Not all ads...

... are meant for you.

As a marketer, it's one of the most important things to remember when you evaluate creative: it doesn't matter whether or not you personally like a particular creative campaign, and that's especially true if you're not in the target audience.

I was reminded of this last week as I was scanning the news headlines. One of them, from 680News, immediately caught my attention: Bold ads promoting child-free, small families get noticed in Vancouver.

Curious to see the bold ads for myself, I clicked on the link. The first image I saw is the one at the top of this newsletter: a photo of a smiling child with the caption, "The most loving gift you can give your first child is to not have another."

Wow.

If you've been following me for any amount of time, you probably know I have four children, all of whom I love more than I could ever fully communicate. So you can probably imagine my personal reaction to this particular advertisement.

But here's something that might surprise you: I think it's a very good ad.

As much as I personally don't agree with the message the One Planet, One Child organization is trying to advance, I'm also not the target audience: this ad is clearly targeted at young parents who are trying to decide whether they should have more children, and my wife and I made our decision about that a long time ago.

Those young parents trying to make that decision today, though, might stop in their tracks upon seeing the controversial headline. The ad could very well prompt them to visit the website and explore the research supporting this point of view. And a review of that research might end up influencing the decision they ultimately make about the size of their family.

And if all that happens?

Then that was a very good ad.

Not all ads are meant for you.

- dp

P.S. Yesterday, I finished reading a mind-blowing book called The Future is Faster Than You Think, by Peter Diamandis and Stephen Kotler. The book talks about how a number of different technologies that already exist today (and continue to be developed) are coming together to rapidly improve our world, and it's a really good read if you want to imagine what our world will look like just ten years from now.