Advertising is a form of communication that is used to encourage an audience to take an action. The action is usually to buy a product. Advertising is the main form of fast marketing.

Advertising is also any paid form of non-personal promotion of ideas or products by an identifiable sponsor.

Person trying to sell a car in a local newspaper.

Corporation trying to improve their imago for more favourable climate for operations.

Advertisements use appeal genres to convince customers to take action:

• Testimonial: Influential people promoting the product.
• Bandwagon: Common people shown to use the product.
• Glitter: Using flashy words or imagery with little relationship to the product.
• Emotional: Using emotions to influence customer to buy the product, usually humor or empathy.
• Scientific: Enforcing the message with surveys and statistics.
• Rational: Introduce a problem and solve it using the product.

First focus on rational appeal, then the rest. You should not do advertisements if no one can see the product as rationally appealing. Point out the true benefits of the product.

Commercial ABCs:

• Every picture must tell a story.
• Provide a key visual that grabs the viewer's attention.
• Focus on a single message per commercial.
• Show the name your product.
• Reflect your product's personality.
• Prefer people over objects.
• Avoid talky commercials.
• Focus on building campaigns over individual commercials.

Mental images are highly memorable. Mental images pass through critical thinking and people visualize them right away.

Turns up your digestive furnace and burns flab right out of your body! [heat and strong visual image]

At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock. [hearing and vision]

Again she orders — "A chicken salad, please" [vision, hearing, taste, smell]

Design around the marketing medium. If your advertisement is printed on a paper.

Banner Advertisements

Banners are targeted for people that are not actively searching for your product.

Banner should look like a banner. Make sure that the viewers cannot confuse the ad to an element of the parent site. It should not look like a button, read "sign in here" or read "download". But it should look like it can be clicked. If possible, use opposite color than the rest of the page so it jumps out.

Banner ad can look professional. Avoid clutter and use whitespace to make banner ads look more professional.

Don't show price on banner ads. Except if the price is free. Never talk about discounts on banners, people don't believe those anyway. If you offer additional things for free, make them relate to the real product.

Text Advertisements

Targeted for people that are actually looking for something specific. Text ads are mainly Google ads and Facebook ads.

Images is the most important. If you can include a video thumbnail or an image, do it. People are drawn to interesting images. Prefer relevant images over attractive images. Big boobs might get you clicks but will not get you revenue.

Heading is the second most important. There are multiple good notes about creating headings in different contexts e.g. copywriting and content marketing.

// bad Learn Tennis Learn to play tennis at Greg's Tennis School [link].

// good Swing That Racket! Learn to play tennis at Greg's Tennis School [link].

Focus on multiple long low-competition terms. Avoid using short and high-competition terms in Google marketing. Of course, short and low-competition is the best combination but rather rare.

// bad facebook marketing

// good the best facebook marketing courses online

Learn how the platform works. E.g. start by bidding high prices on Google ads because Google ranks you according to click count and how much you play. First you get good amount of clicks, then you can lower your bid and still keep your position.

Make multiple Google ads. Google will use those that generate the most visitors.

Other Advertisement Mediums

• Video Advertisements
• Mobile Applications (many free versions have ads)
• Radio, Spotify
• Television, Text TV
• Newspaper
• Sponsorship (sports clubs, non-profit organizations)
• Charity
• Sale sites (Groupon, Offerium, Kimppadiili)
• SMS (avoid, seen as spam)
• Email (avoid, email advertisements are seen as spam)
• Word-of-Mouth
• Online peer reviews
• Social networks
• Blogs and forums

Sources

• KISSmetrics
• Quicksprout
• Wistia
• Verkkokaupan käsikirja, Tero Lahtinen