Choosing the most effective ad can be a daunting task even for experienced marketers, but the following considerations will help you make better decisions.

1. Remember who your target segment is. When judging an advertisment, it’s easy to assess based on our own taste, like whether or not we like a particular color or phrase, and forget that the ad is meant to appeal to your target audience and not to ourselves. Understand your audience and judge the ad from their perspective.
2. Keep it clean. Many advertisers saturate their ad with as much information as they can, listing their complete product line or every item on sale, in order to utilize every inch of the valuable ad space. Don’t forget that your ad will compete for the reader’s attention against many other ads, and the cleaner the layout the better the chances of catching the reader’s interest.
3. Focus your efforts. In order to keep the reader’s interest and make your message memorable, your ads should focus on the most important benefit, trying to impress the customer with a multitude of benefits will only dilute the strenght of your message.
4. Appeal to both sides of the brain. Experts agree that to persuade a reader your message has to use both rational and emotional appeals. Graphics are ideal to stimulate emotions while the copy must deliver a coherent message.
5. Your product is the key. Manytimes ads are ineteresting, funny or clever enough that they create a lasting impression but the audience can’t remember which product was advertise. Every single element of the ad must relate to your brand.