John Wanamaker famously said,
"I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half."I found both halves. They're in the Boston Business Journal. Nothing against the BBJ – all they do is accept the ads that professional services firms send them. The problem is with the firms themselves; they craft such weak ads.
From just the perspective of the offers the companies make, these ads need some serious work. A quick review of 25 or so ads in a recent BBJ from accounting firms, law firms, management consulting firms, commercial real estate, investment banking, technology services, and other like firms revealed the following offers:
- Free Cost Saving Analysis...
- Call me if you have a project...
- To schedule a meeting call...
- To take advantage of our expertise, call...
- For more information on our services, call... (Offered 3 times.)
- Visit us at our website... (Offered 1 time with a main home page URL, and 1 time with a landing page URL.)
- No offer... (Offered 16 times.)
Comments:
- A whopping 16 times there was no offer at all! I can hear Adam Sandler now, "Who was the ad wizard who came up with that one?" Of course, companies have to make good offers, but without any offer at all, these ads aren't doing much.
- The 'call for more information', 'visit our website', and 'schedule a meeting' offers aren't much better than nothing. Might as well just say, "But enough about me...let's talk about me!" or "I couldn't think of anything to offer you might find worthwhile, but if you want to buy something, I'm around."
- In the "Enough about me, let's talk about me" vein, many of the offers had announcements. Some popular ones were 'we've merged', 'we just hired some staff', and 'we did some work that we're proud of'. Me me me...
- The 'Cost Saving Analysis' – the only offer that even remotely hinted of potential value for the respondent – didn't have any detail about the analysis itself. This could have easily been taken care of by providing a landing page on the company's website about the offer itself and a web form where the visitor can sign up for the analysis. Plus, by providing a landing page and response form, the company could have analyzed the effectiveness of the ad by tracking landing page visits and acceptances of the offer.
- If I were most of these services firms, I wouldn't spend my money on ads in business journals. That's a blog post for another time.