High Artistic Standards in PPC Advertising Can Give You the Edge

Let's face it, the United States has not been the most art forward place to be in recent history.   One look at design standards now compared to design standards 50 years ago shows the value that corporate America currently places on art.

  Indulge me in an experiment.  Google advertisements from the 1950's and 1960's and see what comes up.  As you can see, these ads often have intelligent and playful use of color, a painting or some kind of graphic art, fun composition, and a myriad of different fonts and typefaces.  Now Google ads from present day.  The colors are often garish (or at the opposite end, almost monochromatic), there is little or no art present, and the fonts are bland and lifeless.

  Notice a difference?  Do you also notice how the older advertisements don't just give you information, but make you WANT to look at them and find out more?  Now,  I'm not saying that every creative or advertisement has to be a show-stopping work of art,  I'm merely trying to demonstrate how maintaining high artistic standards for your creatives can give your company the edge it needs in the highly competitive internet market.

   The way PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising works is a business or corporation is only responsible for paying an affiliate (person advertising for them) when a customer clicks on a banner or advertisement to find out more information about the product or service being advertised.  Similar, but not the same is PPA advertising, where a company only pays an affiliate if a member is acquired or a sale is made.  In either case, getting someone to "walk through the door" is a large part of the battle.  It's the only way both the company and the affiliate can benefit.

   Put yourself in the customer's shoes.  If two ads were to appear at the top of their screen, one ad that was fun and appealing to look at, and one ad that was bland and generic, which do you think would be more successful in grabbing their attention?  Even though the ads from the first group were designed for print media (where advertisers assumed that they would have more than a fraction of a second of the viewer's time), they still manage to grab and hold our attention more successfully than the ads from the second group do.  

   

   When artistic standards are high, your company not only benefits in the short term, but in the long term as well.  A successful artisticly-based ad campaign gives your company an opportunity to develop iconic status, and earn a positive space in a customer's mind for not only a second or a minute, but for years and years.  Think about it.  If Coca-Cola had never commissioned Norman Rockwell to paint those Santa Claus advertisements, would we still think about them every Christmas?  Would we fondly remember Campbell's Soup if it weren't for the apple cheeked children of Grace Drayton (or the non-commissioned satirical work of Andy Warhol)?  Iconic status is in no way guaranteed by employing high artistic standards, but having such standards is the only way to make it possible.

   If you research further, you will see that history is full of wonderful examples of successful arts-based ad campaigns.  These campaigns benefit you, the customer, and could play a part  in raising corporate Americas artistic standards on a large scale.  In short, in a world of digital beer, why not offer champagne?   You're much more likely to get people to come to your party that way.

You can reach Elana with questions and feedback at peakadvertisinglosangeles@gmail.com.