Radio Sales Café

The following is excerpted from a piece by Wizard of Ads Partner Jeff Sexton, from his blog Jeff Sexton Writes.  When his advertising fails to achieve its intended result, the advertiser needs to understand WHY it failed and correct the problem. Here Jeff addresses three common problems, the solutions to which might be summarized: 1) Write Better Ads, 2) Run Them Often, 3) Over an Extended Period of Time.  Want to dig deeper to understand why these are important?  Read on...

Lin­ear, No-Threshold Thinking

Lin­ear, no-threshold think­ing assumes that a func­tion is pre­dictably scal­able. That if you do twice as much, or half as much, you’ll get dou­ble or half of the result.

But more often than not, there are thresh­olds and inflec­tion points, and dimin­ish­ing returns which make lin­ear, no-threshold think­ing dan­ger­ously mis­guided. If you buy a ticket halfway to Europe, you don’t end up with a half a Euro­pean vaca­tion; you just end up stranded at sea. 80% of the parts of an engine don’t get you 80% of the horsepower...

These kinds of thresh­olds are inevitable when deal­ing with human response. Espe­cially when it comes to adver­tis­ing. There is a thresh­old of inter­est, rel­e­vance, and impact for ads: the thresh­old which moves an ad from back­ground noise into con­scious aware­ness. If any ad fails to reach that thresh­old, it becomes essen­tially invis­i­ble, and would require nigh-unto-infinite rep­e­ti­tion to get results...

If your ad writer is a hack — if he accepts adspeak, hype, and adver­tis­ing cliches, or tries to bluff with fluff on the pro­duc­tion side — then your ads are never likely to cross the thresh­old of impact. And no mat­ter how much fre­quency you load into your ad sched­ule, your ads won’t move the nee­dle on sales.

If your ad writer aspires to be great and has a mod­icum of tal­ent and craft skills, then your ads will likely cross the impact thresh­old. As Leo Bur­nett said, “When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a hand­ful of mud either...”

The more impact your ad car­ries, the less rep­e­ti­tion is required. LBJ’s “Daisy” ad is a clas­sic exam­ple of an ad so pow­er­ful, it only required one air­ing to make an impact (pun intended):

And, this is where tal­ent and craft really take over from taste and ambi­tion. The more skilled and tal­ented your ad writer, the more impact he (or she) can bake into your ads.

Min­i­mum Effec­tive Dose

What do you think will hap­pen to your head­eache if you take 20 mg of Ibuprofin?

Noth­ing, right? Because while Ibuprofin can be a god­send for get­ting rid of headaches, the min­i­mum effec­tive dose is 200mg, with most adults tak­ing 400mg or more.

If you take sig­nif­i­cantly less than 200mg, you’ll receive no benefit.

Simi­larly, If you go the gym for a day or even a week and com­plain that it didn’t work, you sim­ply didn’t meet the require­ments of the min­i­mum effec­tive dose. You’ll see some ben­e­fits at the end of a month, but plan on 90 days for real changes that oth­ers will com­ment on.

And it’s no coin­ci­dence that Stephen King com­pares writ­ing to weightlift­ing. Want to be a pro­fes­sional writer? Bet­ter be pre­pared to put the time in every day becom­ing a “stronger” writer. Just like Ira Glass says about doing great cre­ative work.

The same thing applies to Advertising.

Most mass-media brand­ing cam­paigns require enough fre­quency and duration—enough of a min­i­mum effec­tive dose—to really work their magic. You might get lucky and see some results in 90 or 180 days, but plan on a full year or longer at a high enough fre­quency of ads to get a min­i­mum effec­tive dose.

And just like with work­ing out (or, in Ira’s case, with doing great cre­ative), there’s a cer­tain level of frus­tra­tion and chick­en­ing out you just have to work through. Be pre­pared for this chick­en­ing out period, and take Ira’s advice: fight your way through it.

Cumu­la­tive Effect

Cumu­la­tive Effect is the other side of the coin from Min­i­mum Effec­tive Dose. Assum­ing your ad passes the thresh­old for rel­e­vance and impact, and that you’ve sched­uled enough fre­quency to give the audi­ence a min­i­mum effec­tive dose, the per­sua­sive power of your ad will build over time.

You might just be start­ing to see results at the end of a year, but those results will accu­mu­late and build. You’re not start­ing over each year, you’re stand­ing on the per­sua­sive results you gained from the year before....

For adver­tis­ers, the cumu­la­tive effect of your adver­tis­ing is cer­tainly about increas­ing your mar­ket share and mov­ing the nee­dle on sales. But it’s also about find­ing your adver­tis­ing voice and hit­ting peak stride in your ads and campaigns.

Most TV shows, and espe­cially most come­dies, get bet­ter after a sea­son or two. The Simp­sons first sea­son wasn’t as good as what was to come. It took a sea­son or two to really hit its stride. Same thing with Sein­feld. And most adver­tis­ing cam­paigns are like that. The results build with time, but so does the authen­tic­ity of the voice and the impact of indi­vid­ual ads.