Do Termites Eat Wooden Roofs?
Have you seen the commercial for ShakeMasters? They apparently install and maintain wooden shingle roofs (Shakes).
They've been running a commercial (might be the worst commercial I've ever seen) on late night cable. And I'm pretty certain they're running it nationally (which must be costing them A TON).
Anyway, this commercial is bad, bad, bad. There's no even any voice over (talking). It's just music played over pictures of people installing wooden roofs (is anyone interested?).
The music is terrible. The whole theme of the spot is like southern, country, etc. The music is saxophone, bad-jazz. Not a match. I normally don't care about the music, but when it's all you got...
Worst of all, no call to action, no response mechanism. What is this commercial supposed to do? Are they trying to implant peoples' minds with their name so if/when they decide to put a wood roof on their house they'll call them?
Bad bad bad choice. How many people watching (as a percentage) are or ever will be interested in a wood roof? None here, I can tell you that.
This leads me to my point. I'm going to give you a virtually fool-proof system for determining which advertising works and which doesn't. With this tip, you'll be able to monitor ad all around you, determine with relative accuracy which are working, then pattern your own ads after them. After all, copying what works is the best marketing strategy of all!
Here's how you do it: monitor your mail box, your newspaper, your magazine, the TV, the radio, etc. Listen to the ads carefully. Try and decide for yourself which ones are good and which ones are bad. Keep listening. General rule: the bad ads disappear. The good ads stick around. Why? Of course, the bad ads fail to pay for themselves and the company wisens up and pulls it or goes out of business (which ever come first).
So what about the ShakeMaster's ad? Well, I could have called it. It's gone. But the good news is, it looks like they fired their agency and either grew a brain, read a book, or hired someone who did either because they have a new ad which is completely different and it filled with a great call to action and strong response mechs.
One final thought - the ShakeMaster's web site is pitiful. They would have been a lot better off if the spent a few thousand tidying that up before they spend a ton on TV.
And to boot, it took me several searches to find them (I couldn't remember their name exactly). It's a wise idea to beef up your search presence (even through pay per click) before you run a big campaign - so that when someone is looking for you, they find you easily.
