Let’s take an intermittently sarcastic look at ten ways to mess up a perfectly good ad. Any one of these techniques will put an ad on the brink of ineffectiveness. All ten at once will guarantee a place in the Advertising Hall of Shame.

1. Keep the focus on product features, not benefits. Advertisers are in love with the bells and whistles in the products they sell, and they’d like nothing more than to put all that stuff in their ads. But consumers don’t care. All of their buying decisions are driven by the answer to the age old question, “What’s In It For Me?”

2. Don’t put valuable information in the headline. Expect readers to wade through your copy to learn what you sell, in spite of the studies that show that 80 percent of the people who see a headline will not read any further.

3. Use plenty of exaggerations and superlatives. Talk about how great the advertiser’s product is, without supporting any of the claims. Kill your advertiser’s credibility with words like “best,” “number one,” and “great.” And be sure to use a lot of exclamation marks.

4. Make the logo the biggest thing in the layout. That shiny new logo is really important to the advertiser. And even though the headline is much more important, you don’t want to upset your client.

5. Reverse the entire ad to read white on black. The term “read” is used loosely here. White type (especially body copy) on a black background is nearly impossible to read. An exception to this rule is when a bold, white headline is printed alone inside a black box.

6. Use all upper case type in body copy. WHY MAKE IT EASY FOR YOUR READERS TO FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU’RE SAYING? MAKE ALL THE LETTERS THE SAME HEIGHT, SO YOUR WORDS WON’T HAVE DEFINING SHAPES.

7. Don’t make an offer, or give readers a reason to act now. That would look too much like selling. Why not just put your advertiser’s name out there, and hope that people will flock to his or her place of business like homing pigeons?

8. Run the ad only once. Forget the fact that a message has to be repeated many times before it makes an impact. You didn’t choose your brand of car or breakfast cereal the first time you saw those products advertised. But your advertiser’s prospective customers are sure to take a different approach, aren’t they? Probably not.

9. Use stupid pictures. By stupid, I mean laughably inappropriate. Examples include smiling cartoon figures in a funeral home ad. Or a posed photo of a bunch of executives leaning over a conference table to stare and smile at a document. Or an illustration that simply has nothing to do with the ad’s headline.

10. Use small print. After all, the smaller the point size, the more copy you can squeeze into the allotted space. Readers won’t mind reaching for a magnifying glass. Don’t we all keep that handy device with us when we read the paper?

(c) Copyright 2009 by John Foust. All rights reserved.

E-mail John Foust for information about his training videos for ad departments: jfoust@mindspring.com