A Tale of Two Magazine Ads

It’s frustrating when a process runs backwards. Anyone who’s worked with me knows that I always try to kick-off a creative project by identifying the audience and what thoughts and feelings we are trying to elicit from them. So, it is unfortunate when a project begins with an ad buy and then the question that is asked is “so, what are we going to advertise?”.

Anyone who has worked in a creative team has encountered this phenomenon. Normally it starts with a quid pro quo by someone talking with a magazine. If an entity wants good editorial coverage, then a suggestion might be made that they need to place an ad buy. It’s just the way things work.

Now I’m not saying that’s what happened in this case, but I am saying we received the following brief:

“We’ve booked two 1-page ads in Atlanta Magazine. Can you come up with two ads..? Oh, and the deadline is next week.”

The challenge presented ultimately boiled down to this: How do we create two unique ads that are essentially promoting the same thing—The City of Sandy Springs?

Now you might be thinking that there is an obvious solution to this two-ad challenge. Wouldn’t it make more sense to combine the pages into a 2-page spread? Well, apparently, this wasn’t possible. Based on the deadline, the magazine was likely already laid out and we were picking up some last-minute left-over ad inventory.

Concepting

The creative team gathered, and we considered the readership of Atlanta magazine. We rallied around a concept that someone visiting the Atlanta-metro area could possibly be compelled to consider relocating to Sandy Springs. This is not an uncommon scenario as Sandy Springs is a city with a fast-growing population buoyed by the general growth of the region.

We then made a pivotal decision: Even though each ad would need to make sense as a standalone experience, we needed to find a way to connect the two together to make the double ad buy feel intentional.

We reached out to Atlanta Magazine, and while they couldn’t give us a two-page spread, they could guarantee us two consecutive right-hand pages. And that gave us the idea to make the tagline of the first ad tie to both the copy of the first ad and the tagline of the second ad.

When you visit Sandy Springs… You’ll want to call it home.

With that in mind, the first ad was developed to compel the audience to visit Sandy Springs, and the second compelled the audience to consider staying.

Development

Due to my team already being committed to other projects, I took the lead role on the development of these ads. I sketched out a draft concept and came up with the idea to anchor each ad around an image of a male/female couple. In the first ad they would be walking through a hotel with a suitcase. In the second, they would be in almost identical positions, but in a neighborhood instead of a hotel, and the suitcase would be replaced by a dog. The dog of course, symbolizes that the couple has settled into the neighborhood.

Due to the short turnaround, I recruited some co-workers as models, and hit the mean streets of Sandy Springs. The suitcase I brought into work from home. The dog, Waylon was even easier to procure. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to bring their dog to work? And predictably, my coworker happily obliged.

I was careful to shoot each photo with identical lens aperture settings to keep the amount of background blur consistent across both images. The only challenge in this shoot was working with Waylon the dog. He was insatiably curious as to what I was up to and kept turning around to look at me. But I knew as long as I had a least one good shot of him, I could composite it into the selected photograph during post production in Adobe Photoshop.

With good hero images captured, I tightened up the marketing copy, and developed a compelling layout in Adobe InDesign building upon my concept sketches.