What Makes Ads Successful?

When designing advertising campaigns, we often look for hooks that will attract our target audiences and drive home our messages. But today, consumers are inundated with the constant noise of commercial messages. As a result, they start filtering information by ignoring anything ordinary or unremarkable. With that in mind, how do you design your messages to get noticed? Our efforts to reach audiences are wasted unless our ads break through the clutter. Here are some important tips that will make a difference in the performance of your ads.

Simple messages:

Save the speeches for industry events, as potential customers have short attention spans. The first step in your ad designs is to stick to clear, concise headlines—the shorter, the better! Here are some ads that use brief and crisp headlines to get immediate attention and deliver the messages effectively.

 

Choose the right ad styles:

The right styles can prevent your ads from being skipped by your potential consumers. One of the most successful design techniques is contrast. This occurs when two elements in a design are different. Our brains are trained to categorize everything. That's why we notice when "one of these things is not like the others." For example, it could be different colors for the text and the background color. Or it could be a difference in font styles, between a large graphic and a small graphic or between a rough against a smooth texture. The main idea behind this approach is that our eye like contrast.

iPod ads use contrast effectively to focus the viewers' attention on the music player. The iPod and earphones appear in white and stand out clearly against the silhouettes and colored backgrounds.

 

Offer incentives:

The next step in developing great ads is to offer incentives. Admit it, we all love and have fallen for them. A study by KN Dimestore and SocialVibe notes that incentivized advertising works to drive active attention to brand messages and significantly improved brand perception and purchase intent. According to the study, more than 90 percent of people pay attention to brand messages when interacting with incentivized engagements and brand perceptions rise to an average of 38 percent after completing engagements.