Milking Your Advertising Money For All It’s Worth

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I was on Digg yesterday while for some reason my Adblock was turned off. In the top right of my page there popped up an ad for WorldVision. WorldVision is great, seriously, they do amazing work in this world. But maybe, just maybe, they aren’t spending their advertising dollars as effective as they could be.

I navigated away from that page unfortunately (dang XKCD got me distracted!) Because upon returning my ad was gone! Now, it was very important for this discussion that I had that ad as a reference. I refreshed that page again and again. I’m pretty sure I spent enough refreshes yesterday for 10 or 20 people.

The initial frame said “Every 7 seconds a child dies from hunger or malnutrition.” That is such a striking statement. Aowh! I love it. But I have two problems with this ad.

1. The stopwatch clicks down from 7 seconds and then stops. The ad doesn’t restart; it isn’t a digital stopwatch that starts counting the number of dead kids. It just stops and waits for your response. A good ad has a great message and waits for you to answer it. A GREAT ad has an amazing message, grabs you by the arm, and begs for you to answer it’s call.
2. Digg is probably the wrong target audience for WorldVision. With the kind of traffic Digg has they’ll definitely get tons of click throughs simply because they buying from such a huge traffic source. Although little to none of those clicks will be targeted. There is a large group of progressive individuals on Digg, I’m not disputing that. But no one goes to Digg to find information about adopting an African child. It’s simply the wrong target and they’re most likely getting the wrong response.

How Could They Be Spending Better?

The concepts for WorldVision’s ads are amazing. They do a great job of tacking a difficult concept to grasp in only the few seconds you are viewing them. But they don’t grab you and shake you until you respond.

And ofcourse, the text needs to update every 7 seconds to add another child to the “dead list”. Now that may be a little morbid but it WILL force a response. Don’t you think you’ll get a bigger and better emotional response from telling someone how many people have died while they were screwing off on the internet instead of telling them how much of a difference they can make by burdening themselves with a new child?

Please comment below! What ads do you think could be done better? Tell me about your advertising that you need help with.