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Remember how it was in college? You were too busy partying in the dorm or frat house to fight your way through Dante's “Divine Comedy” and write an analysis of it for your term paper. Then the term paper was due.

So what did you do? You sat down and cranked out several thousand words of baloney, to use a polite word for it, which hopefully concealed that you had barely read a line of Dante. “His soaring poetry plunges us into the depths of eternal hell where we see mankind's universal destiny blah blah blah.” And you got a “C” on your paper, but at least you escaped being flunked.

Many such glib baloney artists and almost-poets go out into the world and land cushy jobs at big agencies working on brand advertising. To create brand-image advertising for a commodity product like Pepsi-Cola or MasterCard, you don't really have to know anything about the product — you can still score as long as you have a colorful imagination.

But when it comes to a print ad that's trying to persuade a prospective customer to act in some way about an informational product or service, the result can be embarrassingly ineffective.

I wrote about Yahoo! once before (The Makeover Maven, January 2001). It's not just a search engine about to be defeated or swallowed up by the giant Google. It has a number of useful and worthwhile departments. And it makes sense for Yahoo! to sell possible users on the virtues of one of these departments as a way of getting its foot in the door.

That previous makeover subject, an ad for Yahoo! Shopping, exhibited and typified the baloney approach used by somebody who had too obviously never used the product.

It showed an airline co-pilot fooling around with a laptop personal computer instead of paying attention to the business of flying. The cute headline was “No one will ever know you're shopping.” Get it? But motivation provided for the reader to explore and use the product was zero.

Now here is Yahoo! making the same mistake with this print ad for Yahoo! Finance. This is possibly how it happened.

“Hey, Jimmy, give me a clever ad for Yahoo! Finance by tomorrow.”

“Yahoo! Finance? What's that?”

“You know. A Web site that keeps you up to the minute on stocks and bonds and financial news, stuff like that.”

“Do I need to know anything more about the product first?”

“Not really.”

And another violation of the principles of empathetic marketing is about to be committed.

The ad's graph line charts the fluctuation in a daily investor's mood (in pale white type, naturally): up to Joy, down to Despair; up at Lunch, then down again to Uncertainty…and so on.

Because of the word “Lunch,” it's immediately apparent that the ad is charting and addressing the daily mood not of the average long-term investor, but of minute-to-minute day traders. And it could easily have been created by someone who has never even bothered to log on to Yahoo! Finance.

Well, there are investors (as I can testify personally) who are foolish enough to try to beat the market by outguessing its minute-to-minute fluctuations. But I think it's safe to say that this is not true of the great majority of Yahoo! Finance's prospective users.

On the other hand, I have used Yahoo! Finance to get long-term investing ideas and found it to be uniquely helpful.

For instance, do you invest in a mutual fund? And do you stick with it because “it's a good fund” even when it goes down, down, down, while the Dow Jones average keeps going up, up, up? Or what if a similar fund has been doing twice as well as yours for the last three years? You'd like to know about that, wouldn't you?

Would you like to see all top mutual funds ranked by percentage gain during different recent time periods? Or how about a ranking of all the leading funds in a particular sector?

Hey, here's an idea. Pick a fund with impressive gains and look inside its portfolio of holdings. If the fund is up 18% so far this year, it makes sense that some of its stocks are up less than that and some of them more than that. So how about picking out the best-gaining stock in the fund portfolio and displaying a chart showing how it is doing compared with the Dow and the fund. It should be doing even better than the fund itself!

See how useful this is? You tell me. Of course, no approach can ever guarantee investing success, but at least you can greatly improve the odds by improving your grasp of the situation.

I've addressed this mythical investor and his or her concerns in my makeover. I lead the reader by the hand through one typical use. Then in the copy below, I pick up some of the basic descriptive text buried in tiny white type at the bottom of the original, and I touch on as many other attractive features as I have room for.

(Note: Yahoo!'s future apparently is uncertain. Shortly before this column went to press, The Wall Street Journal published a story headed, “As Yahoo! Falters, Executive's Memo Calls for Overhaul.” If the company ever does go under, better print advertising might not have helped it enough…but it certainly wouldn't have hurt.)

Find more Makeover Maven columns at http://directmag.com/opinions-columnists/makeovermaven/.

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THOMAS L. COLLINS (thomas.l.collins@verizon.net) has been a direct marketing copywriter, admaker, agency creative director and co-author of four books on marketing. He is currently an independent creative and marketing consultant based in Portland, OR.