If Bombardier let me make an ad for the Q400...

[Guest Chairborne]

Okay, I have idle hands but I try to make sure they're not the Devil's playground. Well, not too much, anyway. Bear in mind, this is only in praise of the Q400, certainly not against it, because I'm a big fan of the Q. The image is way too large for the 200K limit here, so I put it in my Photobucket account and you can see it by clicking..

HERE.

Enjoy! Feedback is....well, if you're gonna leave it, you're gonna leave it. Just be gentle and bear in mind it's a fake ad and that I love the plane.P.S.--I didn't know where else to put this, God knows I looked around the Forum.

[Chock 17,769]

It's only a fake add (or 'concept' if you prefer the poncy advertising term), but since you placed it on here for us to look at, I might as well give you some feedback. I know a fair bit about advertising copywriting, as it is one of my jobs. I even run a course on how to do it, so you might be interested in what I think, although feel free to disagree!Generally speaking your ad is a nice concept and I though it was clever, although if any criticism could be leveled at it, I reckon it would be that you hammer the concept a bit too much, which weakens its impact. Usually, when you have a good idea to hang a product on, you get a lot of notions for 'one liners' to put in the body copy, of which, it can be hard to choose the best. Because they are 'your babies', you can often be loathe to ditch any of them, and so you end up weakening the impact of each one by trying to have them all in there. I would say that's the case in your body copy; there are many strong copy lines, but their strength makes them fight against one another rather than do their real job, which should be to push the message as opposed to demonstrating your skills as a wordsmith. In short, you can occasionally end up being a bit too clever for your own good if you are skilled at writing. Essentially, there are so many card game analogies that they end up overwhelming the clarity of the point. Usually less is more in situations like that, so if it were me, I'd be inclined to try two or three versions of the ad with the analogies spread around through them, effectively creating a 'campaign' of ads as opposed to just one.When you present such ad campaign concepts to a client, the typical thing that happens is you have three or four different ideas, and somewhat annoyingly, the client invariably picks the one you think is the weakest. Mention that to any advertising exec and they'll probably groan in recognition. But with all the ammo you have there in terms of copy potential, you could create a very strong series of ads, which could all push different plus points of the brand by using all your different card analogies, which would 'give you more mileage'. That, incidentally, is another thing to strive for in copywriting - push one point and support it with other subordinate points, rather than trying to push several ideas at once; trying to push too many concepts is generally weaker than sticking to one very strong point.A classic example would be car ads: We all know BMWs are technologically advanced, but BMW do not harp on about that fact in their ads, instead they simply use the strapline 'The ultimate driving machine' and might choose to support that with brief info on just one cool feature of their car, such as the advanced brakes, or the smooth power delivery. They know listing everything would be tedious and offputting to read, so they stick to a small point and go with a memorable strapline. It usually works better to do that sort of thing.Doing that would also afford the opportunity to make things less wordy, which is a thing to strive for in any writing, and especially ads. If you are familiar with the work of Marshall McCluhan, who was a notable communication theorist, you might have heard one of his most famous statements: 'The medium is the message'. He was essentially saying that what people see in terms of copy visually, has a bearing on whether they would want to read it, and if they see a big block of text, then they are less likely to want to read it. So with copy, the message is not just what is written, but whether it will be able to get through, based on how it looks. A more familiar literary name, Mark Twain, summed up brevity nicely too, when he said: 'I never write 'policeman' when I can get the same money for writing 'cop'. Always a good one to remember when editing stuff!One last thing that is always worth doing with your own writing, is to try and rip it to pieces by looking at any potential negative overtones it might have. It can be hard to do so, but it will often highlight shortcomings and point to ways you could improve things further. As an example of how you might do that with your concept, perhaps you could consider the possibility that someone might view aviation as not something that would be good to associate with gambling. When you do that sort of thing, it can point you towards other ideas, such as maybe having a closing line which bats away any potential for that critical view, i.e. 'Why gamble with safety and success, when you could be holding all the cards?' or something of that nature.Stick at it, you clearly have copywriting talent, and there is certainly room for good writers in advertising, as the vast majority of advertising copywriters are not brilliant at it. I know that because I spend a lot of time training them, and it is amazing how many I meet that have no clue about such deeper concepts.Al

[Guest Chairborne]

Point taken. I do seem to read a bit too much Reader's Digest, and as much as I try to avoid TV newsmedia, it seems their pun/theme syndrome has permeated my commercial psyche. It's hopeless...where can I get some hemlock? :(