How to make a good advertisement

The Process of Creating an Advertisement in 9 Simple Steps

If you want to learn how to make an advertisement, you are in the right place.

Although dedicated to those who are just grasping the surface of this industry, this article may also help skilled marketers better organize themselves. How?

Well, let’s get right to the subject and analyze the most important steps of the process involved in creating an advertisement.

What Is an Advertisement?

Let’s take a short quiz. Look at these visuals and tell me which one is an advertisement?

The right answer: all of them are a type of advertisement.

We already showed you a few advertisement ideas you can get your inspiration for your next campaign.

But what exactly defines an advertisement?

“…is an audio or visual form of marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea”.

Business Dictionary comes with a similar but more diverse definition. According to them, advertising refers to:

“Paid, non-personal, public communication about causes, goods and services, ideas, organizations, people, and places, through means such as direct mail, telephone, print, radio, television, and internet.”

There are many types of ads, each of them specific to a specific campaign or, a specific part of a campaign.

Today, I am going to talk about online ads only and what it takes to create such an ad.

This is how an online advertisement can look like:

This guide will try to help you whether you are going to design banners, flyers, brochures, video ads, or other types of visual advertising elements for an online campaign.

First, let’s answer a few questions:

Can You Create an Advertisement Online?

Many beginners in the marketing industry imagine that banner design is something that you require professional software and professional design skills. This may be true, for certain specific tasks but not for all.

For instance, designing banners for online advertising campaigns has become quite an easy task if you know where to look and which tools to use. The same rule applies to designing flyers and brochures.

It is easier than ever to create an advertisement online in 2020 using an online advertising maker.

What Types of Formats Are Best for Online Advertising?

If you are using an online advertisement banner maker, there’s no need to worry about formats and sizes.

Tools like Creatopy are constantly updated to meet the latest technical requirements.

However, if you are considering creating your advertisements offline, I would recommend you to ignore Adobe Flash. Instead, try making HTML5 banners for more compatibility. In fact, HTML5 is compatible natively with all web browsers available now.

Another file format that is suitable for flyers and brochures is PDF. Although you need a third-party PDF viewer in order to see the ads, most of your customers will probably have it installed already on their devices.

Also, for static banners, traditional JPEG and PNG graphics formats may be suitable for your advertisements.

Related articles:

How to Make an Advertisement and How to Be Good at It

Now that we’ve defined the advertisement and learn the basics about the available file formats, let’s get back to our main subject and discuss the process of creation.

There are, however, a few things to keep in mind before you can actually design and create an advertisement.

Here are the most important steps you need to undertake:

1. The SWOT analysis of the product and the company

Before analyzing how to create an advertisement that converts into great results, you should start by performing a thorough analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for both, the company and the product that is to be advertised.

In short, advertisers call this activity a SWOT analysis.

You obviously start by analyzing the strengths of the company and the product.

What makes them unique? What are the core values upon which the entire advertising campaign can be based on?

Here you can also include the relationship with the customers, your financial capabilities and resources, the level of commitment of the employees and so on. You need to know the basis from which you start your campaign and this step may give you exactly what you need in order to set it up correctly. You can then continue with a thorough analysis of the company’s weaknesses and the advertised products, and future development and growth opportunities. When you analyze opportunities, you can also set goals for the campaign.

Finally, you can also analyze the threats presented by the competition and/or other external factors.

(an example of a SWOT analysis made by Starbucks. Image credits )

2. Set up your main objectives

What is the purpose of your advertising campaign? What are your main objectives? Are your goals feasible or not? You should also perform an analysis of these questions and answer them with the utmost sincerity.

Based on what you set up here, you can go further to the next step and start your research.

3. Research the market, the competition, your audience

You cannot consider yourself ready to make an advertisement without conducting a proper research on some important factors your campaign depends on.

For instance, it’s important to know the market and its behavior. Study how things have changed over the past few months and what professionals predict for the near future.

Know your position on the market, the competitors’ role, and positions as well. Find out how they advertise their products and try not to copy their campaigns. Instead, you will need to come up with something new, something out of the box, something that will make your audience convert into clients.

In order to accomplish that however, you will also need to know some things about the typology and the personality of your ideal client. Know to whom you are addressing your advertisements too. What devices are they using? What is their social status? What are their online behaviors and how do they shop?

4. Identify your target audience

Who is more likely to buy your products or services? Responding to this question is yet another important step in setting up your advertising campaign. Should you want to be successful at designing an appealing advertisement, you need to know to whom you are addressing it.

For example, if you are selling clothing for babies, it’s quite obvious that your target audience is parents and maybe grandparents. You don’t have to do anything with teenagers, kids, or single people. The design and copy text will, therefore, be appealing to the selected demographic groups. If you also consider influencer advertising it will definitely help you choose your influencer.

Of course, based on your industry and your niche, there may be other important questions to answer here such as:

The list of questions could go on forever.

What’s essential here is identifying which one of them – or maybe more – suits your goals and answers them with honesty and objectivity.

Once you do this, you can move further to the next step.

5. Select your channels

Creatopy allows you to create a full set of banners if you want to create advertisements online.

Therefore, it will be easy to design them for different channels in less time than if you would have done it individually.

However, it’s one thing to design your ads and an entirely new thing to select where to place them.

Based on your demographic research, however, you will be able to narrow your search to some specific channels of media distribution suitable for your campaign. For instance, if you are targeting people who are known to spend a lot of time on social media, you should channel your efforts into designing suitable ads for social media and of course, select the most appropriate channels of these sorts. Focus on them. For instance, if you want to advertise on Facebook or Instagram, there’s no need to study the ad placement requirements and methods on Twitter.

At the same time, you can advertise on websites and blogs as well. In this case, you need to analyze at least a few advertising platforms and select the one that manages to meet all your needs in terms of placements, costs, and network.

6. Brainstorm for fresh ideas

Take all the information you manage to gather up to this step regarding your products and your targeted audience.

Think also about the delivery channels you have chosen for your ads and learn about how to write advertisements tailored to each one of those channels. Based on your findings, you can now start brainstorming for fresh and creative new ideas for your campaign.

Write down some words, phrases, ideas. Combine them and do not stop until you come up with at least a dozen of possible calls to action, copy texts, and visual representations of how your banners, flyers, or videos should look like.

7. The design process

Obviously, this is the hardest part of the entire advertisement creation process. Everything you did until now, each other previous steps, prepared you for this one. Now, it’s time to put your creativity to work and actually design your banners, flyers, or brochures.

Take the top three or five ideas from your previous sketches and use them to create raw advertisements. If you are using Creatopy as your main advertisement maker, all your projects will be automatically saved online. You can get back to them to make modifications or, you can share them with your peers for valuable inputs. It will also help you show your rough designs to people who are in your target audience. Their input and advice may help you adjust your advertisements in order to meet the targeted demographic needs and values.

8. Deliver your advertisements

Once the designs are ready to be delivered online, you can start your campaign based on your selected delivery channels.

At this point, you need to define your budget and select the criteria on which you are going to publish your banners on each channel in particular.

Each advertising platform (or social media platform that includes paid advertising) will let you select your own parameters of delivery, based on demographics, age groups, types of websites, industries, countries, and regions, etc.

You have already identified your target audience at the fourth step of this guide. Now, you just need to apply that specific information according to the specifications of each selected channel.

9. Quantifying and analyzing the results

This is also an important step in your campaign, maybe the most important of all.

After your campaign has finished, you need to start analyzing how your audience reacted to your banners and whether or not the entire process was a successful one.

This data is also important for your future campaigns. You will start your future design processes based on your initial results and try to improve them.

Conclusion

When we think about advertisement design, most of us imagine that it starts with the actual design and ends with the setting up of a delivery channel.

However, if you want your job to be professional and thorough, you need to do everything by the book. This means that you need to understand the entire process behind an advertising campaign. It starts with an in-depth analysis of your company and products to be advertised, followed by extensive research on the market and the targeted population.

When you get to actually design the banners, you already know exactly what to expect from your campaign. You know what types of individuals make the audience you are addressing your messages to and how to properly quantify the results.

It’s now easier than ever to design a professional banner thanks to the available online tools such as Creatopy. However, you can make things even easier by going through each of these steps and base your design on actual data. It’s quite possible that when you’ll get to the sixth step, you will already have a few ideas in mind, at least a starting point from which to go on with your design. We hope we helped you understand better what makes a good advertisement.

How many of these steps did you actually go through on each of your marketing campaigns?

The 18 Best Advertisements & Ad Campaigns of All Time

Free Resource: Advertising Planning Kit & Guide

I’ve always been a little leery of proclaiming anything «the best.» I never declared anyone my best friend as a kid because I was afraid my other friends might assume I thought less of them.

So it was a little difficult for me to come up with just one «best» advertisement of all time — which is why there are 18 in this post instead.

What makes these some of the best ads of all time?

Because of the impact they had on the growth of the brand, and because they manage to hit on some universal truth that allows us to remember these campaigns years after they first began. In fact, some of us might not have even been alive when these campaigns first aired.

But to know what makes an advertisement great, you first need to know how an advertisement is defined.

Advertisements

Advertisements are written or visual messages dedicated to promoting a specific product, service, or campaign. Businesses can pay the owner of a channel or platform that reaches a similar audience to broadcast this message. Two of the biggest challenges in advertising are measuring the value of the advertisement and ensuring it resonates with the right people.

As you can imagine, there are numerous types of advertisements — all of which run in different mediums, on different channels, and have different goals in mind for their business. People can advertise anywhere, and today’s best type of ad might not be the best type tomorrow.

Types of Advertisements

Here are four basic examples of advertising from the past few centuries (yikes), from earliest to latest.

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Learn more about the best advertising types with this free kit.

1. Print Advertising

The first print ad ran in England in 1472, according to Infolinks. Since then, this type of advertising has become available in newspapers, magazines, brochures, billboards, flyers, and similarly portable methods of carrying a brand’s message to its ideal end user. In this ad method, the advertiser pays the publisher to place their ad in the publication.

2. Radio Advertising

Radio advertising dates back to 1920, when the first commercial radio stations were launched in the United States. Today, radio is still a relevant marketing and advertising platform for expanding the reach of a sponsored event or new product. In this ad method, the advertiser pays the radio station to play their ad during designated breaks between music or a radio show.

3. Television Advertising

Television ads originated in the 1940s with the promotion of practical items and political campaigns. Advertisers can now use television to promote food, toys, stores, business services, and more — both to local TV channels and to national broadcast networks. In this ad method, the advertiser pays the regional or national TV network to show their ad during designated breaks in the network’s regular programming.

4. Internet Advertising

Internet advertising took root in the mid 1990s with the launch of «banner» advertisements for various telecommunications companies. These ads are placed in interstitial spots on a webpage. In this ad method, the advertiser pays the website owner to place their ad in exposed spaces that are peripheral to the website’s own content. Internet advertising has gone on to include video, search engine marketing, sponsored social media posts, and more.

But, as you know, the advertising types above have evolved dramatically since their respective origins. What were once quite one-dimensional messages now carry clever, funny, or profound undertones that make the ads memorable years after they first ran.

So how do you create an advertising strategy that resonates?

This blog post is dedicated to the ads and campaigns we can learn from.

But, first, an important distinction:

Advertising Campaign

An advertising campaign is a group of similar ads with a unified tone or message. The advantage of a campaign over a standalone ad is the ability to push the same idea in different ways, across multiple mediums, and for a longer period of time without getting too repetitive or stale for the audience.

Featured Resource: Advertising Campaign Planning Kit

Use HubSpot’s free Advertising Campaign Kit to plan out your advertising project and learn more about which advertising type is the best for your project.

The Best Advertising Campaigns of All Time (And What Made Them Successful )

Without further do, here they are in no particular order: 18 of the best advertisements of all time and the lessons we can learn from them.

1. Nike: Just Do It.

Ad Campaign: Print, Television, Internet

Did you know that, once upon a time, Nike’s product catered almost exclusively to marathon runners? Then, a fitness craze emerged — and the folks in Nike’s marketing department knew they needed to take advantage of it to surpass their main competitor, Reebok. (At the time, Reebok was selling more shoes than Nike). And so, in the late 1980s, Nike created the «Just Do It.» campaign.

The Lesson

2. Coke: Share a Coke

Ad Campaign: Print

Big brands are often hard-pressed to do something ground-breaking when they’re already so big. So, what did Coca-Cola do to appeal to the masses? They appealed to individuals — by putting their names on each bottle.

The Share a Coke campaign began in Australia in 2011, when Coca-Cola personalized each bottle with the 150 most popular names in the country. Since then, the U.S. has followed suit, printing first names across the front of its bottles and cans in Coke’s branded font. You can even order custom bottles on Coke’s website to request things like nicknames and college logos.

It was a breaking story across the marketing and advertising industry. Many consumers were enchanted by it, while others were confused by it — why make a temporary item so personal? Pepsi even released counter-ads shortly after the campaign launched.

Nonetheless, Coke received immediate attention for it.

The Lesson

Coke fans are regular buyers, and the company leaned into that sense of individual ownership with full force. Wondering what name you’ll get out of the vending machine was a fun thrill in and of itself — even if it isn’t yours, it encourages you to «share a Coke» with whomever’s name is on the front.

3. Absolut Vodka: The Absolut Bottle

Ad Campaign: Print

Despite having no distinct shape, Absolut made its bottle the most recognizable bottle in the world. Its campaign, which featured print ads showing bottles «in the wild,» was so successful that they didn’t stop running it for 25 years. It’s the longest uninterrupted ad campaign ever and comprises over 1,500 separate ads. I guess if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

When the campaign started, Absolut had a measly 2.5% of the vodka market. When it ended in the late 2000s, Absolut was importing 4.5 million cases per year, or half of all imported vodka in the U.S.

The Lesson

No matter how boring your product looks, it doesn’t mean you can’t tell your story in an interesting way. Let me repeat: Absolut created 1500 ads of one bottle. Be determined and differentiate your product in the same way.

4. Anheuser-Busch: Whassup (1999)

Ad Campaign: Television

When’s the last time an advertisement literally changed the way we talk to one another? Allow me to answer that question with another question: «Whassup?!»

This series of commercials, which first appeared in late 1999, features a group of friends connecting on a group phone call (we don’t do those much anymore, do we?) while drinking beer and «watching the game» on TV.

It starts gently: «What are you doin’?» Someone asks. «Watching the game, havin’ a Bud» (a Budweiser), someone replies. As more friends pick up the phone, the hilarity ensues: «WHASSUP!?» is yelled back and forth, becoming a classic catchphrase and an icon of beer-drinking culture that ran constantly on sports networks over the next few years.

The Lesson

The ad took pop culture by storm during the Super Bowl in 2000, and you can still hear its echoes today. Why? Anheuser-Busch showed us just how silly and informal an ad can be without ruffling feathers or going off-brand. Dare to celebrate your audience’s absurdities. The more genuine your ad is, the more valuable your product is.

5. Miller Lite: Great Taste, Less Filling (1974)

Ad Campaign: Print, Television

Think it’s easy to create a whole new market for your product? The Miller Brewing Company (now MillerCoors) did just that with the light beer market — and dominated it. The goal of the «Great Taste, Less Filling» campaign was getting «real men» to drink light beer, but they were battling the common misconception that light beer can never actually taste good.

Taking the debate head-on, Miller featured masculine models drinking their light beer and declaring it great tasting.

The Lesson

For decades after this campaign aired, Miller Lite dominated the light beer market it had essentially created. What’s the lesson marketers can learn? Strive to be different. If people tell you there isn’t room for a product, create your own category so you can quickly become the leader.

6. Always: #LikeaGirl (2015)

Ad Campaign: Television, Internet

My eyes are still wet while writing this blurb.

The Always brand hit a home run with this advertisement, not because it went viral after the commercial ran in the 2015 Super Bowl, but because it was a groundbreaking message that hundreds of millions of people repeated long after the campaign was over.

The campaign began as a commercial explaining the stigma behind playing sports «like a girl» — implying that the boy’s way is better or correct. By the end of the ad, the message is both clear and inspiring: Girls are just as fit and capable as boys are, particularly during puberty — a stage of life that is extremely important to Always and its women’s products.

The message is now a holistic initiative by Always you can learn about here, and a hashtag that’s still used on social media today.

The Lesson

Acknowledge not just your audience, but the challenges they face — especially the ones that reflect your time or culture. Not every societal issue is off limits to marketers and advertisers. Take a stand on the ones you know your audience supports, and you’ll access a customer base that identifies with your passion.

7. Volkswagen: Think Small (1960)

Standalone Ad: Print

Many marketing and advertising professionals like to call Volkswagen’s «Think Small» campaign the gold standard. Created in 1960 by a legendary advertising group at Doyle Dane & Bernbach (DDB), the campaign set out to answer one question: How do you change peoples’ perceptions not only about a product, but also about an entire group of people?

See, Americans always had a propensity to buy big American cars — and even 15 years after WWII ended, most Americans were still not buying small German cars. So what did this Volkswagen advertisement do? It played right into the audience’s expectations. You think I’m small? Yeah, I am. They never tried to be something they were not.

The Lesson

That’s the most important takeaway from this campaign: Don’t try to sell your company, product, or service as something it’s not. Consumers recognize and appreciate honesty.

8. Google: Year in Search (2017)

Ad Campaign: Internet

This isn’t the oldest or most well-known advertisement on our list, but it’s become the most powerful over its nine-year (and still going) existence. So powerful and so true, you forget it’s an advertisement.

Year in Search began in 2009 as «Zeitgeist,» a written report of the public’s most common Google searches over the previous 12 months. The following year, Google adapted it for a three-minute video. Since then, it’s been a bold, yearly reminder of how much we depend on Google for information on the news and events that give the entire world pause. Check out the company’s latest video from 2017 above.

The Lesson

Remind your customers how much you care that they care. These stories elicit a variety of emotions, but ultimately unite everyone — no matter what Google products they might like — through an uplifting message of how our usage of the company reflects the best in all of us.

9. Dos Equis: The Most Interesting Man in the World (2006)

Ad Campaign: Television, Pre-roll

You know who he is. He smokes Cuban cigars, is always surrounded by beautiful women, and — most importantly — he drinks Dos Equis beer.

A key component of a strong campaign for an indulgent vice — like beer, desserts, or luxury items — is to make it cool. And when it comes to The Most Interesting Man in the World, he’s one of the coolest commercial guys there is.

And at the end of every commercial, he says: «I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis. Stay thirsty my friends.»

The Lesson

The hilarious hyperbole employed in this campaign makes it memorable the next time viewers head out to buy some beer. And even though Dos Equis recently replaced The Most Interesting Man with a new actor, he is forever immortalized in meme culture and in liquor stores due to this short, sweet, and memorable tagline — and the cool dude vibe it makes viewers harken back to.

10. California Milk Processor Board: Got Milk? (1993)

Ad Campaign: Print

Thanks to the California Milk Processor Board’s «Got Milk?» campaign, milk sales in California rose 7% in just one year. But the impact ran across state borders, and to this day, you still can’t escape the millions of “Got [Fill-in-the-Blank]?” parodies.

Note, though, that the ad didn’t target people who weren’t drinking milk; it instead focused on the consumers who already were.

The Lesson

It’s not always about getting a brand new audience to use your products or services — sometimes, it’s about getting your current audience to appreciate and use your product more often. Turn your audience into advocates, and use marketing and ad content to tell them why they should continue to enjoy the product or service you are already providing for them.

11. Metro Trains: Dumb Ways to Die (2012)

Ad Campaign: Internet, Radio

Yes, you read that right: Dumb Ways to Die.

In Melbourne, Australia, Metro Trains wanted to get across a simple message: No horsing around near train tracks. Disorderly conduct could lead to injuries, or even death, but instead of typical warning signs or announcements inside train stations, Metro Trains came up with Dumb Ways to Die, a song that has garnered 157 million YouTube views since it debuted in 2012.

The song is about dumb ways to die — for example, by poking a grizzly bear with a stick, or taking your helmet off in outer space — and it features a catchy little chorus you won’t be able to stop humming to yourself (because singing it is a little morbid): «Dumb ways to die, so many dumb ways to die.»

At the end of the video, after you’ve watched adorable cartoon characters dying in the dumbest of ways, you get to the moral of the story: There are many dumb ways to die, but the dumbest possible way would be if you died while standing on the edge of a train platform, drove through a railroad sign, or tried to cross over a train track.

The video ad went viral on YouTube, the song was made available on iTunes, and it even played over the radio with an accompanying ad.

The Lesson

This beloved, now-famous campaign communicates a simple idea in a creative and memorable way — and you don’t feel like you’re being nagged, the way some public service announcements do. If your subject matter is grim or boring, consider using creativity to get your message across.

12. Apple: Get a Mac (2006)

Ad Campaign: Television

The Lesson

Just because your product does some pretty amazing things doesn’t mean you need to hit your audience over the head with it. Instead, explain your product’s benefits in a relatable way so consumers are able to see themselves using it.

13. Clairol: Does She or Doesn’t She? (1957)

Standalone Ad: Print

Clairol did the opposite of what most marketers would do: They didn’t want every woman on the street running around saying they were using their product. They wanted women to understand that their product was so good that people wouldn’t be able to tell if they were using it or not.

The Lesson

Sometimes, simply conveying how and why your product works is enough for consumers. Showing becomes more effective than telling.

14. De Beers: A Diamond is Forever (1999)

Ad Campaign: Print, Television

In 1999, AdAge declared De Beers’ «A Diamond is Forever» the most memorable slogan of the twentieth century. But the campaign, which proposed (pun very much intended) the idea that no marriage would be complete without a diamond ring, wasn’t just riding on the coattails of an existing industry. De Beers actually built the industry; it presented the idea that a diamond ring was a necessary luxury.

According to the New York Times, N.W. Ayer’s game plan was to «create a situation where almost every person pledging marriage feels compelled to acquire a diamond engagement ring.»

The Lesson

Advertising can make a relatively inexpensive product seem luxurious and essential.

15. Old Spice: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like (2010)

Ad Campaign: Television, Internet

The very first part of Old Spice’s «The Man Your Man Could Smell Like» campaign, created by Wieden + Kennedy and launched in February 2010, was the following commercial. It became a viral success practically overnight:

That video has over 51 million views as of this writing. Several months later, in June 2010, Old Spice followed up with a second commercial featuring the same actor, Isaiah Mustafa. Mustafa quickly became «Old Spice Guy,» a nickname Wieden + Kennedy capitalized on with an interactive video campaign in which Mustafa responded to fans’ comments on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media websites with short, personalized videos.

In about two days, the company had churned out 186 personalized, scripted, and quite funny video responses featuring Mustafa responding to fans online. According to Inc, these videos saw almost 11 million views, and Old Spice gained about 29,000 Facebook fans and 58,000 new Twitter followers.

«We were creating and sending miniature TV commercials back to individual consumers that were personalized, and we were doing it on a rapid-fire basis,» Jason Bagley, creative director at Wieden + Kennedy and a writer for the campaign, told Inc. «No one expects to ask a question and then be responded to. I think that’s where we broke through.»

The Lesson

If you find your campaign’s gained momentum with your fans and followers, do everything you can to keep them engaged while keeping your messaging true to your brand’s voice and image.

16. Wendy’s: Where’s the Beef? (1984)

Ad Campaign: Print, Television

Is it enough to say this campaign was successful because it featured a giant hamburger bun and a cute set of old ladies? No? I didn’t think so.

Wendy’s took a more gutsy approach in this advertising campaign: It targeted its competitors. The simple phrase «Where’s the beef?» was used to point out the lack of beef in competitors’ burgers — and it quickly became a catchphrase that encapsulated all that was missing in their audience’s lives.

While you can’t predict when a catchphrase will catch on and when it won’t, Wendy’s (wisely) didn’t over-promote their hit phrase. The campaign only ran for a year, and allowed it to gently run its course.

The Lesson

Be careful with your campaigns’ success and failures. Just because you find something that works doesn’t mean you should keep doing it over and over to the point it’s played out. Allow your company to change and grow, and you may find that you can have even greater success in the future by trying something new.

17. Procter & Gamble: Thank You, Mom (2012)

Ad Campaign: Television

I’ll give you a minute to dry your eyes after that one.

Seriously — you wouldn’t expect a household and cleaning products company commercial to pull at the heartstrings like that, would you? Lately, though, Procter & Gamble (P&G) has launched some of the best ads we’ve ever seen from the consumer goods industry.

That’s because P&G identified the story behind the story of Olympic athletes — the stories of the supportive moms who pushed these world-class athletes throughout their entire lives leading up to that crowning moment. And yes, they probably had to do a lot of laundry and cleanup along the way — presumably using P&G products.

The Lesson

Make your audience cry (just kidding). The season or time period of your ad is important. But even if you run an ad during the Olympic Games, like P&G did, make sure it has longevity and a message that can influence people no matter when or where they see it.

Emotional and nostalgia marketing are powerful tactics to get people to make buying choices, so if there’s a bigger, more universal story behind your product or story, tap into it — and showcase it front-and-center.

18. KFC: «FCK» (2018)

Standalone Ad: Print

The ad above isn’t just an empty bucket of KFC with the company’s letters jumbled around. It’s also not a normal, unprompted promotion of fried chicken.

This ad is an apology, and perhaps the most creative one of all time.

In February 2018, KFC’s business in the U.K. ran out of chicken. You read that right: A poultry company ran out of poultry. It’s not every day that a business stumbles upon the most ironic PR crisis in company history, so when it happens, all eyes are on the business’s response. Well, we’re happy to report that KFC stuck the landing.

With the help of the creative agency Mother London, KFC took out a full-page ad in Metro, the U.K.’s newspaper, rearranging its three famous initials to create a hilarious albeit explicit response to its product shortage. The ad depicts a KFC bucket that reads, «FCK» — as if to say, «FCK, this is embarrassing.» (You can fill in the missing letter. )

Beneath this design, the company goes on to apologize for what it realizes is an inexcusable, if not slightly, funny failure.

The Lesson

No business is above a good old-fashioned sorry. And if you can laugh at yourself in the process, you’ll only make it better. KFC’s ad demonstrates how to combine humility, class, humor, and ultimately company pride in a message that can help you bounce back from bad press — and even come out the other side with a net-positive result for your brand.

With these ads in mind, start thinking about your brand identity, your brand story, and the things that matter most to your ideal customer. This is the foundation of a great advertising strategy.

Originally published May 19, 2020 7:00:00 PM, updated March 16 2022

The Ultimate Guide to Advertising in 2022

Learn how to use advertising to build a magnetic brand that attracts customers, establishes a following, and generates revenue.

Advertising Plan Kit [Free Planning Templates + Guide]

Plan and launch an effective and profitable advertising campaign with this guide and set of templates.

When you hear the word advertising, what comes to mind?

Do you think of banner ads on your favorite website? Those hilarious Super Bowl commercials? The billboards along the highway or posters in the subway stations?

While most of us have a pretty good idea of what advertising looks like, we often struggle to nail down exactly what it means — and how to do it well.

From the printing press to pop-up ads, advertising has certainly changed with the times. Despite this, though, the need for advertising hasn’t changed, and neither have the techniques and best practices that make for quality advertising. That’s what we’ll cover in this guide.

Advertising vs. Marketing

History of Advertising

Advertising Methods

How to Advertise Online

Advertising Best Practices

Memorable Ad Campaigns

What is advertising?

Advertising is the act of creating messages and using different psychological techniques to persuade and motivate someone to take action, most likely to buy a product or service.

Advertising is one of the oldest types of marketing and aims to influence the actions of its audience to buy, sell, or do something else.

Good advertising is designed to be extremely influential, memorable, and, at times, risqué.

But, how does advertising work?

How does advertising work?

Advertising has a simple principle — get people interested in a product being sold.

After arousing interest, the goal is to persuade people to purchase the product, even if they hadn’t previously thought about buying it. Ads work by using psychology to influence the way people think and feel about a product or service.

Depending on the goals of your ad campaign, advertising can go to work for your company in a variety of ways:

Advertising can also be executed in various ways. Radio commercials, billboards, branded t-shirts, and social media endorsements all count as advertising — as we’ll discuss later on in this guide.

What are advertisers?

Advertisers are the people at a company who are responsible for advertising a product or service. They promote messages about a brand’s products and services to build public preference for the brand.

«Advertiser» can also refer to the entity that’s paying for advertising on a billboard, in a magazine, or through a website or mobile application.

Advertisers are important because the whole business of advertising is dependent on them. It’s the advertiser that incurs the cost of advertisements, so if they decide it’s not worth running ads, then the advertisement industry will be in big trouble.

All advertisers are marketers, but not all marketers are advertisers. Let’s dig deeper into the differences between advertising and marketing.

Advertising vs. Marketing

Marketing constitutes the big picture of how a company plans to raise awareness of its brand and convince customers to make a purchase. Advertising is the act of communicating messages around these broad goals.

Advertising is a subset of marketing, which is the umbrella term for communicating with your audience.

Marketing includes a number of different channels, such as:

Alternatively, advertising is just one component of marketing.

A company’s overarching marketing strategy will typically include an advertising plan. The advertising portion zooms in on the specific process of creating and publishing the persuasive messages to get customers to take action.

A Brief History of Advertising

Advertising is one of the oldest segments of business, save for currency and trade. Once products and services arose, so did the need to make them known.

The oldest confirmed piece of advertising dates back to 3,000 B.C. Technically, it was a print ad from ancient Egypt promoting the capture and return of an escaped slave.

Incidentally, the ad also mentioned the slave owner’s shop — a rug business — which inherently advertised his storefront, too. The slave was never caught, but the rug owner did discover a brand new method of bringing in traffic: advertising.

Let’s fast-forward about 4,000 years. Here’s a brief look at the past five centuries of advertising:

1472: The first poster advertisement is placed on church doors in London.

1650: The first newspaper ad — a reward for 12 stolen horses — is published. (What’s with these reward-based advertisements?)

1704: The Boston News-Letter prompts its readers to place ads in its paper.

1870: The Powers style of ad copy is born. This style packed a punch — it was short, to-the-point, truthful, and convincing. Powers said the focus should be on why the consumer should buy your product or service — a message that still resonates for good reason today.

1880: Postcards become one of the hottest new ways to reach customers.

1902: Unilever creates the “longest client-agency relationship in advertising history” when it hires J. Walter Thompson Company to advertise its Lifebuoy Soap.

1902: Mellins Food advertises its brand on 25 airship flights, becoming the first brand to take this approach.

1904: The Campbell’s Kids are created, piloting the change in advertisement focus from a single ad to an entire campaign.

1925: Advertisers start to appeal to emotions, focusing on what pleasure customers would receive from their product or service. This old Ford ad exemplifies this perfectly.

1975: VCRs are introduced, and consumers begin to record shows and, therefore, skip advertisements.

1990: Computers become more popular and accessible at home, with over 5 million homes connected to the internet.

1994: The first email spam campaign launches. Banner ads are also introduced.

1995: Search engines like Yahoo! and Alta Vista are born. Ask Jeeves and Google would follow in 1997 and 1998, respectively.

2005: YouTube and Facebook (for college students only) launch.

2008: Brands start to realize the importance of having an online presence for their potential customers. Procter and Gamble pilot the concept of the content hub with BeingGirl.com.

2012: Online videos reach almost 170 million viewers.

2013: Sites like Pinterest and Instagram join the social network scene.

2020: Advertising soars on digital platforms including social media, podcasts, pay-per-click (PPC), and more. Customer data plays a larger role in advertising targeting and retargeting. Lastly, a rapid increase in mobile devices sees a boost in mobile ads and SMS marketing.

History teaches us that advertising is an ever-changing concept, just like shopping habits and how and where consumers spend their time.

Whereas almost 140 years ago, postcards were the newest form of advertising, brands today are building chatbots for Facebook Messenger and integrating artificial intelligence into their marketing and sales platforms.

Things in the advertising world move fast. Now, let’s take a look at how advertising methods have changed and what marketers and advertisers are using today.

Advertising Methods

Advertising can look like many different things. Here are the different advertising types and channels advertisers have been using over the years.

1. Print Advertising

Print advertising refers to posters, bulletins, flyers, and other physically-printed promotions. It also refers to newspaper and magazine ads.

How we design and consume print advertising has changed over the years, but it’s been a steadfast advertising medium — especially as digital advertising has evolved (which we’ll cover next).

Unlike digital media, print advertising can’t be tracked and analyzed as clearly. Fortunately, brands have found brilliant ways to incorporate print advertising into broader digital campaigns.

2. Billboards and Public Transit Ads

Billboard advertising encompasses print advertising on a much larger scale. Due to their size, the design, placement, and cost of billboard and public transit ads are different from typical print advertising.

For example, billboards are typically designed with few to no words so that viewers have time to process the message while passing by in a car or train. Also, these ads are used for brand awareness, so they usually only include a brand name or phone number (versus a website).

3. TV Commercials

TV commercials are short advertisements developed and paid for by companies and organizations looking to capture the audience of a TV show or network program. TV ads have been around since the invention of the television and have since changed drastically with the birth of streaming TV.

TV ads have a wide reach (millions) and provide viewers with a multi-sensory ad experience — something print ads and some digital ads can’t quite do. Alternatively, TV ads are expensive, avoidable by your audience, and hard to target as accurately as other channels.

4. Radio

Radio advertising refers to spoken advertising spots aired on radio channels between music and other programs. This method dates back to 1920 when commercial radio first aired.

Radio advertising is particularly powerful for local and regional advertising. Nowadays, podcast advertising is a similar but more effective method, especially for national audiences.

5. Event Advertising

Events (both in-person and virtual) are opportunities to connect with your audience while promoting your brand and products. You can host your own event (as HubSpot does with INBOUND) in the form of a conference, webinar, roundtable, or luncheon.

Another form of event advertising is by sponsoring an event or purchasing a booth at a conference or trade show. This is less expensive than hosting your own event, but you still get to engage audience members and promote your brand.

6. Direct Mail

Direct mail advertising includes postcards, pamphlets, and catalogues mailed directly to the homes of your target audience. A direct mail advertising strategy is more personal than others on this list, but it’s also very costly. (Consider the cost of postage alone.)

Another direct mail strategy is electronic mail, typically through the form of email newsletters or promotions. This overlaps with our next section — digital advertising. That’s what we’ll unpack next.

Digital Advertising: How to Advertise Online

As of today, there are over 4 billion people using the internet. This number is up 300% from 2005. Point being, internet usage is skyrocketing, and it’s not stopping.

If you’re not advertising online, you’re behind the curve. Not only does the internet offer you direct access to more than half the global population — including more than half of your target audience — but it also provides so many different advertising types and channels on which to advertise.

Marketers now have the flexibility to reach their target audiences on multiple fronts, in multiple ways, for multiple budgets. There are also a number of tools (many of which are free) that can help you execute your advertising strategy.

Here are the most common ways to advertise online:

Paid Search Advertising

Whether Google, Yahoo, or Bing, all search engines have their own paid advertising. This is referred to as pay-per-click, or PPC, and involves bidding on keywords and placing ads at the top or sides of search results.

When someone performs a query using one of those search engines, advertisers have the ability to display ads above organic search results. That’s what makes PPC so powerful — it gives your advertisements prime real estate in front of people already searching for relevant topics.

Here’s an example on Google:

The top listings in the red box are advertisements. Organic search results, those that came up as a result of SEO, were below the map snippet.

Social Media Advertising

Social media platforms know how valuable their content is, and that’s why they offer the option to sponsor or boost posts. Social media ads> put your message in front of your target audience and encourage them to engage, click-through, and buy.

More and more, social media sites are prioritizing ad space over organic content because, well, it brings in more revenue.

Whether you’re a budding or brand new business, consider running some social media advertisements. These will not only advertise your products and services but also promote your social media pages and grow your following.

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter each have their own version of ads like these.

Here’s how they appear on their respective feeds:

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

Twitter

Native Ads and Sponsored Content

Sponsored content has been around since 1922, when brands would sponsor entire radio shows. Today, sponsored content refers more to native ads and blog or article content subsidized by brands.

Have you ever read a Buzzfeed article that heavily referenced or recommended a certain product or service? It was likely sponsored by a certain brand.

Check out this article, 10 Reasons To Put Away Your Phone On Your Next Trip, promoted by agoda, a hotel or destination booking site. Does it blatantly promote agoda’s services? No. Its primary purpose is to entertain and inform, although agoda is referenced a few times throughout the content.

At the top, the byline reflects agoda’s sponsorship, just before the content starts. And, as you scroll down the page, another ad sits within the content.

Sponsored content is a great way to promote your brand in content your audience is already familiar with.

Banner and Display Ads

Banner and display ads are an extension of search ads and follow a similar PPC model. But instead of a text-based ad, consumers see a more visual advertisement.

Banner ads are typically the horizontal boxes on top of a web page, whereas display ads are smaller in nature and shown on the side (like in the screenshot above).

Whether you opt for traditional print ads in magazines or subway stations or choose online promotion on social media or search engines, there are a few rules that make for great advertising. Below are some advertising best practices to apply to all your ads.

Advertising Best Practices

There are a lot of best practices, tips, and tricks when it comes to advertising. It’s an art that’s been perfected over the years, and with the rise of modern types of advertising channels and new media, best practices continue to manifest.

These advertising best practices are:

In this section, though, we’re going to cover these five famous advertising concepts that still work today — regardless of what type of advertising method or medium you’re using.

When used correctly, these advertising techniques will do wonders for your brand and products.

Appeal to emotions.

While you may not consider the ASPCA a business, their unforgettable Sarah McLachlan commercial is the perfect example of using emotional appeal to entice people to take action.

For most of us, the images in that commercial are hard to watch — we may even turn away. But since it tugs at our heartstrings, we’re more likely to donate to animals in need after seeing the horrors they’re going through.

Create positive associations.

When consumers associate your product with a feeling of happiness, state of achievement, or accomplished goal, they’re more likely to take notice, remember your product or service, and make a purchase.

Actually, you’ve probably been on the receiving end of this before without even realizing it. Have you ever seen your favorite celebrity or Instagram influencer posing with a product or brand and found that you wanted to be, do, or look the same? Companies create this subconscious connection in advertising hoping that you associate your positive feelings with the product or service they’re promoting.

For example, Under Armour uses Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to create a subconscious connection with customers. It apparently works, since his Rock Delta shoes were the fastest-selling Under Armour shoes of 2017.

Catchy songs like “Nationwide is on your side» is an example of helping people associate friendliness with the Nationwide brand. Coca-Cola has a brand advertising campaign that associates their product with friends, family, and fun. When you consider what refreshments to serve at a party or bring on a picnic, Coca-Cola wants you to think of them.

As you create your advertisements, consider what feelings, desires, or goals with which you want your brand to be associated. Weave these feelings or goals into your advertisements through stories or videos. Look for influencers who align with your brand’s core values and demeanor and include them to promote positive association.

People want to fit in. It’s human nature. Neither you nor I are immune to it.

And it’s this base human desire that makes the bandwagon effect so effective. People don’t want to be left out. They find value in their peers’ opinions, and they certainly don’t want to be the only ones not using the latest and greatest product.

Brands like Maybelline understand this concept well and use it to their advertising advantage. One tube of their top-selling mascara is purchased every two seconds, a statistic that establishes social proof and further supports their claim of “America’s Favorite Mascara.”

Use customer testimonials, survey data, or shareable content to advertise your brand as one worth following or buying into. Take another approach by promoting a discount for sharing your brand with a friend or family member — so your audience will do the selling for you. Either way, use your advertising to create an inclusive environment people will want to join.

Focus on benefits over features.

Features and benefits are two very different things. Features are the details of the product or service you’re selling, such as the measurements of a couch or the ingredients of a protein bar. Benefits, on the other hand, explain why a person should buy a couch or protein bar from you and how their life would, well, benefit from such a purchase.

Advertising should focus on the benefit your product or service brings, not explain what you’re physically selling.

Consider how Southwest Airlines advertises. Instead of explaining, line by line, what a Business Select ticket offers, Southwest paints a picture of what life would be like if you made a purchase. In this advertisement, they focus on the benefits.

Rather than wasting precious ad space on your product specifications or service details, talk about the ways a purchase might positively impact your customers. If you do it right, your creative, benefit-packed advertisement would then inspire them to research the features on their own.

Leverage storytelling.

Not unlike our desire to fit in is our penchant for a good story. Storytelling helps paint a bigger picture of a brand or company, not simply promote a single product or service. Also, when stories resonate with someone, it’s far easier to motivate him or her to take action.

Storytelling is the one technique you should try to infuse in all your advertising. In fact, if you haven’t started crafting your brand’s overall story, you should definitely do so. Research shows that stories that illustrate a brand as “necessary, believable, and integral” are the most effective for engaging and influencing consumers.

Dove employs storytelling in its campaign partnership with Operation Homefront. The videos feature real stories of military men and their families being reunited. The advertisements don’t directly promote Dove products but instead tell the Dove brand story (and pull on a few heartstrings, too).

Determining your brand story will help you learn how to best discuss your brand in all marketing efforts, not just advertising.

Next, let’s take a look at some of the most memorable ad campaigns, a few of which put these best practices in action.

Five Memorable Ad Campaigns

The best advertisements are the best teachers. Whether it’s the copywriting, design, medium, or target audience, well-executed campaigns can always teach you something new about advertising or positioning.

(Consider Westinghouse Electric’s «We Can Do It» ad …)

Here are five campaigns that left a noticeable mark on advertising history.

1. Nike: Just Do It

In the late 1980s, Nike launched its “Just Do It” campaign.

At the time, Reebok was outselling Nike, and Nike needed to act fast to compete against the sneaker conglomerate.

But it wasn’t just the three-word phrase that earned global attention. Their new ad campaign also focused on real people wearing and working out in their products, as opposed to simply featuring clothes and sneakers themselves.

2. The Absolut Vodka Bottle

Did you know Absolut’s “Bottles in the Wild” ad series is the longest uninterrupted campaign in history?

The campaign was Absolut’s attempt to grow their name internationally, especially throughout the United States. It featured the Absolut bottle in different cities and countries worldwide.

It launched in 1985 and ran until 2000 — lasting an impressive 25 years.

Absolut’s campaign helped grow the company from a tiny slice of the vodka market share (2.5%) to over half the U.S. imported market share.

To this day, the Absolut brand is the fourth largest spirit company, thanks to its focus on the overall story, not just the product itself.

3. Miller Lite

The folks at Miller Lite used differentiation to reach their goal: to get “real men” to willingly drink light beers. With their “Great Taste, Less Filling” campaign, they maintained a leading position in the light beer market for several decades after this first campaign aired.

4. Volkswagen

Though Volkswagen has officially discontinued its production of Beetles, its iconic “Think Small” campaign will be forever ingrained in advertising history.

Doyle Dane & Bernbach (DDB) advertising agency knew it had to change the mind of consumers if it wanted to compete with industry leaders. So, VW admitted that though the Beetle was, in fact, tiny, it was still a force to be reckoned with and worth a purchase.

Authenticity and honesty went a long way in this seemingly small campaign.

5. Dos Equis

With its edgy, cool, and sophisticated aesthetic, it’s no surprise “The Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign put Dos Equis on the map.

This campaign created a positive association between the Dos Equis beer and the feeling of sophistication and poise. Sales quickly jumped by 22% after the campaign launched.

Even more impressive was how Dos Equis found success in a time when craft beers grabbed a foothold in the market and imported beer took a 4% hit. This campaign was a major component of that success.

To learn how to grab the attention of your audience, learn from the professionals. These campaigns are a great example of how brands have used real stories, real people, and real talk to grow their businesses.

Advertising Helps You Grow Better

Equipped with a dense, dynamic history, advertising is an incredible tool to add to your marketing toolbox.

Between print ads, radio sponsorship, TV commercials, and social media promotion, the opportunities to advertise and promote your brand are endless.

To best connect and engage with your audience, speak your customer’s language, appeal to their emotions, and tap into their desire to be a part of a community, create a clear and authentic brand story to illustrate how your brand aligns with their values.

By applying these tried and true practices to your advertising, you’ll build a magnetic brand that attracts customers, establishes a following, and generates revenue.

Do this and your brand will grow into a household name that stands the test of time — just like advertising itself.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Originally published Feb 17, 2022 7:00:00 AM, updated February 17 2022

How to Make an Ad: A 15-Step Guide

The challenge? Massive variety in the digital advertising market — from differing platforms and ad types to target audiences — can frustrate efforts to capture customer interest and drive ROI.

How do you choose the right medium to promote your platform? What metrics matter? And once you decide, how do you actually make the ad?

Our comprehensive ad-making guide has you covered. Let’s go.

To make your advertising planning easier, use HubSpot’s free Advertising Planning Kit. Included are templates to help you plan and present your ad pitch, schedule your release dates, and inform your stakeholders. We’ve also thrown in an advertising best practices guide to help you choose the advertising method that works best for your business.

How to Make an Ad

1. Choose Your Target Audience

When making an ad, you’ll first need to decide the audience you’re making the ad for. Target the right market and you’ll find customers naturally inclined to engage with your brand and product. Cast too wide a net and you may find yourself lost in the digital noise.

One way to help your ad find the right audience is to get granular on whom you want to target with your messaging, which will help you incorporate the best messaging and select the best advertising platform. This should be based off of your buyer personas — semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

If you need help building your personas, try using HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool.

2. Conduct Marketing Research

Market research is an essential part of campaign promotion. Feeding into your buyer personas, market research can answer key questions about your target market, such as:

Knowing the above information about your target audience can help you answer questions like — TV or YouTube? Instagram or LinkedIn? Billboard or bus? — because you’ll understand more about how to appeal to the right people.

You can use this Market Research Guide and Set of Templates to get started on market research for your ad.

3. Choose Your Platform

Your market research should give you the insight and confidence you need to choose the most effective platform to reach your target audience. You should also do some supplemental research on the costs, ROI, and benefits of certain ad platforms and methods.

You may come to the realization that using multiple ad platforms and methods would be the right move for your campaign – such as social media and search engine ads. This is actually a great strategy, as it casts a wider net and opens up the possibility of reaching even more prospects where they already are.

4. Decide on a Budget

For advertising, you need to spend money to make money.

Getting your budget approved can be difficult, so make it easier to get what you need by clearly outlining:

Be sure to come to any budget meeting prepared to answer whatever questions could be thrown at you and to defend the specifics.

5. Craft a Message

By this point, you know your target audience and your preferred platform, but you’re still not sure what you’re saying. Here’s where you’ll want to think about the broad purpose of your campaign to inspire your ad.

Do you want people to come to your store, or visit your website? Is your immediate goal to drive free signups for your software, or ebook downloads? Think about the message and how that can feed into the end goal(s) of your ad campaign.

Free Advertising Planning Kit

Featured Resource

6. Get People Talking

While your message needs to include your brand purpose and tie in with long-term marketing goals, it also needs to be something people remember.

Here’s why: As more advertising shifts to social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and even Twitter, brand marketing needs to get to the point ASAP to drive customer interest and social sharing. If your message — whether it’s text, images, or videos — can make users stop, look and share with their connections, you’ve got a much better chance of creating organic interaction and driving more traffic to your site.

7. Decide What You’re Building

Ads can build brand awareness and product awareness — but not simultaneously. As a result, it’s worth taking the time to think about your advertising goals for new marketing campaigns.

For example, if brand awareness is the goal, you may want to consider a set of ads that tell a story or help customers learn more about what makes your brand unique. Here, the goal is to engage with customers over a longer period of time to help them engage with your brand from the first time they see your ad to eventual conversion. Ideally, your brand story will help create a long-term, reciprocal customer relationship.

Product awareness ads, meanwhile, are designed to highlight new products or services, call out seasonal specials or help drive specific action from customers. They’re often one-off or a short series of ads that run over a small period of time.

8. Include a CTA

While building awareness is critical for ads to be effective, it’s not enough in isolation.

That’s why all your ads also need a call-to-action (CTA) that provides information for consumers on what to do next. In some cases — such as an ad on your webpage — the CTA may be simple and direct, such as “sign up for our newsletter” or “click here to buy now.”

If you’re advertising on social sites, meanwhile, reaching for an immediate sale or asking for user contact data may actually drive customers away. Here, your CTA needs to be more subtle but no less clear. For example, you might opt for “click here to learn more” or “explore what we have to offer.” In practice, the goal is to avoid presuming what users want — instead, your CTA provides a path to more information if they’re interested. And if you’ve crafted a great ad, they will be.

9. Don’t Forget the Details

They’re small things — the smallest, in some cases — but can have significant impacts for your ad campaign: The details.

Consider an advertisement for a concert or event that your company is hosting. You’ve done the work: Identified the right market, crafted a great message, and created a CTA that will drive customer action.

You’ve forgotten the details. Your ad doesn’t mention where or when the event is happening. Sure, customers could click through and see the specifics on your website, but there’s no guarantee they’ll take this step. Put simply, when it comes to creating a great ad, you have to account for the forest and the trees: You need big-picture advertisements that are visually compelling, content-rich and engaging, but it’s just as critical to double-check that you’re not missing the details.

10. Create Test Ads

Before launching your ad campaign, it’s worth trying your hand at making an advertisement for your brand. Here’s why: Not all ad designs look as great on the screen as they do in your head. By creating basic mock-ups, you can see what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to improve.

One of the most popular options for simple ad creation is Adobe Photoshop. Not sure where to start? Here’s a quick look at how to make an ad in Photoshop.

How to Make an Ad on Photoshop

Let’s say you want to create a Facebook ad on Photoshop. Follow these steps:

Open Photoshop, select “File,” and then click “New” from the drop-down menu. You’ll see the screen above. Here, you can select the size of your new ad, along with the color profile you want to use.

Next, you’ll want to insert an image to work with. Simply drag-and-drop the image of your choice into the Photoshop workspace and you’re ready to go.

Next, add some text to your image by selecting the “T” button in the bottom left-hand corner. You can choose vertical or horizontal text, depending on what works best for your image.

Once you’re happy with your text placement, consider adding a CTA. Select one of the shape tools from the left-hand side menu and insert that into your image. Resize as needed, then head back to the text tool and insert your CTA.

Facebook used to have a hard-and-fast 20% rule that stated no more than 20% of your image could contain text. While this is now a strong suggestion rather than an absolute rule, it’s worth keeping your text to a minimum since Facebook rates ads based on their text volume — the more text you have, the lower your chances of getting seen.

11. Develop Creative Assets

Whether it’s copy for a Google Ad or a flashy landing page from your in-house designers, all ads need creative assets. Chances are, most of the ads you run will need one or more of the following:

All of these assets can be overwhelming, and if you’re thinking “I’m not a videographer/writer/designer/photographer!”, that’s totally fine. If these resources aren’t available to you in-house to help make your ad, consider hiring a team of freelancers or an agency to help you produce these deliverables and make an outstanding advertisement, or use an online marketing design tool like Canva to help streamline the process.

12. Determine Measurements of Success and Set Up Tracking

No matter if your ultimate goal is Page Likes, online purchases, or promo code uses, you should never launch an ad without first being crystal clear on two questions:

You already thought of your advertisement’s goal in Step 7, so now, make the expectations of your campaign known by setting up the proper ad tracking.

If you’re advertising online, there’s a good chance the platform you’re using — like Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn — has an ad management and tracking platform, allowing you to see how many interactions your ads have had and how much they cost.

However, you’ll also want to take a few extra steps to aid in your analysis down the line:

13. Launch Your Ad

The stage is set, and you can finally launch your ad for the world to see.

Needless to say, the process of launching an ad on Google is different than on Bing. The same can be said for every social media channel, TV ads, or transportation ads.

Here’s a list of the more detailed, step-by-step process for launching an ad on some of these platforms. Click through to learn more about the platform or platforms that you’re creating an ad for:

14. Track & Analyze Performance

For campaigns that have a set run time (transportation, television, etc.), determine how the ad’s results performed against expectations. Since it’s difficult to draw a one-to-one comparison for these ad types, you may want to look at general business trends, change in revenue, or even social media/press mentions to gauge success.

For online ads, this process is a bit easier. Results start coming in immediately, so you can see how well your ads are performing instantly, and over time. Take note of the ads that are bringing in high numbers at low costs and — just as importantly — ads that are costing a lot but not performing that well.

Remember, you can take the headache out of the manual ad tracking with a free online ads tracking tool.

15. Make Changes, Rinse, and Repeat

Once your ad campaign is over (or if it’s an ongoing online campaign), take your learnings and apply them to your next advertisement.

For instance, maybe you realized your online ads that were wordier performed worse than ads that were more concise, or that YouTube just didn’t work this time around. Lean into what worked (or is working) and abandon what’s not to continue to strengthen your company’s advertising program.

It All Ads Up

And there you have it — our comprehensive guide to planning, creating, launching, and analyzing your new ad.

Looking to streamline the process? Use an advertising planning template to outline your ad campaign, keep all contributors informed, and rally behind the same end goal for your business.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Originally published Nov 23, 2021 7:00:00 AM, updated January 07 2022

Whitepaper: What makes a great ad?

What makes a successful ad campaign?

How can I develop better ad creative?

Can you provide any best practices for effective advertising?

These are all questions we often hear from our clients.

There is of course no magic formula for making a great ad. The artistic aspect of advertising means that there are no set rules for advertising success and effectiveness, only best practices. And sometimes, creativity requires you to break away even from those best practices.

What is great advertising?

Before discussing what makes a great advertisement, let’s start by defining what we consider to be great advertising.

In our view, a great ad drives business results; it successfully meets the brand’s marketing objectives.

Even an ad which has become iconic isn’t always successful. An example of this is Taco Bell’s famous Chihuahua campaign from the late 1990s. The advertising campaign was wildly successful at reaching huge audiences. It seeded itself into pop culture and was strongly linked to Taco Bell. The problem was that it didn’t impact sales, and that’s what the campaign was tasked to do.

A great ad
drives business results.
It successfully meets the
brand’s marketing objectives.

The importance of ad breakthrough

But one common factor among all ads which go on to become iconic, successful or not, is that they get noticed. They stand out among the other advertisements, media and content competing for the audience’s attention. And people are willing to engage with them.

In today’s fast-moving and cluttered media environment, people can choose to engage with or skip, thumb through
and ignore content. Getting people to watch or read your ad can be a challenge. Just look at the average view time of your digital video ads as proof!

Therefore, a great ad needs to effectively break through all this noise.

Nowadays, understanding your ad’s ability to break through is just as important, if not more so, than understanding how well it performs once it has been noticed. This is why assessing ad breakthrough is a key part of our ad testing solutions.

A great ad needs
to effectively break
through all the noise.

Other critical characteristics
of successful advertising

Let’s assume your ad has broken through the noise and grabbed the viewer’s attention. What else can make it a great ad? A common factor in great advertising is that it often also achieves the following two results:

Strong
brand recall

Strong mental availability of the message

For an ad to successfully drive business results, consumers should be able to connect the brand to the creative (brand recall). The most successful ads also clearly convey a message that viewers are able to recall in critical situations (mental availability).

The best ad campaigns are often the ones that clearly articulate the brand value to their audience, either intrinsically or extrinsically.

People don’t want to work hard to figure out what you’re trying to tell them. So, ensure that you clearly communicate your message and that it doesn’t lead to confusion.

Only 1% of ads that are very difficult to understand achieve the highest levels of performance.

As we mentioned earlier, breaking the rules can sometimes result in successful advertising. However, for every Geico or Old Spice campaign that benefits from breaking the mold, there are so many more that lose out.

Based on our extensive ad testing experience, we’ve set out our best practices for making a great ad below. These guidelines generally aid in ad breakthrough, brand recall and mental availability – all characteristics of great advertising!

For an ad to successfully drive business results, consumers should be able to connect the brand to the creative (brand recall). The most successful ads also clearly convey a message that viewers are able to recall in critical situations (mental availability).

The best ad campaigns are often the ones that clearly articulate the brand value to their audience, either intrinsically or extrinsically.

People don’t want to work hard to figure out what you’re trying to tell them. So, ensure that you clearly communicate your message and that it doesn’t lead to confusion. Only 1% of ads that are very difficult to understand achieve the highest levels of performance.

As we mentioned earlier, breaking the rules can sometimes result in successful advertising. However, for every Geico or Old Spice campaign that benefits from breaking the mold, there are so many more that lose out.

Based on our extensive ad testing experience, we’ve set out our best practices for making a great ad below. These guidelines generally aid in ad breakthrough, brand recall and mental availability – all characteristics of great advertising!