Small Office, Home Office Information

The good, the bad and the downright ugly

by Stuart Livesey

Back in March I talked briefly about advertising in the local newspaper and you can find those two posts here and an update here.

Since then I’ve been looking around at some of the small business advertising that’s been appearing in the local newspapers and I thought that it might be helpful to show you some examples over the next few days of good, bad and perhaps downright terrible advertising that’s been appearing over the last few weeks.

I think it’s important to bring you something like this because so many small businesses rely on the local newspaper for the major part of the advertising … and sadly those small businesses may not be getting the service they need and deserve.

So perhaps, after looking at some of the advertising I have to show you, you may feel confident enough to take control of your own advertising instead of relying on untrained or inexperienced sales staff at the local newspapers where you operate your small business.

So let’s start some really bad advertising - in fact you really can’t get more ugly than this:

And why is it so ugly? It certainly catches the eye and, in a way, it does tell a story that a lot of people might see as being applicable to them … if only they knew what shop was offering the deal.

It’s not even in the fine print and even the address is not enough to identify the business because there are around 15 shops at that address. Sure there is a phone number there but who’s going to call a phone number when you don’t really know if the business on the other end is really relevant to them.

Whoever wrote that ad … and whoever passed the ad for publication have allowed a business to spend a lot of money on an ad that will do absolutely nothing.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 6:10 am and is filed under Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.