Baffling Response Advertising 101

What were they thinking?

How can such a supremely misguided effort as this costly half-page ad in The New York Times for the College of New Rochelle not tempt us to speculate about its origin?

I can come up with only two lame theories:

1. Members of the school's advertising class were challenged to compete in creating the best ad for the school, with the winner getting to see her ad published in the Times. Students were told that the secret of success in an advertising creative career is simply to create ads that are “catchy.”

2. A wealthy philanthropist offered the school a grant of $1 million, on the condition that his 17-year-old freshman daughter got to create a newspaper ad for the school — which he would pay for.

Anybody have a better hypothesis?

Most of the ad is taken up by a photo of a young woman hungrily eyeing a snack-dispenser machine filled with what appear to be bags of potato chips. Hanging from her neck is an ID tag, suggesting that she is a student.

There is no headline. But there is a torn-out clipping of a school catalog blurb for a course in kick boxing and its health benefits.

Now comes the heavy lifting. We've got to figure out what it all means. There's a clue in a line of copy at the bottom. “Prepare for life's challenges. One course at a time.”

Come on, help me out here, folks. Taking a course in kick boxing will help her resist the challenge presented to her good-health habits by a snack machine? Or she burned up so many calories during the kick-boxing class today that she's hungry again an hour after dinner? Or maybe her karate class has given her the training needed to dislodge the contents of the vending machine with a good swift kick?

Whatever it is, what has it got to do with what the college has to offer the most likely prospective students?

For my makeover, I once again started by asking myself: Who is the prospect? What is the product? And why should the prospect want it?

For you out-of-towners, New Rochelle is an elegant commuter suburb of New York City. The College of New Rochelle is a small women's college situated there, with half a dozen other campuses scattered about the city.

It actually has several classifications of prospective students. And being greedy, I want to interest as many of them as I can. Who are they?

1. College-bound high school seniors in the Greater New York area.

2. Adult women in the area who never got or completed a college education and want to do something about it.

3. College-educated women working at building a career in Manhattan who find their advancement would be aided by obtaining a master's degree during off hours.

(There is a fourth group, women who aspire to a career in nursing, that I didn't have room for.)

I visualize members of the first group, the high school seniors, as having a certain psychographic profile. In the picture in my head, she is not part of the glamour-girl cheerleader gang in high school. She is a little shy, maybe a little plain, and a little anxious about being overwhelmed by thousands and thousands of male as well as female students in a large university. She is not a rebel but is devoted to her protective parents. She has always loved the concerts and museums and ballets in Manhattan that they have long been taking her to.

Why is all this important? Because that makes her a good prospect for New Rochelle. Someone who welcomes the idea of being able to weekend at home with her family during her college years — or even live at home while attending college classes — and also to still enjoy New York's cultural attractions. Add to this the desire to please her parents by not going to a college far, far away — as long as her choice is a really good school.

I touch on all three of these attractions in my subhead — “intimacy, excellence and convenience” — as well as indirectly in my headline and illustrations.

But these three features are also attractive to the other two market segments cited.

Then in the body copy I devote a brief message to each group, followed by a strong call to action in the form of inviting prospective students to attend an on-campus open house.

Gee, I would love to do a split-run test of the “before” and “after” on this one. The difference in the number of responses from the nonsensical and the commonsensical approaches surely would set some kind of record.

THOMAS L. COLLINS was co-founder and first creative director of Rapp & Collins and is co-author with Stan Rapp of four books on marketing. He is currently an independent marketing consultant and copywriter based in Manhattan.

If you see a direct response ad that you think is crying out for a makeover, clip it out and send it (unfolded, if possible) to me at 250 E. 40th St., #40B, New York, NY 10016. To e-mail comments and opinions: thomascollinsnow@hotmail.com.