Skip to content

Comedy Wanted Ad

Many years ago I was browsing the big job advertisement section in our weekend paper.

One ad stood out immediately.

It was brilliant.

Amongst all the small print ads this big text, short, punchy ad caught my eye and I was impressed by the marketing skill of the person who had placed the ad…

…until I realized one thing.

Can you figure out why this ad is a joke?

Comedy Wanted Ad

Yes that’s right.

There is no punchline. There is no phone number or way to contact the person who placed the ad!

To this day I don’t know if this was a joke ad, or a real ad gone horribly wrong.

How many of your marketing messages look great, but without a ‘Call To Action’, they too are a joke?

-Martin Russell

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

7 Comments

  1. Del Sauzo wrote:

    Nice one !!! Lol

    Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 3:52 am | Permalink
  2. Honestly, I haven’t noticed it on first sight. :-D But then when you said it…

    Yeah, interesting.

    Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 10:01 am | Permalink
  3. Rose wrote:

    Good one.
    Here’s my email address, thanks again!

    Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 9:21 pm | Permalink
  4. Yes, you must call your readers and audience to action. You can give them all the free information you want but how will you capitalize on that if you forget your call of action. The more you practice this technique, the better you will become at it.

    Friday, May 23, 2008 at 11:38 am | Permalink
  5. Gaida wrote:

    I’ts amazing that the ‘call to action’ is often missed..

    Recently I received several of the same glossy brochure over a couple of weeks from a furniture store.

    There was no address or phone ‘anywhere’ on it. I thought I knew who’s it was & rang up.. that certainly took some detective work just to locate them.

    What a waste of money on advertising… and my time… as I’m sure there would be a lot of other people who would not have been as persistent in trying to ‘discover’ who was having the sale.

    Monday, June 16, 2008 at 11:39 pm | Permalink
  6. Gaida – These sort of things make the job of a business coach seem very simple.

    It also shows how little people measure their results. It would show up problems like this soooo quickly.

    Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 11:56 pm | Permalink
  7. Chemogen wrote:

    And a baker earns more than a Comedy Writer!

    Sunday, September 28, 2008 at 5:13 am | Permalink

4 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. [...] Russell presents Comedy Wanted Ad posted at Word of Mouth [...]

  2. [...] Russell presents Comedy Wanted Ad posted at Word of Mouth Marketing. Very interesting reminder about the voracity and robustness of a [...]

  3. Working at Home on the Internet on Friday, May 23, 2008 at 6:03 am

    [...] Russell presents Comedy Wanted Ad posted at Word of Mouth [...]

  4. [...] Russell presents Comedy Wanted Ad posted at Word of Mouth [...]

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *
*
*

Subscribe without commenting