Art vs. Sales

Do you want your company to succeed?  Do you want to entertain people with your advertising, do something really creative, or do you want to use your advertising to increase profits?

We love to harp, with some passion, on large national advertisers who create ads that forget to sell the products.  We have written about products like Chatter.com that used the Black Eyed Peas to create ads. Even though the commercials were viewed by a lot of people, they did not even inform people as to what the product was they were selling.

Now, we want to offer our opinion on two really great national advertisers that even though they can bore people with their commercials, meanwhile they really can sell their products!  Two of those types of advertisers that do the type of advertising that our ad agency would create or recommend are Ford Trucks and Samuel Adams Beer.

Most likely you can not remember a single “Built Tough” Ford Truck ad if you tried and may not remember a single one of Boston Beer Company’s Founder Jim Koch’s commercials where he educates consumers about how his beer is brewed, but they really have sold.

Look at the Ford F-150 No-Nonsense Ad Campaign and then realize that according to Sunday May 1, 2011 Parade magazine the Ford F series trucks were the most sold Vehicles in the USA during 2010.

You may not remember hearing points about Samuel Adams Beer and the commercials that take the time to talk about how the beer is brewed.   Did you know that Boston Beer is ranked first overall in craft brewing and forth in over all beer sales?  Not bad for commercials that bore people. By the way, Anheuser-Busch’s 230 million dollar investment in Superbowl advertising alone in the past few years in addition to a whole lot of other entertaining ads does not seem to offer any magic to sales which dropped in past years.

What do you want for your company, to create art for the sake of art or to create art for the sake of sales?