Advertising Campaigns
Successful brands don't just sell their products. They encourage consumers to adopt a certain lifestyle.
When a company website enhances our state of mind and goes beyond providing information to creating an experience, our perception of the brand changes- to the point that we can even become emotionally invested in it. This positive impression deepens our brand affiliation, which makes us loyal customers and refer family members and friends to the brand.
Advertising Techniques
Colour
This technique is used in every kind of visual marketing. Easy to misunderstand, a wrong colour can end up portraying the wrong theme or emotion aimed for.
Colour is present in the background, photography, fonts, visual accents and branding elements. That’s why it’s important to think about the colour palette every single time.
Examples: Tiffany, Blue/Coke, Red
Composition
Composition is how all the elements are placed in a visual place
Rule Of Thirds
The rule of thirds is visual tools that help the designers place elements on a space in a way that is visually appealing. The rule of thirds separates the canvas into six equal rectangles – two rows and three columns. By placing important elements at the crosspoints of the rectangles, they’re given visual importance while maintaining a visual balance.
Focal Point
Pinpointing a focal point is just as important as the choice of colours and typography. The viewer needs to have a clear place to look at as they absorb the advertisement’s message.
Repetition
The technique of repetition is an advertising technique that has to do with marketing strategy. Repetition applies to a few different aspects of visual advertising.
Examples are:
- Air a TV commercial many times a day on a variety of channels.
- Send the same ad to be printed on a number of magazines in your niche.
- Put the same ad on various billboards around the city, country or internationally.
- Create digital ads and submit them to Google ads or media outlets like Mediavine.
- Create and distribute a large quantity of merchandising with your brand assets printed.
- Make different versions of the same ad with different characters, body positions, etc.
- Increase the number of times you allow the same Facebook ad to appear.
Body Language
Confidence, knowledgeability, success and various other sentiments can be visualized through a person’s body language. Body language is a nonverbal language that a person transmits by how they stand, sit, smile and move. Whether the person in the graphic is a model, an actor, a famous professional, a regular person or even an animated character – the way they move or stand is important.
Direct Gaze
Direct gaze is when someone looks you straight in the eye without looking away.
This technique is borrowed from hypnosis practices. Its official name is “gaze induction technique,” and it’s meant to make people feel things just by being looked at intensely. It’s a highly effective advertising technique.
It’s common to see the direct gaze technique used in magazine ads for wristwatches and perfumes. The characters in these are usually celebrities, particularly ones that consumers consider very handsome, beautiful or worth swooning over.
Association
The premise is that the visuals in the graphic will create associations for the viewer. These associations can be feelings, ideas, places, or nostalgia. For association marketing to be successful, a good bit of research must be done beforehand so that there is a deep knowledge of who the consumer is before deciding on what the association will be. For example, antibacterial hand soap might use scenes of kids playing outside in the mud and getting dirty, but having tons of fun. This creates an association that it’s okay for kids to get dirty – as long as they can wash their hands with soap afterwards.
Symbolism
Visual marketing techniques that use symbolism in their message call on the use of metaphors and similes. These are literary tools used to make comparisons and allusions. For example, a marketing strategy for a hand cream can use a visual metaphor to compare the scent of their cream to that of spring flowers. The use of symbolism can be vague and subtle or overly far-fetched. The latter only works with brands that already have a large following of consumers with high brand loyalty. Nobody wants to cause confusion.
Animation and Motion graphics
Animation pertains to visuals that are animated instead of filmed with human characters. It’s the moving version of an illustration. A motion graphic is a bit different as it’s not a storytelling technique, but more of an explanation or visual accent. Both are used in short advertisements seen at the beginning of YouTube videos or inside apps with in-app purchases. This technique catches the attention of the viewer very fast and can be very successful.