Q&A with Zontee Hou: Building Digital Ad Strategies that Work
My friends at Superside interviewed me for their blog, and I shared several case studies on designing effective digital advertising campaigns. Here’s an excerpt of that conversation:
Superside: If there was one key takeaway or piece of advice that you’d want to give creative teams about how to execute a successful digital ad, what would that be?
Zontee: Don’t be too enamored by your own cleverness. Often the ads I see come back from a creative team, you have to go back and say, “I’m sorry we can’t use this at all.” They’ve done something so obscure or irrelevant to the actual audience and the core message, that somebody wouldn’t even sit through two seconds of looking at the ad.I know in every creative industry you have somebody telling you to kill your darlings, but there’s absolute truth in that. If you handed the creative to your best friend or brother, will they get it in a few seconds of looking at this ad? If the answer is no, the ad is not effective. You have to go back to the drawing board and clarify what message you’re trying to get across.