Marketing
If your creative style gets in the way of your message, your advertisement has already lost its biggest advantage. Design should support communication, not compete with it. If people spend more time admiring your editing, animation or visual effects than understanding what you ' re selling, you ' ve sacrificed clarity for creativity.
MARKETING AFRICA
Marketing
Vera Phoebe
Can You Score An Advertisement?
Over the past few weeks, I ' ve been producing a lot of marketing materials, and one question kept following me from one review meeting to the next: How do you know when an advertisement is actually good?
Creative work attracts numerous opinions. Make the logo bigger. Change the colors. Use another photo. Add more text. Remove the text. Everyone is usually trying to help, but somewhere along the way, useful feedback becomes subjective preference. Before you know it, the project has drifted so far from its original idea that you ' re almost starting from scratch.
So, I started wondering whether there was a better way to review creative work. Could advertising be measured instead of argued over? Is there a scorecard that helps us separate personal opinion from good communication?
That search led me to a fascinating framework inspired by advertising legend David Ogilvy. Rather than judging an advert by whether we personally like it, the framework asks whether it follows a series of timeless principles that make communication clearer, more persuasive and easier to remember. Every advertisement begins with 100 points, and as each principle is broken, points are deducted. By the end, you ' ll have a practical score that tells you how effectively your advertisement communicates.
The first and biggest deduction is 17 points. If your creative style gets in the way of your message, your advertisement has already lost its biggest advantage. Design should support communication, not compete with it. If people spend more time admiring your editing, animation or visual effects than understanding what you ' re selling, you ' ve sacrificed clarity for creativity.
The next biggest deduction is 11 points if your illustration or hero visual isn ' t actually helping to sell the product. Every image should do some heavy lifting. It should
explain a benefit, create curiosity, solve a problem or make someone imagine themselves using the product. A beautiful photograph that contributes nothing to the sale is simply decoration.
Deduct 10 points if someone cannot immediately identify what category of product you ' re advertising. Within a second or two, your audience should know whether they ' re looking at skincare, banking, coffee, software or shoes. Mystery might work in films; it rarely works in advertising.
Deduct another 9 points if your brand isn ' t immediately recognizable. Today ' s branding goes beyond logos. It includes colors, packaging, typography, editing style and even tone of voice. The reality is that many people won ' t watch your advert to the end, so your brand should never arrive only in the closing seconds.
Another 7-point deduction comes if your advertisement feels too much like... well, an advertisement. The best-performing campaigns often educate, entertain or tell a story before asking for a sale. Modern audiences are far more receptive to content that feels helpful than content that immediately starts selling.
Take away 6 points if nothing interesting is happening in your visual. Great advertisements create curiosity. They make people pause and wonder what happened just before the photo was taken or what happens next. Storytelling doesn ' t always require words; sometimes a single image can do the job.
Deduct 5 points if you rely on illustrations where authentic photography would have built more trust. While illustration certainly has its place in branding today, real products, real customers and genuine moments usually create stronger credibility. Another 5 points disappear if your layout feels cluttered. Too many colors, fonts, graphics and competing messages overwhelm the audience. A confused customer rarely becomes a buying customer.
Now we move into the smaller refinements that quietly improve readability. Deduct 4 points if there are multiple places for the eye to begin reading. Good design naturally guides attention from the image, to the headline, to supporting information and finally to the call-to-action. Deduct another 4 points if typography is being used simply to look artistic rather than to communicate clearly. Beautiful fonts are useless if nobody enjoys reading them. Another 4 points come off if your body copy is difficult to read because of poor contrast, such as light text on dark backgrounds or low-contrast color combinations.
Deduct 3 points if your images appear without context. Captions, labels and short descriptions often help people interpret visuals correctly and are among the most-read pieces of copy on any page. Remove another 3 points if you ' ve covered important parts of your visual with unnecessary text or graphics. Let your strongest image breathe.
If your creative style gets in the way of your message, your advertisement has already lost its biggest advantage. Design should support communication, not compete with it. If people spend more time admiring your editing, animation or visual effects than understanding what you ' re selling, you ' ve sacrificed clarity for creativity.
102 MAL73 / 26 ISSUE