Are you talkin' to me?
Talk about an ad that jumps out at you.... This one sprang off the page and gave us a left hook.
The advertiser is CreditMax, a debt broker. The company buys unpaid credit card accounts that major creditors have written off, then turns around and sells these accounts to debt buyers. The debt buyers then have the right to collect and keep as much as they can from the original credit card holders.
CreditMax's ad copy is persuasive. It emphasizes how the company allows buyers to select accounts for purchase based on the criteria important to them. Where the ad goes horribly wrong is in its visual presentation.
"Now you can pick the parts you want," declares an all-caps headline. An illustrated vulture - which, incredibly, represents the target audience of the ad - fills most of the page. In its beak are two credit cards. Apparently, these are the two most succulent of the cards, as several others remain on the parched earth at the vulture's feet.
If you really know your vultures, you'd recognize this particular bird as the lappet-faced vulture. The lappet-faced vulture is pretty much the mack daddy of the vulture world. It's bigger and stronger than most other vultures. Smaller birds sometimes loiter at the site of a dead animal just waiting for the lappet-faced vulture to arrive and do the heavy lifting. Clearly, somebody on the CreditMax creative team did some in-depth vulture homework before selecting the image of this bird, one that truly can pick the parts it wants.
But no matter how bad a mamma jamma this vulture is, it's still, well, a vulture. And that's setting up CreditMax for a head-on collision with the audience's self-concept.
Debt buyers don't think of themselves as vultures. Matter of fact, they get a little defensive when people suggest - as people often do - that debt buyers and debt collectors are merciless predators. They see themselves instead as investors, risking their own capital in the hope of earning profits.
Because of this disconnect, the CreditMax ad doesn't elicit the "that's me" effect. The "that's me" response is one we see in young children watching other children on television. "That's me!" they'll exclaim, pointing a tiny finger at the screen as they watch a child performing an impressive little-kid task like brushing his teeth or tying her shoe. And then they'll become engrossed in watching this kid they perceive as being just like them.
The "that's me" response is what we should be aiming for whenever we communicate with our audience. When they see our ad or read our case study, we want them to say, for example, "That's me! I'm a manager who's looking for a simple way to use technology to lower transportation costs, just like the guy in the case study. This company understands me, my goals and desires, and the challenges I face. This product is made for me."
So CreditMax's vulture ad, while eye catching - albeit in a repulsive way - misses the mark. No self-respecting debt buyer is going to look at the ad and think, "That's me! I am the heartless scavenger, feasting on the road kill of the lending world!"
This isn't to say that we have to suck up to our audience at every turn. But our communication should always make our audience feel that we relate to them, sympathize with them and, heck, even like them.
