All Over the Place
Maven’s Maxims:
- If you don’t have a goal, you can’t reach it.
- If you don’t have a target, you can’t hit it.
This Emcor ad is a good example.
First of all, it has a jumble of elements which don’t invite walking through it easily from beginning to end.
But a further problem is that it isn’t clear who it’s addressing and what it wishes to accomplish. Is it talking to potential clients for its services? Then why not say so? Or is it talking to possible stock market investors with a message that hopefully will make Emcor stock more desirable?
By not focusing on these objectives, if fails to attract either audience or accomplish either purpose.
But I appreciate the difficulties the creators faced. Sometimes a global corporation is so big, so diverse and so complex that it’s hard to describe its attributes clearly and simply. Still, that’s what ad people get paid big money to do.
While working on my makeover I had to decide the answers to these questions. Because I had no way of knowing which audiences and aims were most important to Emcor’s management, I tried to answer all the needs in a single ad.
I simply could have redesigned the ad typographically to double its readership and effect. But I thought it would be worthwhile to see if other things couldn’t also be changed to make the company more attractive to both potential clients and investors.
First of all, I wanted to convey a sense of the company’s bigness. Implication: We’re bigger because we’re better. But we’re also better because we’re bigger.
To do this, I included a number of hot buttons.
