Advertising
The first set of ads appeared in People. Both ads fast-forwarded a season -- the spring ad features a tropic/summer season and the winter ad features fresh flowers. As such, the strategy appears to be to appeal to women's sense of longing and looking forward to the future. People is a mainstream gossipy publication, so in that sense ad A's image has more immediate pull in that it might not look like an ad. B is clearly an ad. However, I feel that B will be more effective with women because it conveys more information about the product. While both ads ask the reader to associate the Downey product with a good mood, B's flowers are something sorely missed during the winter months, and the image of spring in the middle of winter has a fairly strong pull. Further, the visuals have more clarity, being specifically of the product.
The second set (10) features two ads that were tested in Cosmopolitan in summer. The structure of the images are nearly identical, though B is larger. B also has a little less copy, but the images are not self-contained; they rely on the copy to complete the message. A does this more effectively. Further, the blue color makes A more effective among women. In summer, coolness is attractive and A conveys coolness effectively. The only caveat would be whether Cosmo is read in air conditioned circumstances, in which case A's blueness might actually make it less attractive. But for light summer reading, which Cosmo surely is, the cool color of A and the stronger copy of A make that ad more likely to appeal to women.
The third set (11) features ads from different magazines and seasons. The first ad is from Ladies Home Journal...
Both are ads for a highly functional product, where product attributes are an important part of the marketing message. Both are to introduce a new extension of a heartburn remedy line. The Ladies Home Journal ad, for Pepcid Complete, makes its message very clear with a headline, and a striking visual that will attract the reader. The Tums ad in People has a much subtler image, and while it has more copy, it is not as effective at getting the reader to look at it.
Based on the more striking visual and headline, ad A should have been more effective with women. The seasonality should not affect much with this ad, and the visuals are neutral to both the season and the publication in both cases. Ad B simply seems visually unfocused with too much blank space in the upper half of the ad, compared with ad A where the visual is in the upper right, immediately capturing the eyes.
The fourth set (12) of ads features one from People in winter and the other is from Better Homes and Gardens in winter. Both are ads for credit card companies, but structured to convey their benefits via partnerships that they have. The first, for Discover, features a partnership with Red Lobster, and is dominated by an image of a cooked lobster. Ad B, for Discover, features a PDA, and is for an association with Staples. This one is tough to evaluate in hindsight. A lobster still has a lot of appeal, but a PDA looks archaic today -- I wasn't even sure what the device was. Certainly, something that is old just does not look good, but one can assume that this was advanced technology at the time.
So attempting to evaluate…
