This weekend I was browsing through my latest copy of Information Week magazine. A full page advertisement from Diskeeper Corporation caught my eye. Normally I scan the magazine for technical information and skip all ads. However this ad made me appreciate the marketing work done by this company. I made a note to remember the fine points of the ad in case I am in a position to take out a full page ad myself one day.Like all ads in the magazine, the top of the page had the obligatory “Advertisement” banner so as not to confuse the articles with ads. But it was all up hill from there. It had a catchy headline of “Speed up Your Systems in Real Time”. They listed 8 bullet points of benefits. There was a bar graph ranking top benefits as chosen by users of the product. There was a “Try it FREE for 45 days” message in large font. The URL for the company was prominently displayed. Although there was some small print, it was very small, at the bottom, and in a light color so as not to distract the reader.
Maybe I was more interested in the marketing technique than the product. However I did not even know what they were selling. I mean I knew it was some product to run on your PC to make it faster. But I had no clue what it was that they did to achieve this. Maybe they did this on purpose. Either way their ad got me to their web site where I found out their flagship product was a disk defragmenter. I am pretty stingy with my money when purchasing software products. So I did not follow through and purchase this software. That is the real test. But I did look through their entire web site and read up on the company.
I recall back when I placed my first “big” advertisement in a magazine. It was just a black and white text ad that took up a quarter of the page. The ad cost me around 600 bucks. I don’t think I made anywhere close to that on the revenues that the ad generated. In retrospect I should have done an analysis of other ads that work well. Maybe then I would have had a better response and return on investment. This post goes out to the people ad Diskeeper (http://www.diskeeper.com/defrag.asp). Thumbs up to your marketing team. You have my respect.
