Are Your Ads Open Ended Or Closed?

By Author: Katie Marcus
Total Articles: 252
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Ok, bear with me for a minute. Advertising can often be like a choice between the games Super Mario Bros or Zelda, and I'm referring to the original games for the first Nintendo. Super Mario Bros was a completely linear game where you travelled from point A to point B and you couldn't do anything but travel to point B. Zelda, on the other hand, was completely open to you.

You could spend hours roaming the world if you wanted to without accomplishing anything. The game was yours to do with as you want, and if you really wanted to you could go to the harder areas at the very beginning.

Now, how does this apply to your commercial printing? Any form of advertising is going to be either open or closed. For example, a postcard advertising a sale is a closed form of advertising. It gives a set message: there is a sale. There isn't any room for interpretation.

Longer forms of commercial printing such as catalogues are open forms of advertising. You don't have to read a catalog from beginning to end in order to enjoy it and pick out something to buy. You can flip to the last page first if you want and read through ...
... the thing backwards without any trouble.

Catalogues and postcards are two more obvious examples of an open or closed advertisement, but what about the ambiguous ones? Brochures stand as the best example of a style of advertising that can be either open or closed depending on how you choose to make it.

You can make a brochure that follows a continuous string of information. A person needs to read the first page of the brochure in order to understand and enjoy the second page, and so on. Or you can design your brochure so that someone can flip right to the third page and have no problems understanding what's being said.

Each form is going to have a benefit and weakness to it. The closed brochure gives you the chance to go into more detail about a subject matter, and will probably read more like a booklet than a brochure. Here is a chance to give people a piece of intricate knowledge about your industry to help them make a better purchase.

The open brochure is going to be less focused, perhaps dealing with various different services you offer or deals the customer can get. Because a person can jump to page three each page needs to be self-contained, which means each piece of information you discuss needs to be shorter.

So which form of commercial printing will work best for you? That depends completely on the reason why you're getting it done. The earlier example of a sale almost needs to be a closed form of advertising because the message is so straightforward there isn't much room for a person to do anything else.

When you're trying to give people a lengthier and more detailed look at your industry it becomes up to you to figure out what style will best suit your needs. The closed ad ensures people will get the exact information you want them to, while the open ad gives people the freedom to figure out the message on their own, while risking that they won't.

The question really boils down to which game did you always enjoy more, or more accurately, what game do you think your customers preferred?

Katie Marcus writes about the commercial printing technologies used by businesses for their marketing and advertising campaigns.