Magazine ad going out tomorrow - Critique

Marketing
1

Hi there

I’m working on a magazine ad that is going out next September issue, but my deadline is tomorrow and I wanted to run this through you to see how’s the reaction.

A little background and couple of notes about this:

Magazine is distributed monthly to a subdivision, recently converted to a city, and it reaches 1300 households. We have around 50 customers there, and I’m not really convinced about that being a huge number, but if you think of it is only a subdivision, a big one, but still, so I believe it might create an anticipated sense of “trust”, but I might be wrong. Is a very tight community with lots of older people, and they really talk to each other like I’ve never seen around here.

There’s no call to action and no deadline, and I can live with it for this time at least. Ad is 4x5inch at $225 which doesn’t give me a lot of real estate to design, but is a good one to test the waters, if it works I might even go full page.

About the design … do you know that I clean windows or is just to vague? Is the ad too crowded? hard to read? I printed it at actual size and the wording is easy to read and the colors stand out from each other, but that just me.

It might be too late to change this one, but I’ll be glad to take any suggestions and apply that for the next one.

thanks again and have a nice weekend.

NOTE: The website on it is my actual website, but i’m gonna buy one right now to use solely on this ad and use it like a landing page, and then redirect them to my main website, easier to track interest and more “dedicated” or “professional” I guess. Something like www.subdivisionX-services.com PLEASE feel free to add comments about this too, since I might don’t do this now and wait for the next issue for the right domain.

2

I don’t think it’s too crowded, but here’s what I noticed, for constructive criticism:

  1. Nothing about windows in the message … just “top 5 chores”, until you get to the bottom.
  2. I think it’s “have” and not “has”, - “50 of your neighbors have trusted” (?)
  3. The chrome look on the phone number and some other places were harder for me to read, but that could just be on my monitor. Still, if this is going to a neighborhood with a lot of older people, you might want to consider making it easy on them… especially at 4"x5".

Take care and good luck with it.

3

Thanks Brian, those are valid points for sure.

I knew that the message wasn’t extremely clear, but at the same time I’ve had a couple of people reading it and they told me that they kept reading to find out what it was. Then my company’s name tell you what I do. That’s the problem of being busy and a short deadline to work with. Next one is gonna be much better for sure.

But please, keep the comments coming.

4

I think your on the right track. We advertise in several H.O.A.s in our area and it has worked well. Reach a lot of households at an inexpensive price.
Good luck with it!

5

ok, seems like “has” is wrong.

What is it then ?

have trusted us or had trusted us ?

English is not my native language and I am self-taught, and stuff “simple” like this kind of confuses me, and I don’t want the first impression of my ad to be that bad with grammatical errors.

6

It sounds right to me. Wouldnt have or had kinda sound past tense, has sounds good to me because it sounds like they still do trust you.

7

Thanks Tony, grammatically “I do suck” :smiley:

8

ok, I’m 30 mins away from turning this in, and I’ve changed my mind … now I don’t see Window cleaning as a “household chore” and more as a “House Maintenance” .

What you think ?

9

I sent it already, so let see if it works.
feel free to still critique this anyway, since I’ll be taking notes for the next issue

thanks for your time

10

Good for you for taking the plunge and trying to build an ad on your own.

[B]There are some redeeming things about this ad.[/B]

For instance, you left your company name at the bottom, and put a headline at the top, instead. That was good.

You included a specific call to action, which is good.

You informed them that 50 of their neighbors trust you already, which is also good, tapping into the power of social proof.

[B]Suggestions:[/B]

Way too busy, design-wise. Kind of difficult to look at.

The headline is a little confusing. Who decided the “top 5 household chores?”

Instead of offering a customer list upon request, tell them that the list is on your website, along with some client video testimonials.

Tell them why they should care that you carry $1 mil in insurance.

Those are a few things I’ve noticed, anyway.

Keep it up!

11

Thanks for the input Kevin, I’ll keep that in mind for the next one.
Is not an excuse, but I was designing right on top of my deadline.
And yes, I thought it was a busy ad, but couldn’t decide what information to leave out.

12

I believe it would be “have”. “Has” is also past tense. Sorry, this is probably not helpful now. I like your headline because it makes you curious and read the whole ad to find out what it is about. Although, the part about one of the top 5 chores made it less compelling because then I am wandering what the other 4 are and where window cleaning places etc. I wonder if it might be better to say “one of the most loathed chores” or something to that effect. Anyway, just my 2 cents.

13

It ended up being “have”.
I appreciate your comments and I also agree with that, but it was right over my deadline, so that was the best I could come up with.
Next one will be better hopefully.

14

What’s your native language?

Try substituting “they” in place of “neighbors”, and maybe then it will sound right to use “have”. They (the neighbors) have trusted us.

Regarding the comment Salvatore has made… both have and has are past perfect tense. The difference between the two is that ‘has’ belongs with 3rd person singular (he has trusted, she has trusted). All other singular and plural forms use ‘have’ (I have trusted, you have trusted, we have trusted, y’all have trusted).

Perhaps the next printing could/should say: “Find out why 50 of your neighbors trust us…”

If you use a modern word processing program, turn on the option to highlight grammar problems and see if that helps.

Let us know how it turns out!

15

I appreciate your input, as mentioned before my english grammar really is far from perfect. My native language is Spanish by the way

16

I never would have guessed - you write in English like a natural!

I know a little German, but all I can do with it is order schnitzel und bier. :slight_smile:

17

Then you can do better than me in German, to me is like hearing a dog barking :slight_smile:
I do understand (enough) and speak (very little) of Portuguese and Italian, but every time is harder to remember if you don’t practice, getting older and lots of unneeded crap in mind doesn’t help either.

I read and write in English with no problems whatsoever, but believe it or not I still get nervous when I’m speaking, and that leads to more mistakes than I’d like to make.
Chris knows what I’m talking about :smiley: