Want your ad to work? Make it shocking.

Are your ads getting through?

In order for your ads to be effective they need to be noticed. That’s an easy enough concept to understand. But realize we are bombarded on a daily basis with thousands of marketing messages, on top of all the other emails, facebook status updates, tweets, and more that we get. Your mind just can’t keep up with all that information, especially since most of it is pointless to your daily lives. Show how do you make sure your ad gets seen? Read on…

Broca’s Area

In your mind there is this special area called Broca’s Area, think of this as the spam filter for your brain. It keeps all the junk out you don’t need to process, allowing your mind to focus on the important tasks at hand. Its how you can get to work every morning and realize you don’t remember how you got there, you just did. It analyzes your surroundings and determines if its something that needs to be processed. If is something you have processed multiple times and its not important, its blocked. If its boring, and bears no meaning to you its blocked. Its how we can end up with banner blindness, we know we can ignore them and the web will still function. But what about those ads you do see? Well, those got Broca’s attention.

Hold on and never let go!

You don’t have long to get the attention of Broca, and once you do, you’ve got to hold it. That’s why your ads need to be shocking. They need to get attention quickly so that your mind can process the ad. Let’s look at two basic examples:

And

Both of these ads are slightly jarring to the mind, they make your mind take a second look. And that’s the goal. You need to make sure your ads are worth a second look. So the next time you sit down with your designer, or you get something back from your ad rep, make sure the ad is worth a second look. That it opens the mind.

In our upcoming series on Total Mind Absorption, we will look at a 5 step approach to creating shocking ads. We’ll also show you how to build a campaign that is effective and makes sure your message is heard.