In 2014, global advertising spending surpassed US$580 billion. Of this amount, 23% is spent on digital ads. With such a big amount of money spent on advertising every year, it is no wonder that marketers around the world work relentlessly to answer the question: what makes a good ad? 

Creativity? Top of mind recall?

I have been working in the weddings industry that is very aesthetically demanding in nature.

Look around any bridal sites and bridal magazines and you will be on a feast of beautiful photographs with never ending pages of graceful brides. But think again, does another pretty picture really work?

I will just do a simple test. Flip through any genre of magazine like a time-starved and distracted consumer, spend no more than 2 seconds per spread and see which one really catches your attention.

The scary thing is that most advertisements within an industry start to look the same.

Take a step further to look at the format, layout, headlines and offers of the ads. It may now seem like more ads are starting to look quite homogeneous.

This brings about the scary word – desensitization. Oh no, our consumers are starting to be immune to the beautiful or clever ads we have painstakingly designed.

Sometimes, it is because of this thing that marketing guru Dan S. Kennedy calls “industry incest.” What this means is that people start learning and copying from each other, or from the so-called market leader and they start to produce similar work and hence, get dumber and produce lower quality work over time.

Undoubtedly, in an industry where being aesthetically pleasing does help, not understanding the fundamentals of what the ad is supposed to do for you is detrimental.

While it sounds good to do exposure and branding, many small businesses cannot afford the luxury of splurging thousands of dollars for a classy subtle logo placement. If you are Chanel, of course, by all means. However, for the majority of us, we have got to get our objectives right and clear.

Your ad should bring you leads and eventually, sales. Period.

Do you know how to make your ad work for you? The most important thing is to set your objectives clear. You can’t achieve something that you do not measure, much less improve on it. Objectives also help give you a foundation for rational decision-making.

Which objective are you trying to achieve:

• Building brand awareness?
• Driving lead generation – online or offline? This can be in the form of getting the customer to take an action to exchange their data for a benefit
• Increasing sales or encouraging customers to try something?
• Reminding customers about the satisfaction or to connect the product or service with an emotion?

Only after you answered the above questions are you then able to create the content that delivers.

My company once did a series (which meant we burnt a lot of money) of innovative ads that were part emotional and part mysterious. We put a sweet love poem from a bride to her groom, and another was a darkened artistic picture of a sewing machine.

The final verdict: It did cause a stir in the market, but it was within my industry, not with clients. And no client responded to that ad at all. So we did gain a point on creativity, but all in all, it was a terrible scorecard for sales.

Lesson learnt.

Visit La Belle Couture page to find out more about Peiru’s work.

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