Five Biggest Mistakes When Creating Ads For Vertical Markets

NewBay media interviewed Griffin Integrated Communications President Bob Griffin on the "Five Biggest Mistakes When Creating Ads for Vertical Markets." Check out NewBay's blog here.

7/14/2014 By: Joe Braue —So we’ve been creating advertisements for vertical markets in B2B for a long time, but it is amazing how many of the simple lessons have not been learned over the years. To get our list of the five biggest mistakes, I sat down with Bob Griffin, whose Griffin Integrated Communications has been doing B2B vertical market creative for more than 25 years. Ignore Bob’s advice at your peril.

No. 1: Ads are created last minute with no thought to longer term strategy. “It’s amazing how many folks come to us at the last minute, with a purely tactical request to get an ad out on a specific product on deadline, without any sense of a larger strategy,” Griffin says.

No. 2: Focus on product advertising and forget about the brand. “To create a truly effective and longer lasting program, you need to focus on both branding and product advertising,” Griffin says.

No. 3: Too quick a trigger finger: “Many folks are too quick to pull the plug on a new program if it doesn’t produce results in real time, Griffin says.  “The mistake is being reactive instead of proactive,” he says. “This shouldn’t be a spigot that you turn on and off.”

No. 4. Failure to integrate: “You need to integrate messaging into all available platforms: print, digital, social media, and PR.” This requires planning (See Mistake No. 1), but he says, “you’d be surprised with the number of companies just happy to put up a quick print ad with headline and a product shot and not consider a more robust multiplatform approach,” Griffin says.

No. 5. Failure to mix branding into product ads. A corollary to Mistake No. 2, Griffin says that product ads should also do branding as well. “You need to create and establish a brand image, and then integrate that into specific product advertising,” he says.