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Ad Of The Week

One thing that has always intrigued me is looking at ads. I know that many of you on this site do freelance art and stay away from advertisement, but there is a huge market for commercial art and many art majors / creative folks get into this field because, quite frankly, there's so many opportunities in marketing and advertising for creative people. Nonetheless, each week I will try to post a new ad that I found especially intriguing.

This one is for an athlete's foot product in Brazil called Vodol. It is an interesting ad, as I think that anytime you can make a semi-seamless creation using two mutually-exclusive objects, it is eye-catching. This ad, however, does little to provide the customer with an idea as to why this product is better than that of its competitors. Now, I am no expert on the athlete's foot remedy market in Brazil, so I am assuming that this product has competitors (otherwise why advertise). Thus, they need to find a way to show why this product is better or (at least) different that that of its competitors.

I picked this particular ad to illustrate how merging two objects together can work to make an ad stand out (especially when humor is involved). However, a fisherman doesn't waste his time bating a hook if he isn't going to try and hook a fish - so don't waste your time grabbing attention if you aren't going to win business. This ad attracts attention, but it does not win business. It implies that this powder will help your feet and keep them from stinking, which consumers already know - that is the point of using an athletes foot medication. McDonalds doesn't advertise that their food will fill you up, people already know that and that will not sell burgers.

Therefore, this is a great, eye-catching design but I find it hard to believe that it will sell. This provides a great lesson and I was just talking about this with my friend Gavin: ads can be super beautiful or funny or eye-catching, but if they don't sell they don't hit their mark and they aren't worth the money. If you are in the business of developing ads, that is one of the biggest struggles you can have artistically: developing art that is beautiful vs making ads that sell. You must learn to do both, which is tough because often times it means that you have to alter something that you are really proud of so that the it achieves the prime objective, which is to win business and sell.

This ad might smell, but it doesn't sell. Learning how to juggle the sales pitch and the artsy side of advertisement is one of the trickiest things to do when you are in commercial art. I still struggle with this and I think that most commercial artists would echo that sentiment.

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Comment by 3 Quarters Design Pty Ltd on July 27, 2012 at 9:08am: Hi Jonathan, this is a really good and interesting analysis over the advertisement. From the understanding I think it is kind of "perception" to the public that "we sell but do not sell". Indeed, this marketing skill has been wisely used by many companies to make sure they don't overpower their own product but enhancing the branding instead.

If you are interested, feel free to look at some of our graphic design jobs via www.3quartersdesign.com.

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