 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
P.O. Box 1421 |
Case Study – Advertising Campaign
| Background | Building product manufacturers typically
promoted their products through costly brochures and product binders. Vertex
Design Systems developed a new type of product catalog for them: an electronic
CADalog on diskette. |
| Issue | To build the business, Vertex needed to not just introduce
the catalogs to building product manufacturers, but to build pull-through
by creating a demand for them among architects. |
| Solution | We developed a series of direct-response
display ads that ran in architectural magazines. In reviewing the target
publications, we found that virtually all the building product ads showed
beauty shots of the products, buildings that used them, or both. Ads
for architectural software showed someone sitting at a computer or the
computer screen. We realized that more of the same would not call sufficient
attention to a missionary product.
Something more original was called for. What would make readers stop and notice the ad? A totally incongruous image, was our answer. But that approach only works if you can convincingly tie the image to the message.
The response coupon features "fortunes" with the manufacturer´s names and logos on them and several ways to respond. The ads were a huge success, rapidly generating a backlog of leads for the manufacturers. A number of them told us they were getting better quality leads from our CADalog ads than they were getting through their own marketing. The follow-on ad featured a take-out pizza instead of the Chinese food container with the response information on a "guest check. To make the most of the campaign, we produced direct mail pieces with
the same visuals and the same message as the display ads. These mailing
generated a response rate in excess of 3%.
|
The
premiere ad, shown here, features a Chinese take-out container. The headline
reads, "How to add three new spec sections and five installation
details to your construction documents before lunch." These are
the kinds of things, as the copy pointed out, that can mean late lunches
and even later nights for architects. 
