No Excuse For Bad Ads

I'm going to start tweeting/blogging about bad book ads.  Good ads too when I see them.

Today's a bad ad day.

IMHO there's no excuse for lousy creative. 

Good books... great books... deserve great ads. 

 This is the problem with saving money - perfectly lovely people in publishing who don't know how to do a good ad write the ads for books. 

 You can make toast is a toaster without much education. But you cannot make a souffle without some lessons or a really good recipe. 

 Ditto with ads. 

 90% of the ads we see today for books are toast. I love Audible - I am a member of Audible - I'd work with them on ITW projects - but have you seen the TV ads they are spending so much money on? Nothing provocative or imaginative about them. Think for a moment about the magic of listening to a book while you are on a boring commute. 

 Take Target- today in the NYT online they are spending mega dollars advertising four books. Anyone looking at that page on a normal screen can not read 3 out of the 4 titles/covers of the books they are advertising.

Comments

[twitter.com/TomThompson]

I'm so glad to see you stirring up the hornets nest on book ads! But I disagree with your point re: Target. The ad's primary objective isn't really to sell these particular four books. It's to drive the book buying demo into Target. You see Dan Brown and a few other titles and you get it: "Target sells books! I had no idea..." Too much focus on particular titles would distract from the ad's main mission.

[Mandy]

Good post! I disagree with Tom's comment though. As the advertising manager at a book publisher, I can tell you it's always about the fundamentals - especially readability. Anyone who buys books knows you can buy them at Target; I think most people who've been in a Target can tell you that. I think the biggest problem here is the size of the ad. The book covers are unreadable and the text below them referring to the release dates of those particular books is even worse - I had to enlarge my screen just to read it. Even if Target's objective is to let people know that they carry books, they should have purchased a skyscraper ad and featured one or two book covers at a readable size. Proportionally, it makes more sense.

[MJ]

I totally disagree too - but thanks for writing Tom. Even if the point is to make sure people know Target has books its a missed opportunity to make them unreadable.

Say I'm a reader and I wanted to read The Gargoyle when it was in hardcover but was waiting for the less expensive paperback to come out - and I can't see the book covers in that ad - I'm not going to be aware that Target has it.

Also by not showing the bookcovers so that they are readable you're missing another opportunity to subliminally influence the book buyer in the store. If I saw the ad, could read the cover, then happen to be in the store and saw the book - even if I didn't remember that I saw the ad - the book would look more familiar to me and I'd be more likely to pick it up.