This ad for State Farm Insurance comes from People. The headline reads:
Ever been to the place where
GROWING INTO WHO I AM
meets WISHING MONEY GREW ON TREES?
I’M THERE
Huh?
Ignore for the moment that it should read “growing into who you are” (because I haven’t grown into the place where the model in the ad is). This headline is so cryptic that I didn’t understand it.
I asked my wife, who is smarter than I am, if she had any idea what the headline was trying to say. She said, “It means that she reached a point in her life where she knows what she wants but she needs more money. But it’s bad.”
Oh.
Now that I understood the headline, I still had no idea what this ad was trying to sell. My eye went down to the bold STATE FARM logo at the bottom of the page.
State Farm, I thought. Don’t they sell insurance? What does this ad have to do with insurance?
I tried to read the copy, but the white type was difficult to read over the photo in the background. Here I learned “you can save an average of $369″ on your auto insurance.
Finally, the message of the ad.
The message should be in the headline because the headline is all that most people read. Here’s a headline that isn’t lyrical or clever but gets the point across:
STATE FARM CAN SAVE YOU $369 ON YOUR AUTO INSURANCE.
Admittedly, this may not be the best headline, but at least it’s clear.
