This may seem an odd choice for my very first BAD AD pick.  It’s not for a high-profile brand. And, to the untrained eye, it probably looks fine.  We see ads like this day in, day out, without giving them a second glance. And therein lies the problem.  It’s virtually invisible, totally bland and utterly forgettable. Hence my singling it out – it’s a bad ad because it’s unlikely to get itself noticed.

More worrying for me, however, is that ads like this are so ubiquitous.  Crap has become the new normal. It’s not just a bad ad. To me it’s a red flag, drawing attention to the fact that something has gone terribly wrong with the industry as a whole.

It’s a bus accident – stuff scattered all over the place

Take a closer look at it.  There’s a lot of different elements jostling for attention (eight images, logo, dates, strapline, partner details x2 and three lines of text).  They’re just plonked onto the page in no particular order. And each one is given equal prominence. Your eye does not know where to start, or where to go next.  There’s a lot of information but nobody has worked out what order to present it in. To paraphrase Maurice Saatchi: “simple messages go into the brain quicker and stay there for longer”.  This ad does not to have a simple message and is visually confusing. Nobody has taken the time to work out what to say and how best to say it.

The result is an ad that invites you to turn the page.  An ad which fails to present a compelling argument for buying a ticket and taking the time to attend.  It tells, in a clumsy and chaotic way. But it does not sell.

Leaking hot air in all directions

To the trained eye the obvious problem with this ad is the lack of a decent headline.  There is one, of sorts, but “A LITERARY FESTIVAL LIKE NO OTHER” is just vacuous, smug and pompous.

It begs the question “why?”.  Why is it different from all those other literary festivals that have popped up in recent years?  There’s a handful of good speakers but you’ll find them at a host of other events too – this is not your only chance to see Prue Leith, Julian Fellowes or Bernard Cornwell.  So the text needs to answer this question and substantiate the promise that the festival is unique – but does nothing of the sort.

To make matters worse, the designer has buried the headline in amongst everything else.  A headline, as the term suggests, works best at the head of the ad. At the very least it should be prominent.  Instead, the logo and dates are given greater priority. This is plain dumb. The eye should be grabbed by the headline first, followed by some copy substantiating the promise and making the reader want to attend.  Those are the elements with the pulling power. Only when someone is keen to buy will they be interested in the date and place – putting this information above the headline, and making it more prominent, is like putting the cart before the horse.

The body copy is set in smaller type than everything else and buried at the bottom.  It should be directly below the headline to amplify the message. They should work together and be together – the text substantiating the promise made in the headline.

The words they have been used, like the headline, are glibly pretentious – “a celebration of the written word” is a lazy epithet that could apply equally to any literary festival.  Instead of clearly differentiating this event they suggest it is exactly like all the rest!  Worse still the tone is condescending – it suggests the reader doesn’t know what a literary festival is!  Patronising your target audience is not a great way to encourage them to join you.

The thing that makes this festival unique, surely, is the house itself and its fascinating heritage.  The headline and body copy make nothing of this at all. They are meaningless waffle, made even more impotent by the designer’s decision to separate headline from body copy and then hide them in amongst everything else.

This result is an ad too weak to punch its way out of a wet paper bag.

How it should be done

Let’s now imagine that this brief had been given to someone who understood how to structure sales messages, who was experienced at creating effective ads and was well versed in advertising best practice.  They’d have written a headline that promised the reader some kind of benefit. A headline that was likely to hook the reader in with an appealing or intriguing promise. For instance:

Gripping plots, colourful characters and scandals aplenty.

They’d put it at the top, making it big and bold.  Then they’d write a couple of lines of text to support that promise (and not bury it at the bottom of the ad in smaller type than everything else).  That text might be:

Come and join some of the world’s best storytellers in a glorious house that has seen far more than its fair share of drama, plots and intrigue.

This form of words makes a link between the speakers, the event and the unique heritage of the house – so that the reader understands why it is “A literary festival like no other” and buys into that promise.  That “…like no other” line would then come across as less smug and pompous.  It would work as a strapline and should go at the bottom, under the logo.

The message has become mush

This ad, and the countless others like it, shows that today’s marketers have lost the basic ability to create and present a simple and compelling marketing message.  How did that happen?

Over the course of the 20th century the advertising and marketing profession got pretty good at working out how to use words and pictures to sell products and services.  A body of recognised best practice built up and the standard of communication was generally quite competent – producing a simple press ad was not beyond the capabilities of the average marketing professional.

Then the digital revolution turned everything upside down and inside out.  The changes are too big and many to be listed here. However, at the risk of generalisation, I’d say that communication best practice was tossed aside by a new generation of digital natives who assumed they had nothing to learn from those who went before.

These smart kids have spent the last couple of decades focusing on the opportunities created by the explosion of new media (from Facebook to Youtube and Instagram to LinkedIn), the mechanics of utilizing these new channels (PPC, CRM, UX, Bots, motion graphics…) and the metrics (MQL, SQL, LTV, CAC, ROI…).  In the process (and it has all become very process driven) they’ve lost interest in the message. Words have been relegated to junk status – dismissively referred to as “content”.

Words still work – if you know how to use them

This ad is not fit for purpose – the purpose being to make people sufficiently excited about this event that they eagerly give up their precious time and money to attend.  It fails because whoever created it does not value words and does not have the ability use them effectively. That’s a pretty sad indictment of today’s marketing industry – especially when the ad is supposed to be promoting “a celebration of the written word”.