Creative & Copywriting : Raise the Bar With Common Sense Creative
Smarter solutions for ineffective marketing design
December 1, 2011 By Carol Worthington-Levy
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Lackluster, nondescript and misinformed creative is a problem that’s actually getting worse despite the sophisticated tools creatives have at their fingertips. This malady is rampant in the design world. It’s often caused by thoughtlessness or lack of experience or training on the part of those who are given the job of design, copy and production of your email program, catalog or website.
While it’s easy to point the finger at our creatives for the diminishing standards, it’s just as much the responsibility of the one who hires and manages them to look over their work. They must ask themselves if the work is intelligent, if the employee is doing the best job he or she can to sell the company’s products and/or services.
Designers aren’t being encouraged to perform at a higher level. They shouldn’t be tasked with making a marketing campaign more creative, but instead making it work hard and effective enough that prospects will actually respond.
This column shares a few examples of ineffective creative work. It discusses the issues at hand and suggests how the work could be better and why it would perform better.
The barriers that designers use to keep folks from reading advertising and marketing messaging are astonishing. You’d think they actually didn’t want people to read their copy.
Sadly for designers, pictures only get a prospect’s attention — and that’s only if it’s a good image and relevant to the reader. Copy is the thing that tells them what they’re looking at, what the offer is and why they should buy from you. Reversing body copy out of a busy photograph shows no common sense, nor does putting white type on a pastel background and assuming someone will actually go to the trouble of reading it. There are countless studies that prove how poorly these efforts fare and how their easy-to-read counterparts win the day.
Legibility shouldn’t be a challenge for designers to “make good” on. I was stunned to get a birthday card with a gift coupon from Chico’s. Not because it’s such a nice gift, but because of its white type on an orange background shows such a lack of common sense. Chico’s isn’t the only guilty one though. I often see websites and printed materials with yellow and pale green type on white backgrounds. Who’s reading this stuff? Certainly not consumers.
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