Okay, you’ve got it. You have the perfect message (and ravishing design to go along with it) and now you are charged with the task of figuring out which medium works best for your message/design. All mediums are not created equal for every message, idea, or campaign.
Picking the right medium means you have to be smart. You certainly wouldn’t want your best marketing efforts to call out to a crowd that can’t hear you, do you?
Looking at your various options (and thoroughly examining them) will give you better insight into where you can put your message so that it gets you the most bang for your marketing buck.
Example #1
You have a creative series of images, all of which need to be seen to fully understand the concept, and you have enough text that you need at least 30 seconds for people to read your whole message. Putting this on a billboard probably won’t work out for you. People only have a few seconds to glance at your billboard ad, and they aren’t really able to piece together a stream of images and text in the short amount of time it takes them to drive by. However, a catchy idea like this would work great on a postcard. Let’s face it, most postcards don’t have the most attention-grabbing images. The ones that do tend to stand out. If your images are strong enough, and your message clear, putting your design on a postcard is likely to be your best bet. Plus you’ll have gotten their attention with your images, and your copy can pull them in and make them want to learn more about your products and services.
Example #2
Say you have a single captivating image and under ten words in your whole design. This will likely translate better onto a billboard than our last example. With billboards, you have to keep it short and sweet, while still being striking enough so that your audience takes notice. Postcards, brochures, and flyers give you the option to add support text to more abstract images that need a bit of explanation, where you can’t do that with billboards. Make sure your message, design, and ideas translate into mediums that can actually help your marketing efforts.
Creativity doesn’t have to get lost on mediums, like billboards, and it shouldn’t. You simply have to be careful to make sure you pick the right medium for each message you have.
