Keeping things to the point, below is a list of some of the top strategies used in everyday advertising and how these strategies work. Understanding some of these methods will help you distinguish what makes some advertisements so much better and more appealing than others. You can use the same tactics in creating an effective advertisement for yourself, in both print or film that will be just like the pros.

1. Before and After

Famous in the fitness industry most obviously and also your everyday infomercials where you may find a black and white video of a disgruntled mother wrestling with cords, or losing a battle to soap scum before color returns to the camera and the now smiling mother has the solution to all of her problems – your product. This strategy is centered around showing life without a product and with a product, while adding negative visuals in association with life lacking the product.

2. Expert’s Favorite

This is your classic appeal to authority. This strategy anchors your advertisement to the endorsement of a professional, or influencer if not an entire group of them. Other times what will be used is a level of appeal for your product or service amongst a field of professionals as is done with toothpaste and face creams when every bottle in the aisle is recommended, used, preferred or prescribed by all but 1 in 5, 10 and so on, professionals. The central goal here is to show that not only is your product or service good, but it is the right thing to go with and everyone else agrees.

3. Lifestyle

Everyone has a “lifestyle” and it’s not so much as the way someone currently lives as it is the way we idealize our self living in the future. By creating displays of lifestyle in advertisement you appeal to the people who live that way now and people who would like to live that way if not just to appear to live that way. It’s not always about selling to people who lead a certain lifestyle, sometimes it’s about giving people a window into the lifestyle. A lifestyle advertisement is best for products that “fit” a certain type of person. To get a lifestyle advertisement right, you have to know at the core what activities, emotions, time of day, fashion and other details make your targeted lifestyle appealing to people so make sure you have this grasp before starting or you will not be effective and at worst, may alienate people and get rejected for being an imposter. Lifestyle blogs, Tumblr and Pinterest are good places to find out more about different target lifestyles and cultures.

4. Empathy

Tugging at heartstrings is one way to position your advertisement around empathy, but another method would simply be to demonstrate the sentiment that your company understands and cares about the relationship customers have with certain things in their life and that they are there only to make things better. By associating your offering with positive relationships in your customers life, the goal is to get a share of that emotional connection.

5. Demonstration

This strategy is all about showing how your product or service works OR how well it works. In some ways, the before and after strategy also shows how well your product works but the demonstration strategy is more geared towards why the product/service works so well. This type of advertisement is best for products or services whose competitive advantage is it’s core competency. That meaning there’s some kind of key process that is unique to the procduct or service being carried out that makes it better than competitors. A great product example would be Dyson vacuums, who’s key advantage is the way the vacuum functions. This is perfect to explain through demonstrative advertising.

6. Testimonial

While testimonials are responsible for some of the drier advertisement you’ve seen, it is only used so frequently still because it works. Testimonial advertisement uses the accounts of customers to validate how useful or helpful your product or service has been for them and in turn connects to the consumer. This is why the person or group who you are using a testimonial should be relatable to the target audience of your advertisement. We recommend testimonials being best for small campaigns and small-scale advertisement to keep higher odds that the testimonial stays relatable to as many viewers as possible.

7. Heritage and Legacy

Heritage is not something that only Ferrari, or Rolex has. Many small communities have old brands or businesses that have been handed down. Heritage advertising attempts to increase the perception of quality or value for a company by capitalizing on its long history of performing its craft and learning the trade. Needless to say, this strategy is ill-advised unless your business is relatively older, or does business under an older brand that has been purchased or passed down. The more specific and complex the trade of the business is, the more resonance heritage will have with consumers equating history with quality and value which is why the tactic is so frequently seen in watchmaking and automotive manufacturing.

8. Corporate Personification

This is a strategy best-suited for a campaign, if not an entire branding initiative rather than a single advertisement. Corporate personification involved using the owner/founder, a cartoon, or some other kind of character to play mascot for the company. When the owner or founder is used, it is to increase the feeling of transparency and one-on-one trust between the consumer and the company. When a cartoon or character is used, it is often to give the company an avatar through which the company can demonstrate its personality and enable it to speak, live and act like the company would in living form. The reason this is best suited for a campaign is because it takes a lot of overall interactions to “get to know” a mascot and its personality. Taking this approach requires a very specific character development much like a fictional writer would go through as well as careful design. Even when you are using a real human, it is important to create some sense of a separate character for who the “owner” is as a spokesperson.

9. Competitive Comparison

There’s few tactics more aggressive in advertising than direct competitive comparison. If you want to show consumers you are the best, position yourself against the companies they may think to be better and show them how you outperform.

10. Daring into Business

By showing a consumer the consequences of inaction, or in other words not becoming a client or customer, you can advocate their action. The cliché version of this advertisement usually involves a format similar to – “This is Bill. Bill used our competitor. Bill is not happy. You don’t have to be like Bill. You can use our product or service and become happy.” DirecTV launches most advertisements under this model by showing a customer of cable or DISH in an exaggerated miserable position that they could fix (and so could you) if they switch to be a customer of DirecTV. Humor does well under this strategy.

11. Price Leader

This strategy is centered around demonstrating value. One of the easiest ways to explain whether a value is good or bad is to give people a frame of reference or a baseline measurement to go from so in some cases, people will use this strategy by comparing their value to the industry standard or consumer’s expectations.

12. Challenge the Consumer

Sometimes motivation is as simple as giving somebody a challenge. Challenging the consumer centers the advertisement around the concept “Do you have what it takes?”