How to Write Print Ads

Comments

October 15, 2008 at 10:19 am

(1) Donald J. Leske II says:

Hello Apryl,

I am a successful Real Estate Broker in Tacoma, Washington and a Webmaster. I have been in business for 25+ years and have tried just about every type of advertising media that I could find from Billboards, Local DEX Yellow Pages, Flyers, Post Cards and other Print advertising. Now its the Internet and WebPages. ///

In my humble opinion, print advertising is just not as effective as it used to be. Back in the day it was a critical element in our Ad Budget and essential to our success. We dropped our Yellowpages ad in the local book one year to save $800 a month…, it really took a BIG BITE out of our business. - Today, our 1/4 page ad has only resulted in about 4 phone calls in the last 10 months. Its all going online. People who call now tell me that they have seen one of my 7 Real Estate related websites. Wow.., now that is interesting. - Along with the new Online Media which is helping me be more successful, there are also lots of scams of course.

Along these lines I would like to warn people of what Yellowpages.com is doing.
My Blog is at www.Att-Yellowpages.us if I can share this advice with your permission.

Best regards,

Donald J. Leske II - Designated Broker
BCI PROPERTIES, LLC
P.O. Box 44065, Tacoma WA 98448
Ph: 253.241.6695
Fax: 253.536.1236
www.HomesandProperties.com - Buy/Sell Homes-Land
www.RealHomes.us - Foreclosure-Repo info.
www.bci-properties.com - rentals

October 15, 2008 at 1:23 pm

(2) Mark says:

I respectfully disagree with the above poster. There’s a big difference between a print ad and a yellow pages ad. Print ads work very well for our company and 60% of our ad budget is dedicated to print ads in magazines. 25% goes to TV and 15% online unless we need last minute placement and then we toy with the 15% that we set aside for online.

Advertising is not moving online as the previous poster suggests. When was the last time you clicked on a banner on purpose? When was the last time you sat through a commercial on USA Today instead of clicking the Skip Ad button? When was the last time you were visiting a site and clicked on a Google Adsense ad?

We hit our target market every time by focusing on magazines with thousands of subscribers who are interested in our products. Same goes for placing our TV commercials within programming that has an audience of our target demographic. Online, it’s a crap shoot.

October 16, 2008 at 3:31 pm

(3) Russell says:

As long as magazines are around, print will never die. As long as newspapers are read on the subway, print will live on. No worries about online taking over the world. It won’t happen.

November 2, 2008 at 3:50 pm

(4) Syed Akhteruzzaman says:

I work for TBWA\Benchmark in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh the landscape is totally different here; our customers (companies) are more interested to invest on BTL activity rather than engaging budget for Print media.
Syed Akhteruzzaman
Account Manger
TBWA\Benchmark
Bangladesh

November 11, 2008 at 7:47 am

(5) Tim Thomson says:

I’ve been in advertising for 15 years professionally. Clients, and ad reps, waste too much time worrying about the right media (TV, Radio, Print, Online, etc) when they should be concentrating on what’s really important, the content of your ad. Good ads will work almost anywhere. Every professional media has a core strength and mass reach audience, and the ad you place on that media should be geared to it. You can’t write a radio ad the same way you write for print and get identical results. Ads may have the same theme, but just need to be tweaked to play to that media”s strength.

Write to your clients needs and be unique. All medias works because media is the highway between your business and potential customers.

Tim Thomson

December 20, 2008 at 5:40 am

(6) Premium Domains says:

Nice information there Apryl. I have to agree with the above poster. It’s the content of your ad that’s important. Sure you will need to tweak it for diffenent mediums - but copywriting is key!