Advertisements are failing. Let's fix it!

I spent a lifetime telling advertising people what was wrong with their advertising. They did not always thank me for it. Now this page will do the same for yours. Upload your advertisement, print or digital, photograph or illustration. It takes the place of my photograph, a letter grade lands on its corner, and this copy gives way to the review: what works, what fails, and what to change first.

The standard is not my taste. It is a checklist of thirty-nine tests, drawn from my two books, my agency memoranda, and the campaigns I wrote. Strategy comes first: what are you selling, to whom, and what do you promise them? Then the headline, the copy, the picture, and the layout. The biggest failure leads the review, because no clever headline has ever repaired a broken strategy. What research teaches is separated from what is merely my preference.

Two confessions before you begin. The letter grade is this site's invention; I dealt in verdicts, not report cards. And I cannot tell you from a picture whether your advertisement will sell. Nobody honest can. What I can tell you is where it breaks the principles that made advertising sell, and what to do about it. The thirty-nine tests are printed below, in full. Read them before you upload. Most advertisements fail them.