What Not to Say in Your Ads

It’s important to know what to say in your advertising.

But it’s even more important to know what NOT to say.

Here are three steps to determine what to NOT say in your ads:

Analyze your competitor’s advertising messages. Listen to them. Watch them. Read them. Record and transcribe them. Subscribe to their newsletters. Review their social media. Check each message for consistently overused words, phrases, and themes.
Compile a master list of your competition’s stale, unoriginal, lazy clichés.
Don’t use them.

You’ve heard of a copy bible? This is your ANTI-copy bible.

Recently, my team listened to at least a dozen different radio ads from businesses in direct competition with one of our clients. Over and over, we were bombarded with the same hackneyed phrases: “Great selection,” “Lowest prices,” “Service after the sale,” “Prices so low we can’t mention them on the radio,” blah, blah, blech.

Wanna guess what our client’s ads will never say say?

Start today. Involve your employees. Make it a team-building exercise. Ask your crew to seek out and review what the other guys are saying in their ads. Create your catalog of the offending words and phrases. Post them. Learn to loathe them. Pinky-swear that you’ll never, ever, EVER use them in your advertising.

Then, brainstorm ways to convey these trite, unimaginative ideas in a fresh unconventional way using your own unique voice.

Want your ads to stand out? Don’t say what everybody else is saying.