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How to Win an Award the Next Time Around

By Rick Kean, CBC

As a followup to our two most-recent columns, I may have inadvertently discovered another reason why B2B marketing print budgets are seen to be moving to online media . . . a lot of print ads stink.

So, maybe it's the message and not the medium after all. So maybe it isn't about getting carried away with new tactics and techniques, but rather a much-needed return to the basics.

I recently critiqued a dozen print ads for a friend. They represented a dozen different companies in a bunch of different industries, ads that ran or were running in publications from the glossiest to the most esoteric. Most were filled with meaningless and predictable headlines, borrowed interest photographs, illegible copy and cliché-ridden language.

There were some excellent ideas killed by bad execution, some bad ideas lifted by fairly good execution, but most were just so-so. While great advertising doesn't guarantee business success, it does guarantee you something you can't succeed without . . . an audience.

You Be the Jury

If you were on a jury, you'd want to hear and see all of the evidence before deciding on a verdict. Your advertising audience is like that, too. Many advertisers fail to recognize that their target prospects have been awash in too many claims for too long to accept anyone's unsupported product claims as gospel. Bragging and boasting and superlatives simply don't cut it anymore.

It's important to recognize that prospective buyers won't be convinced your product is better than someone else's until they reach that conclusion themselves. So what you need to do is to present so much convincing evidenced to support your case that it'll be virtually impossible for them to arrive at any other conclusion.

Yet, how many globes, handshakes, and cheetahs running through the wild have you glossed over in business-to-business ads? How many companies have declared "we mean business" or "we're committed to …" in their copy? Words that more often than not turn your advertising into wallpaper. And pretty expensive wallpaper at that.

The danger here is that a lot of advertising—including a lot of award-winning advertising—is so ineffective as advertising that the advertisers get little or no return on their investment in it. So they mistakenly conclude that it was advertising as a medium that didn't work, instead of their specific ad program. They shoot the messenger and look for new outlets for their communications.

The Self-Congratulatory World of Advertising

This is the season of the annual B2B marketing communications award competitions, the beauty contests to determine who gets a sledgehammer, a tower, an ace, a circle, or a lantern. Pursuit of the rewards of artistic excellence, critical acclaim for clients, colleagues, and from the critics in their craft. All of this has nothing to do with selling.

In award competitions there is a always a tendency to view advertising as art, and it's not confined to those engaged in producing it. Award judges, no matter how low or lofty one's position, knowledgeable or not, find themselves anointed critics (I may not know much about art, but I know what I like). Everyone has an opinion of how good an ad looks. Most of our ad award competitions are based on this and this alone.

And no matter how strong their resolve to maintain an objective frame of mind, their first impulse is to lapse into the role of art critic. Few, if any, read or understand the criteria or the stated objectives for the communications they're judging. After all, they have only so much time to review each entry, so what really counts is, does it look like art? The fault is not with the concept of awards, it's with the judging of awards. Judges usually have several hundred entries to judge with an average of about a minute for each. If a judge averaged two minutes with each entry he'd find himself alone long after all the other judges had gone home. The question is: Is an average of one lousy minute enough time to fairly judge an ad on which someone has spent long hours and a wad of dough?

And the answer is yes! The time pressure on judges works to create a situation like that in which your ad is weighed by the only judge who really counts—your potential prospect. He or she will normally spend only seconds on most ads, except for the one that lets him know at a glance who is trying to sell him what and why he should be interested.

Your Business is Different

Oh sure, you might say, our products and markets are unique. No group of assorted judges can possibly know them like our customers and prospects do. If they did, they'd have sensed that our ad, though it may be a bit slow in getting started, covered a subject of real importance to them. They'd have read it. They'd get to the clinching point in the second paragraph of copy—and many of them would act on it.

And to really tighten the screws, you may even be able to prove that many of them did act, that the ad sparked a good response. You got a lot of good leads and several orders were actually linked to it. And maybe all of that was covered in the small type along with your entry, but those harried judges probably didn't have time to read it.

But Just Suppose….

But just suppose that your ad burst out of the starting blocks a lot faster. Suppose that, with some extra effort, you would have found a way to drive home that major benefit point in the headline, instead of in the second paragraph of the copy. And just suppose that your illustration had demonstrated that point in a more credible and dramatic way.

How many more customers and prospects would have read your copy? How many more inquiries would you have garnered? How many more orders would have been triggered? My guess is, a lot more. And I'm sure the award competition judges would have spent more time with it, reading the copy, checking it against your stated objectives and maybe, just maybe, singling it out as a winner.

To put it another way, the positive response to your ad may have been due mainly to the strength of your basic selling (or marketing) proposition and not to the strength of your advertising. You may have had a head start, and failed to capitalize on it in your ad.

Do Some Contestants Have a Head Start?

I confess to a belief that the understanding and strength of a basic selling proposition gives any competition's award winners a big head start—even before their communications people took pen in hand. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever written ads. A strong selling proposition makes it easier to develop a strong visual impact, a clear message and overall creative effectiveness.

Is this big head start unfair to those who may have equally good communications skills but have to work with lazy marketing strategies and flabby sales propositions? Certainly to those who see all communications award competitions as a contest between creative teams and advertising technicians. But those who see communication award competitions as a contest in communications effectiveness should be able to accept that "head start" as a fair and healthy thing.

Let's face it, marketing communications is always most effective when it's used to promote strong, attractive selling propositions. It encourages the creators to work more closely with product managers, to get more involved with the shaping of marketing strategy, and to be a needle, when necessary, to create stronger strategies and sales propositions.

After all, what we want is not just creativity or advertising tonnage, but marketing effectiveness.

Rick Kean (rkean@businessmarketinginstitute.com) is the Managing Director of the Business Marketing Institute