When it comes to making your print or digital advertising stand out from your competition, you shouldn’t do what’s been done before.

Advertising, by its nature, is disrupting people when they’re online, or reading print, for work or pleasure. Because of that, you just have a couple seconds to get their attention with the imagery and headline. Images have to be different and unique. Are you a home builder? Then maybe don’t show your home exterior as the main image, because that’s what every other home builder does.

Your audiences’ time is too valuable, and your budget too important, not to make it worthwhile for people to stop and pay attention to your ad. Check out some of our advertising work below, and see if you agree.

Treplus Communites

The visuals for most builder ads focus on either the interior or exterior of the home, or people reflective of their audience.

Our goal was to develop an ad series so the main visuals were noticeably different than those “standard” images. Images that would stand apart – not only from other builder’s ads – but be unique enough to get noticed in the 2 seconds you have to get someone’s attention in an ad.

The ad series is based around memories.

For the over 60 crowd, images of events, or things, that happened in the years between 1980 and 1980. Each ad focuses on an event that happened the month the ad runs. Other ads in the series focused on Silly Putty and when The Beatles first came to the U.S.

For the 40 – 60 year old audience, the images and events were focused around things that happened around the turn of the century. Things like the Y2K paranoia, the Ice Bucket Challenge (that raised $115 million for ALS research), Beanie Babies, The Power Rangers, and Nintendo 64.

Depend Adult Diapers

Just how can you make wearing adult diapers just a little less embarrassing?

Well, by showing that other folks, who are much cooler than you (or us), wear them. When you realize professional race car drivers, mountain climbers, and astronauts might wear them, all of a sudden it doesn’t seem quite so bad.

Granted, the reason others have to wear adult diapers are different than why professionals wear them. But every little bit helps make it less embarrassing when you know “the cool kids” (even if they are adults) rely on them.

Community Shelter Board

The reasons for homelessness (or “people experiencing homelessness”) may surprise you.

Community Shelter Board oversees funding for homelessness prevention initiatives, emergency shelters, housing services, and supportive housing using an innovative, collaborative model to help abolish homelessness.

As with most other clients, they only gave us general direction, and left it up to us to determine the direction. We researched the homeless situation and developed the headlines and images to design these ads.

Compass Homes

Creative advertising can help sell homes.

Compass Homes built an awesome, award-winning home (one of the awards was for “Best Kitchen”) for the BIA Parade of Homes, and they asked us to create an ad to help them sell the home.

When we came up with this ad, we told them if they use it, they have to be prepared to actually give the new homeowner their own version of the award! It seems if they’re going to be living in an award-winning kitchen, they might as well show that award off. The house sold pretty quickly once the ad ran.

CMC Homes

When designing ads for home builders, we try not to use images of homes as the main visual. Why? Because every other home builder does that.

Think about when you’re scanning a magazine or newspaper. Unless you see a visual that is different than expected, you probably won’t stop to spend a few seconds with an ad. So really, you only have 2 – 3 seconds to get someone’s attention, because if you don’t get it in that time, there’s a pretty good chance you won’t even get it at all. (Remember that saying about not getting a second chance to make a first impression?)

Is an ad like this taking too much of a risk? We don’t think so. Quite the opposite actually. We think not taking a risk and doing something different with your marketing is more of a risk, and wasting your money. Without taking a risk of doing something different, there’s a good chance your advertising won’t get noticed.

Westport Homes

Westport Homes asked us asking to create an ad that showed they have a 98% customer satisfaction rating.

But we didn’t think just saying “Hey we have a 98% customer satisfaction rating” was all that interesting. Nor did we think it would it come across as sincere.

So we decided to compare their 98% satisfaction rating with other things in life that you might not get a 98% satisfaction rating. Again, the image isn’t something you usually see in a magazine, especially for home builders, so it definitely stood out.

Contact us today and let’s talk about your print and digital advertising.