Mark Irving: Keeping advertising simple

There was a successful New Zealand opening batsman who essentially played only a small number of strokes, eliminating all high-risk, speculative shots. Photo / Thinkstock

Mark Irving, advertising company director on why establishing the single minded proposition (SMP) should be the starting point for your advertising message.

How often in life do you hear friends or work colleagues making simple issues or requests overly complex and long winded? It also happens in the sporting world with too many coaches and backroom staff filling players' minds up with so much information that it turns a very simple task like hitting a ball or jumping in a lineout into a shambles.

One of the things I enjoy about advertising is that much of the work involves simplification. It kind of goes against the grain in this fast paced and often complicated world. The first thing we try and establish with a client is a single- minded proposition (SMP) or in other words what is the one thing you want to say?

This is particularly relevant for TV and radio advertising and billboards. The reason is people can only absorb so much information and that they really only remember one important message.

For example, it maybe that the new 'X Car' has more legroom than any other car in its category. Because of a variety of factors, I've seen too many SMPs that will say something like this: "The new X car has more legroom than any other car in the category, comes in four new exciting colours plus the added bonus of $200 dollars of free petrol thrown in with any new purchase."

Although this is one sentence, it isn't an SMP. If you own a business, you should be able to identify what is the one most important thing you want to say about your product or service. If you can't that's what we're here for.

The easy and the most ineffective option when making an ad is to do a checklist type of ad where you include every single piece of information about your product you can think about.

You can often see where this has happened when you're looking at a website homepage and you really don't know where to look or even start getting the information you want.

You'll see it in a billboard with tiny, impossible to read information. Sure, you've got all the details included, it's just a shame people haven't got time, let alone be able to read it. You see it in a TV ad where you wonder what that blur of information was.

The thing about simplifying things, particularly narrowing an SMP down into the one thing you want to say, is that it's the 'harder' and more time consuming option, but ultimately the most worthwhile route. It's a bit like listening to a guest speaker.

Are you going to attentively listen to a speaker who talks for over an hour using overly complex jargon, where he hasn't considered the target audience?

Or are you going to listen to someone who can communicate complex information into easy to understand concepts, where it's wrapped up within 15 minutes.

Often though a company will have a product with many benefits. Fine. What this involves is identifying in order of importance what's the most meaningful benefit in the eyes of the consumer and then ranking them in order of importance. Often with a print ad, you can base it around the primary benefit and include the other benefits in the copy.

There was a successful New Zealand opening batsman who essentially played only a small number of strokes, eliminating all high-risk, speculative shots.

Where possible he only played the ball along the ground, thus reducing his chances of being caught by about 50 per cent. He was hard to get out and had by far the highest average in the team. Simplification in advertising requires discipline, looking at your strengths and playing to these.


Mark Irving is the Director of Range Advertising and Communications.