Ad Placement
Posted on May 14, 2008
I often get asked about ad placement. Where is the best place to put my ad in a magazine? What size ad should I get? How about those little “business card” size ads?
The best place to put your ad depends on several factors. Is there a regular column covering a topic that fits with your ad? Where is your competition placing their ads and why? Does the magazine fall open at the center? (If it is stapled instead of bound, it probably does.) What section of the magazine is most popular to the readers? (Talk to the magazine’s editor, read the “from the editor” article at the beginning of several editions, read several editions and decide what interests you the most).
What about the cover pages? This usually means one of three pages: the inside front, inside back, or outside back. It is often a full page ad and these pages are the most expensive. In my opinion, the outside back is the best, the inside cover second, and the inside back third.
Now what about ad size? Deciding this is more art than science, but I can tell you what works best for my clients (and saves them money at the same time). Choose an island ad. It is called an island because it is the only ad on the page and is surrounded by editorial copy. I’ve found that most readers are reading the magazine for the articles and not for the ads. In reading the article, your eyes continually bump into the island ad. Compare this to the more costly full-page ad. The ad may pull some simply because of its size; however, there is no editorial copy on your page and readers will often turn your page over to find the rest of the article without looking at the ad.
Then there are those little business card ads - so called because they are about the size of a business card. If it is all you can afford, go for it. But persuade your sales agent to place your ad at the top of the heap instead of buried under other business card ads. Above all, avoid like the plaque those pages that are filled with these ads. And finally, make sure your ad is distinctly different from the rest. Are they all color ads? Then go black & white. All black & white, then go color. Use a large bold headline and little or no text. You may have guessed by now that these tiny ads are not my favorite.
And, finally, take a look at your budget. What size ad can you afford to run several times? An ad run once is wasted money. Readers will often not notice your ad until the second issue. They may not really look at it until the third. They may not read it until the forth. A good rule of thumb is to run the ad until you are getting bored with it and then run it a few months more. Remember, when you get your copy of the magazine, you are looking for your ad. The readers are not.
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The four elements of a successful ad
Posted on May 2, 2008
Here’s how to get the best readership on your ad and beat out the competition:
Work most on what’s important. Readers usually view your ad elements in this order: photo, headline, caption, and text. Notice that the text (a.k.a. body copy) is at the bottom of the list. Lets take a look at each element.
Photo: Pick up any newspaper or magazine and find a page with several ads on it. Pay attention to what you look at first. If there are a lot of text ads but one with a photo - I’ll bet your eyes went there first. It’s nearly impossible to control. Now, if there is more than one ad with a photo, but only one has a picture of a person you will jump to that ad. Photos draw attention away from your competitor’s ads.
Headline: If you don’t have a photo, the next best thing is your headline. (Of course you need a good headline even if you have a photo.) Keep it short and to the point. Nothing kills an ad worse than a long, rambling headline. Important: spend more time on creating your headline than you do creating your body copy.
Caption: People may not read your body copy, but they nearly always read the caption under your photo. In fact, if you have an important point you want to make, try putting it in the caption.
Text (body copy): this is the least viewed part of your ad. There are two things you can do to make it more likely that your reader will, in fact, read it. (1) Keep your text down to as few words as possible. People tend to avoid large amounts of text. (2) Keep it focused on what’s important to your customer.
Paying attention to these four elements will pull the reader to your ad and away from the competition’s.
More posts coming up:
- Ad placement
- Differentiating your ad from the rest
- Writing the ad copy
- Writing a successful news release
- Picking the right publication for your ad
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