Tuesday Marketing Notes (Number 63—December 19th, 2006)
A B2B Marketing Newsletter for BMA Members
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Black (and White) Magic: Boost the Selling Power of Ads and Print Projects in Black-and-White
by Eric Gagnon
Technology and competitive pressures in the printing and publishing fields have reduced the expense of four-color printing for most marketing applications, to the point where four-color has become the default for virtually every marketing project.
Given the widespread availability of affordable four-color printing and advertising, I’ll bet that many of our twentysomething friends in the B2B field have never had to produce any marketing deliverable in black-and-white. This is unfortunate, and not just because it risks turning the techniques of black-and-white layout design into a lost art. However, there are still crucial marketing applications where we all must produce and execute ads, mailings, and other print projects for your companies or clients in black-and-white:
Trade show dailies: Trade shows publish their own trade show dailies printed as tabloid-format newspapers, and the best buys in these publications are often smaller, black-and-white space sizes. You can raise your company’s visibility when attending a show by running ads here, and you can make a smaller, fractional sized ad—even in black-and-white—stand up to larger, full color ads;
Business newspapers, like The Wall Street Journal, tab-format business and industry publications, as well as big-city daily newspapers, still publish most of their ads in black-and-white. Effective design, layout and execution in these media means more than running your company’s existing four-color ad as a black-and-white insertion, because most four-color ads actually become less visually effective when they’re converted to monochrome;
.PDF Flyers and white papers printable by prospects: Many deliverables are now printed out by your prospects on their office laser printers—flyers, brochures, spec sheets and white papers. Optimizing these pieces for black-and-white display makes these pieces clearer and more descriptive, and using black-and-white techniques to simplify their design increases their presentation power when they’re printed by your prospect.
But the most important reason to use black-and-white is affordability. Often you will find your company or client just can’t afford to place a four-color ad in a publication. And when your company or client can’t afford larger page sizes or color up-charges on their ads and print projects, you need to know how to make a smaller black-and-white ad or print piece stand up and be bold against your competitor’s more expensive color ads and printed materials.
You can produce good-looking ads and other printed pieces in black-and-white, without having them end up looking like those smudgy ads for trusses and go-kart kits you remember from the back pages of Popular Mechanics. Using the techniques of this monochrome medium of black-and-white, you can compensate for not being able to use color, and you can boost the visibility of your ad, mailing, or other printed piece to compensate for its lack of color.
Using these techniques can actually make your black-and-white ads not only look a lot better than you think, but often gives them greater selling power and visual impact than most color advertising we see these days.
These techniques can be used to develop ads from scratch, and to modify your existing color layouts when converting them to black-and-white applications. The key in both cases is to use what’s powerful about this black-and-white medium—by using greater boldness, tonality, and contrast—to compensate for what you may be losing by not using color. Use the following simple techniques to boost the visibility of black-and-white advertising, or of any flyer, brochure, mailing or other marketing deliverable.
To Add Boldness to Black-and-White, Start with the Headline
One of the most important techniques for boosting the presentation and selling power of a black-and-white ad (or other marketing deliverable) is to make the headline of the ad its most prominent visual feature, and to use tight leading, kerning, and line stacking to turn headlines into eye-stopping visual elements.
Using type in a graphical way boosts the clarity and boldness of your black-and-white projects. For example, using an extra-bold, sans-serif typeface such as Helvetica, Futura, or Franklin Gothic Heavy, combined with artful line stacking and tight leading, makes any black-and-white ad stand out on a page, and hits readers right between the eyes with your headline. These big text blocks work especially well in smaller, fractional-size ad layouts.
The secret to this technique of “graphical” headline type presentation consists of using line breaks to logically separate a longer headline into three or more easily readable, stacked lines. Make sure that the letter spacing, also known as “kerning,” and the spacing between your lines, called “leading,” are set “tight”—that is, so both letters and lines of type are squeezed as closely together as possible, as in the example below:
Setting headlines in this stacked-and-tight style actually transforms your headlines into an attention-getting graphical element in your ad. By using these typographical layout techniques you can create powerful, attention-getting ads using type all by itself, for those instances where you don’t (or can’t) use photos or illustrations in your layouts.
Use Headline Screens and Reverses
Another smart variation when designing with type in black-and-white is to reverse your ad’s headline, placing it as white on a 30 to 40% reversed, rectangular screen, as in this example:
A bold, screened (or even black) field sitting behind a reversed white headline of sans-serif type makes a bold visual statement that demands attention.
Use Selective Tones to Highlight Key Layout Elements
While we’re on the topic of screen tones, you can use tones selectively on various elements of your layout to highlight key text elements of your ad, to enhance the visual appeal of your project.
For example, you can vary the screen density for text, rules, subheads, or graphics to make certain elements of your layout stand out apart from others.
By setting text and graphical elements in lighter tones in your ad, and more important parts in darker tones you can increase readability of your layouts and, most important, drive your reader’s eyes to the parts of your ad you want them to see, as in this example below:
Black-and-White Photo Presentation
Since photographs in your black-and-white ad must often compete visually with the full-color photos and illustrations in the color ads printed all around them, you must pay even greater attention to how your black-and-white photos look in your layouts.
Black-and-white photos often print darker in publications than they appear on your computer screen or in their original source photograph (especially for publications printed on newsprint), so it’s always a good idea to compensate by lightening your product photos a notch or two in the original layout to compensate for this effect.
Other Typographic Techniques for Boosting Sales Impact in Black-and-White Ads and Marketing Deliverables
Mask and shadow technique: If you are using photos of your company’s products, the “Mask and Shadow” technique can often transform your product photo into a nicely highlighted graphical shape, as in this example:
Use text runarounds to boost visual interest: Text set around the outlined shape of your photo (also called a “runaround”), combines the visually interesting shape of your product with tight, effective type design to produce a truly compelling black-and-white ad that draws your readers into your ad layouts.
Type—keep it tight throughout your ad: Make sure you extend this close attention to type design to the rest of your ad layout, not just to your headline alone. For example—and to increase the chances that they will pop off the page—the subheads of your ad’s body copy should be set in the same (or same family of) typeface as your ad’s headline.
Tight, bold-faced subheads, written so they read as complete sentences, help skim-readers get the gist of your sales message even if (like most people) they don’t read the entire text of your ad. Setting these subheads in the same typeface as your ad’s headline helps busy readers get the essential message of your ad in the few short seconds their eyes spend on your ad, before their eyes dart away from your page.
The bold visual: A simple black-and-white shape, line drawing, or photo, when “amped up” beyond the rational proportions of where it “should” be sized within your ad, can often be so effective that it stops the reader—your prospect—so completely that they will focus their entire attention on the rest of your ad. Using simple, iconic figures, such as symbols, punctuation, or silhouettes, can be real traffic stoppers for readers when these line images are blown up to “unexpected” proportions in even the smallest black-and-white ads.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
Questions? Comments? Send them to me at eric@realmarkets.net
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Attention Marketing Managers:
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Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), is president of GAA (www.realmarkets.net), a sales and business development consulting firm, and is the author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, the master study guide for the Business Marketing Association’s Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Builder, and Certification (MSA/B/C) programs.
For more information on The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, available to BMA members at a special discount, link to:
http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com/book.html
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