

'Do you understand what this is about?'

Not: 'Do you like it?' Or 'Do you think this will get an award?'

As we've always said at Lowe: first be clear, then be clever.

7. Body copy is not, repeat not, carpet tiling.

Again and again we see typesetting of body copy which make the WCR jurors visibly flinch in their seats.

Usually, it's set far too small. The lines are too close together. With no paragraphs. And with too many words per line.

The result is body text that's treated like a piece of grey carpeting to be cut to size and stuck somewhere - anywhere - at the bottom of the layout.

Copy is one of the most powerful weapons at a creative team's disposal. Our jury suggests you reawaken yourselves to the possibilities of great writing, and the power of written advocacy to produce a compelling argument.

And above all, once those words are written, make sure the typographer accords them the respect they deserve.