I recently read a fantastic article by Paul Burke of campaignlive.co.uk, it was based on the rise of the overcomplicated poster that we have seemingly come to accept as brand consumers. I loved it, there were clear differences between the beautiful advertising of the past to our current state of taking pleasure in throwing more content at audiences rather than simply having the right content to suit the imagery. Imagery is such a strong medium, so, whatever happened to a picture being worth a thousand words?!
Below you’ll see some of my favourite examples from the aforementioned article (which will also give you a worrying insight into my interests…trainers, alcohol and cars), but this trend got me thinking about what has made us so keen to throw irrelevant and over-engineered content and words at everyone?! I know the B2B Tech industry is often the most guilty of doing this, after all what we’re trying to market are complex solutions so how could one picture and a few choice words summarise what we’re trying to say?!
We’ve all been there as tech-marketers, we’ve got a product/service/solution/offering/capability (whatever you want to call it) that can do so much for a customer…how can we make it stand out in such a way that it makes a strong statement for such a broad range of customers? Words are often the best way to explain it. I do wonder if it comes from the historical tech adverts like the ones below…
…but then you look at some of their newer poster campaigns, and they’re delightfully simple. Maybe they’ve learnt from their errors?! Let’s hope so!
So why are some tech companies still going overkill on their content? If we look at another tech-giant, they have very different adverts for the same product…
…I know which of these I’d prefer to receive! But this raised the question in my mind (and the whole reason I’m writing this blog) is it because of the audience, the channel or both that these adverts have been made in the way they have?
I figured that there’s a wider challenge, it’s not to purely get across a technical solution…it’s actually the fact we are constantly trying to battle with multiple channels and segmented audiences…we are simply trying to cater for everyone! This is when things can really go awry. Being specific to many simply can’t work unless it’s done simplistically.
I do still believe that there are ways of keeping marketing creative and utilising images to give us the extra thousand words we crave in an advert, whether that be social, DM, EDM or traditional poster ads. IBM’s latest set are very good examples of verticalising what is a very broad offering in a way that can be promoted across all channels. This tact allows them to be targeted to a vertical in their campaigns whilst also remaining accessible outside of these industries when used across broader brand campaigns. Another bonus is that the reuse values of this type of work can save marketing departments a lot of time and a lot of money!
These assets are often points of engagement that can lead to the detailed (more technical) content that we need to impart to customers. For example, at Affari we’ve designed infographics that then go straight out to a full eGuide that provides the technical insight that the audience would likely be after.
Let’s all keep on thinking simplistic and creative, let’s get back to letting imagery do as much of the talking as our words do!
