11 Ad Design Tips to Help Your Brand Cut Through the Noise

 Before your copy can persuade an audience to buy your product, your design must persuade them to buy your copy. In advertising, your design catches your audience’s eye and points their attention to your copy. Then, it’s your copy’s job to hold your audience’s attention.

To help grab people’s attention in your advertisements, we’ve put together a list of seven ad tips, supported by examples, that’ll help give you ad design ideas to your brand cut through the noise. 

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Advertisement Design Tips

Read on to learn how to craft creatively refreshing ads that will convert your audience into customers.

1. Stand out from the crowd.

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In a world where countless brands fight for a limited amount of attention, the only way your advertisement can grab people’s attention is by being original.

As a marketer, though, it can be tempting to leap onto the latest trend that all your competitors have already pounced on. If everyone else is implementing the latest tip or trick, it must work, right? To captivate an audience, though, you must resist this urge.

Cliches repel attention. They sap your advertisement's creativity and can’t activate the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for experiencing emotions. But how exactly do you create an original advertisement? Consider one of Estée Lauder’s print campaigns from the 1960s.

Back then, Estée Lauder’s main competitors like L’Oréal, Revlon, and Helena Rubinstein all ran vibrant, colorful ads in magazines. Every makeup ad was beautiful and rich. But even though they seemed eye-popping at first glance, audiences became accustomed to these types of ads -- they all looked the same. They started blending in with each other.

Realizing that no one could differentiate between the brands running full-color makeup ads flooding magazines during that time period anymore, Estée Lauder did something so controversial it was deemed “radical”, “stupid”, and even “ugly”: they ran their ads in sepia.

Estée Lauder’s print advertising move received its fair share of criticism, but they’re ability to be original helped them immediately stand out from the crowd and rake in 25% more responses than their previous color print campaigns.

2. Focus on benefits and not just features.

A feature is an attribute or aspect of your business that distinguishes it from others in the space. Features are important for consumers as they compare providers and make purchasing decisions. However, in advertising, you are often marketing to a wide audience, many of whom may not be familiar with your organization or know they have need for your goods or services.

For this reason, advertising features can be ineffective and overly salesy. The benefits of a product, on the other hand, can be far more persuasive and impressionable to a wide audience.

Tide exhibits this idea well with their Superbowl commercial.

They could have demonstrated the features of their product by showing a dirty shirt becoming clean again.

Instead, they focus on the advantage: clean and crisp shirts.

They even use a bit of humor while calling out this approach as #NotaTideAd.

3. Use humor.

Speaking of humor, it is an effective tool in advertising because it evokes positive emotion.

The best thing advertising can do is make your solutions memorable. The second best thing it can do is associate that memory with positive emotions.

Zola uses this in their wedding website ad. Weddings are already associated with love and happy times, but Zola differentiates their approach by flipping the script on audience expectation with a silly situation.

Instead of imagining somber heartfelt "I dos," the couple talks through logistics, which Zola can help with.

4. Convey one message — and one message only.

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Sometimes, marketers think the more benefits and features they include in their ads, the higher their conversion rate will be. But trying to read a jumbled ad requires a lot of thought and energy, so cramming an ad with a bricks of copy doesn’t actually grab people’s attention. It repels it.

To immediately hook people and persuade them to read the rest of your ad, consider conveying one message per ad. Spotlighting your product or service’s main benefit or feature will make it easy for your audience to understand its value and increase the likelihood of doing business with you because they’ll leave your ad remembering only one message: your product’s or service’s main feature will benefit their lives somehow, someway.

For example, in Citizen’s ad for their Eco-Drive watch, they only use a single line of copy and a simple image to convey their product’s value to their audience -- a watch that never needs a battery.