Concrete Advertising

Last week I spoke about why a construction company would want to advertise. I was looking through a few past issues of ENR and saw a campaign that I loved and I wanted to share why it worked so well.

• Powerful Image – Without saying a word, the image says nearly everything and evokes an emotion. An emotional connection with engineers can be rough, but this one does it. The image is prominent, unavoidable and makes you stop and look if you’re flipping through the magazine.
• Sparse for Effect – You can call it clean or sparse, in the end it is impactful because the image is prominent and not cluttered.
• Target audience – The ad is geared toward highway engineers, in particular the state’s engineers who spec work. This ad is perfectly targeted to them being placed in ENR.
• Repetition – I’ve seen these ads more than once and they slightly alter the message in each ad to hammer their points. The rule of thumb in advertising is seeing something 3 times, but many times people tend to tune out ads if they’ve seen them over and over – they become clutter. (It is one of my pet peeves with TV advertising because the repetition becomes nuisance.)

Below is another one of their ads, this one shows the twist in message & imagery while staying cohesive. After being trained by my asphalt clients about the benefits of asphalt for years, this pro-concrete ad campaign makes some great points that can sway that coveted highway engineer. I must saw, “crude” is a powerful word in this instance.