My advertising isn't working!

As I mentioned in my recent InterBusiness Issues column, there are several reasons why your advertising might not be working. Business Week recently ran an article highlighting seven reasons why your advertising isn't working.

Some reasons I've mentioned before to our clients. Some of them are worth repeating. And some you may not want to hear. Here's an overview, as well as our local perspective. If you want to read the whole article, you can read it on the Business Week website.

Seven reasons your advertising might not be working:

1. It's boring.

2. It's boorish.

3. It's safe.

4. It's trying to do too much.

5. It hasn't been given time (or enough budget).

6. You like it. (Ouch!)

7. It's not an advertising problem (it's actually a product or other problem).

Obviously, there are many reasons why advertising doesn't work, but these are seven big ones on a national scope. Locally, here's what we've found.

Because the Central Illinois economy has been struggling lately, people are trying to do more with less, so we find that a combination of both 4 and 5 are the biggest hurdles in our community. Businesses are trying to cram a lot of messages into small print ad spaces (or short TV/radio spots) and then run those campaigns for a short period of time, reducing the likelihood of effectively communicating any clear message.

We also find that number 6 can be a problem in that clients sometimes get too close to their product or service, and forget their target audience. One surgeon that we started working with about six years ago once said to us, "You do the marketing and I'll do the surgery." It's turned out to be a really good relationship because he trusts us to communicate his message in a way that patients understand. He realizes that because he is so intelligent and spends his day interacting with other medical professionals that sometimes his way of communicating may not be most effective for delivering advertising messages to the average healthcare consumer.

Since DLA focuses on working with high-end professional organizations we rarely get to do anything too edgy, but we took a bit of a risk with a bank's Watchdog service and received good feedback on it. It was a little less "safe" than normal bank marketing (see number 3 above), but it got the point across for our client as we used fun imagery across various mediums.

So which of the 7 deadly marketing sins are you guilty of? And how can we help?