Five Ways to Make Music Brands Ads Better

By studying the nuances of these five award-winning ads, you will take your marketing from ordinary to outstanding.

1) Powerful graphics make your music brand ads memorable.

A talented graphic designer can take an advertising concept and turn it into a visual statement that can’t be ignored. Iconic graphics can be repurposed for t-shirts, websites, brochures, posters and even guitar picks. Ogilvy & Mather Gurgaon took traditional rock symbols and filtered them through regional motifs to create surprisingly fresh and relevant posters for a rock festival in Punjab, India. Rock music has understood this for decades with collectable posters from Woodstock to The Grateful Dead to Cake. Make your ads frame-worthy.

2) Focus on the benefit, not the feature.

The most common mistake in music brand advertising is to focus on the product features. A list of technical specs does not make an effective ad. Apple always leads with the benefit of the product. This classic iPod ad shows consumers in silhouette, jamming out to their favorite tunes. If this ad were done in typical music industry fashion the headline would list: memory, interface capabilities, colors and price with extensive product specs in the body copy. Apple brilliantly captures the experience of enjoying tunes with a powerful image.

3) This is the music industry: don’t be afraid to make bold statements.

If your advertising is vanilla, it will be lost in the shuffle. Your audience will pay more attention to your messaging if it is entertaining and sharp. In this clever ad for Sirius, Vancouver-based agency ReThink exploded the product benefit—unlimited niche music and news—with an outrageous and page-stopping message. Do not be timid or afraid to make consumers uncomfortable.

4) Make your copy engaging.

Copy and headlines should be clever and worth the read. Spend time finding a unique take on your music brand. Long copy ads may be out of style, but this humorous idea for California School of Flyfishing is packed with fun content. Siltanen & Partners understood that fly fishermen are passionate about the details of their craft when they created this quiz/ad concept. And as an added benefit, the ad drives consumers to the website to find the correct answers.

 

5) Speak the language of your customers.

Keiler & Company created a series of ads for Todd The Vinyl Junkie that speaks directly to the audiophile, with language and visuals that they understand. The product offering is large, from headphones, to turntables, to used equipment. But the agency chooses to focus on the attitude, not the product—bold thinking.