We had a very contentious Design Review meeting yesterday. Lots of loud talking and swearing on my part. Got a headache, even. Got into it over the effectiveness of our house ads. I come from the institutional-ad school of marketing (Got Milk?) and Ken Amorosano comes from the ask-for-the-order school of marketing (Buy Now! Operators Are Standing By! Call This Toll Free Number!). This leads to ads that start out like this:
Then when Ken gets a hold of them they turn out like this:
The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, although to my tastes, this is how you create excitement for a product:
We also talked at length about the incredible sales of our back issue catalogue. We made many thousands of dollars last year selling True West back issues which are paid for, so every sale drops straight to the bottom line (listen to the cartoonist cat talk the biz lingo!).
Anyway, after fighting for an hour and a half about the pros and cons of the above ad campaign, we determined that a retooling of our back issue house ad was in order. This was assigned to Rebecca Edwards, and here's what she came up with:
Now THIS was worth the meeting, right here. Love this ad. It has a big idea and is very specific and then asks for the order in a very clean way. This makes me very happy.
"I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning."
—J.B. Priestly
