Creating Ads

Creativity
Advertising Principles
Strength of Evidence on Principles
Improving Group Process
Generating ideas
Borrowing ideas from great ads
Improving Ideas
Advice to Writers
Implementation
Assessing group process
Other Resources for Developing Campaigns
Tools and Techniques

Creativity

For a discussion of evidence on creativity, see this summary from Persuasive Advertising by J. Scott Armstrong (Palgrave Macmillan 2010).

Advertising Principles

This section provides principles that can help you create persuasive ads. Use them to stimulate creativity in new areas as you develop an advertisement. The map gives you an overview of the areas, and the checklist provides the details for application.

Persuasion principles map

Checklist of advertising principles.

Use this checklist as an aid to creativity by seeing what principles might be applied.

Strength of Evidence on Principles

This tells you how much evidence there is on each of the principles. - In a sense, then, it is a measure of the confidence you can place on a given principle.

Improving Group Process

Advertising campaigns typically involve working in groups. This can harm creativity and productivity as shown by previous research. Here are some procedures that can help enhance a person's creativity, and improve his efficiency.

Generating ideas

• Brainstorming and Brainwriting
• Checklist to Stimulate Creativity in Advertising
• Guidelines for Problem-Solving Meetings

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Borrowing ideas from great ads

After developing your creative ideas, look at previous campaigns for similar products to find additional ideas or to avoid reusing typical ideas.

Print
Commercials
Internet
Other Advertisements
Museums

Improving Ideas

• Consensus
  
• Delphi

Advice to Writers

Borrowing from the great advertisers, I offer the following advice to copywriters:

1. Drive the advertisement with ultimate objectives.
The ultimate objective of an ad for a commercial product is profit.

2. Forget about entertainment.
In line with the previous point, the objective is not to entertain. Ogilvy said that is why great writers (e.g. Hemingway) made poor advertising copywriters: Their writing attracted more attention than the product. Put another way, the product should be the hero of the ad.

3. Do not try to be creative.
This also follows from point 1. (Rosser Reeves ,Bill Bernbach, David Ogilvy)

4. Rewrite.
Rewriting is more important than writing. Ogilvy said it best.

Implementation

• Time Lines (PDF)

Assessing group process

• Group Functioning Questionnaire (PDF)
• Group Process Checklist (PDF)

Other Resources for Developing Campaigns

• AdSlogans.com - Advertising slogans and taglines
• Sample press release - Communications are more credible if transmitted by an objective third party
• Website design - Annotated list of five useful books.

Tools and Techniques

Tools and Techniques that are useful to those in advertising are described... More