You Need To Know There's A Difference Between The Medium And The Advertisement

Marketing & Advertising - 66 Strategies: Y2M TIP 31

When it comes to advertising there's one thing that's really important you need to realize right up front. There are two main parts to any advertisement: one is the medium in which it's placed (TV, radio, newspaper, etc.) and the other is WHAT YOU actually say. This is an important distinction because many business owners become jaded toward some forms of advertising because it hasn't worked for them in the past - they almost ALWAYS blame the medium without any regard for how good or bad their ad was...usually how bad it was! I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say something like, "We tried radio and it doesn't work for this kind of business." Or "We sent 15,000 pieces of direct mail and only got back 6 orders...it doesn't work!" Well, maybe that's true, but just because it didn't work don't assume that it won't work. Maybe you just haven't communicated your message effectively. Or maybe you bought space on the wrong day. Or you had a lousy headline that turned people off. Or maybe the medium was wrong.

There are dozens of things that could be wrong with an ad to cause it not to work. Here's the important thing: don't hastily draw the wrong conclusion. Mark Twain said, "We should be careful not to be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove. She will never sit down on a hot stove again and that is well; but she will also never sit down on a cold one either." Now this is higher learning stuff so it bears a short explanation: The cat that sat on the hot stove will draw a global generalization about every stove being hot all the time. But in advertising this kind of global conclusion about the ineffectiveness of a medium could keep you from attaining fantastic results in the marketplace...all because of fear brought on by an inaccurate conclusion or poor results.

Here's what Mark Twain's quote about the cat who sat on the hot stove and now won't ever sit on ANY stove - even a cold one - means to you in terms of advertising: There are a lot of variables in advertising, any one of which could mess up your results if it's not executed properly. So don't conclude that if it hasn't worked that it can't work or won't work.

It will be helpful for you to understand that while there are two parts to an advertisement - the medium and WHAT you say in the advertisement - it's the DOZENS of different components in the what you say part of your advertisement that could have potentially far more impact than the medium itself. And you could unknowingly get just one part wrong and mess up the entire result.

Remember those books when you were a kid with the animal parts...the ones where you could flip different parts of the page over and mix and match different heads, midsections, and legs? The object was to match up the right pieces to create an animal with all the right parts - a pig's head on a pig's midsection on a pig's legs, for instance. Then you'd have a picture of a whole pig. But what was even more fun was to make the goofiest looking animal imaginable...like maybe a walrus head on a pig's body with pelican legs. Then you would call it something silly like a wal-pig-ican. You remember these books, right? Now that you're older, you probably don't spend much time with those kinds of books anymore (hopefully!). But if you're the person responsible for advertising and marketing in the company, then you still play a mix and match game all the time...even if you don't realize it.

You see, each advertisement has several specific components - and they have to work perfectly with each other if you want to reach optimal results. If any of the components are wrong, you could end up with what we call wal-pig-ican advertising. Wal-pig-ican is fine for a kid's game but it is disastrous for your business. Even if you have all the pieces (head, body, legs) in place, it doesn't necessarily mean you've got the picture the right way. Let me give you a short case study then we'll discuss some of the different components:

The president of a big closet organizing company told me one time he had tried a direct mail campaign to find new business, but it didn't work. You know what I mean by closet organizer, right? They put little shelves and hooks and drawers in your closet so it holds more stuff. He figured that since he had sent a piece of mail (the head) with a coupon (the body) to a certain mailing list (the legs) that he had executed direct mail to its fullest potential...and despite his expert and calculated efforts, there was just no way direct mail could work for his particular product. He had the book Advertising for Dummies to prove he knew what he was doing. That's what I call the Wrong Conclusion - just like the cat on the hot stove...a MAJOR WAL-PIG-ICAN.

When I looked a little closer, it was evident that his entire mail campaign was poorly executed. The mailer turned out to be a Val-Pak type mailing - and his ad was printed on the back of a boot store's ad and was stuffed in a big envelope with dozens of other ads. The ad was mailed to tens of thousands of homes...but many of them weren't even prospects for his closet organizers because the average incomes were way too low. The ad itself made no compelling case for the product; it basically had his company name, a picture of an organized closet, a coupon for 10% off, and his phone number. Here's how a customer would perceive the ad, "Here we are. Buy a closet organizer from us for no justifiable, rational reason." (Remember: this is the outside perception.) The coupon might as well have been for $5,000 off since nobody could mentally quantify exactly how much "10% off" was. You see, he had the right generic pieces (head, body, legs - or in this case a headline, an offer, and a mailing list), but he had the wrong specific pieces - a bad headline, the wrong mailing list, the wrong offer...just like a walrus, a pig, and a pelican mixed together. In other words, a wal-pig-ican...that laid a huge egg!

This is important - a wal-pig-ican is a poorly executed advertisement that doesn't work. In reality, there are more than just 3 parts; there could be 10 or 15 or 20 parts. But for simplicity's sake, we'll just call it a WAL-PIG-ICAN. The technique section of the MYM program is all about putting the right pieces together and making it work. For now, remember there are two major parts to every advertisement: the medium it's placed in and what the advertisement actually says - don't pre-judge a medium and say it won't work before you know how to make it work...even if it's failed miserably in the past. Think about any advertising experiences you've had in the past that weren't so wonderful and consider this strategy every time you sit down to pen an advertisement.

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