What technical communicators can learn from ads we love to hate

We all have at least one of them: A TV or radio advertisement that we just can’t stand. The acting is amateurish. The dialog is stilted. The music is ear-piercing. To make matters worse, the ad is on the air for weeks or months at a time. It seems like the only way to avoid these ads is to become a luddite and avoid modern communication altogether.

A diamond in the rough?

A series of radio ads that has been plaguing me on my morning commutes to work for years is from a Canadian jeweler. I’m not alone in my dislike of these ads. They’ve spawned rants on YouTube and Reddit and even at least one petition to pull the ads from the airwaves altogether.

These ads, which are mostly short scripts involving a revolving set of eccentric characters espousing the merit’s of the company’s diamond rings and other jewelry, are about as far from the DeBeers “A Diamond is Forever” campaign as possible. As irritating as I find these ads, I have to admit that they are effective. If these ads didn’t exist or were more conventional in their format, I—and I suspect many other daily commuters in Canada—probably wouldn’t even know the company that pays for them existed.

Even the negative publicity these ads generate builds brand recognition for their company a la PT Barnum. As much as those who post their dislike of these ads on YouTube or Reddit might wish to drive sales away from their company, they may also be inadvertently informing others about the jewelry company.

Breaking through the noise

But what—if anything—can we as technical communicators learn from such ads?

Our audience members live in a world that’s saturated in content delivered to them through multiple channels: TV, radio, phones, computers, etc. This is nothing new (I learned about it in college over a quarter century ago), but it’s likely only going to get worse as AI grows and advertisers and others find new means of delivering their content. Even pumps at some gas stations and washrooms in some restaurants and other public places feature screens with promotional content.

Most audience members have learned to tune out most of the content to which they’re exposed. It’s probably safe to say that at least some of that content is created by technical communicators.

So how do we break through the shields our audience members have built? Is creating good content good enough? Probably not.

Finding our audience’s rush hours

First, we have to go where the audience is. Simply posting our manuals and other documentation on a website and hoping our audience stumbles upon them isn’t going to cut it. One of the reasons the jewelry ads are so effective is that they play during the morning and afternoon rush hours, exactly when most prospective customers are driving to and from work.

As technical communicators, we need to learn when and where our audience members’ rush hours are and make sure our content is there for them. This might be as simple as adding a link or button to a commonly viewed screen for a software product or a label with a QR code or short URL to a hardware product.

Grabbing our audience’s attention

Next, we need to make sure our content grabs our audience’s attention. The jewelry ads accomplish this with eccentric characters and exaggerated dialog. Other ads include humor, jingles, loud noises, and bright colors. I’m not suggesting we need to start injecting such elements into documentation, but if we want to be noticed by users, we need to move beyond black-and-white documents with Helvetica font and minimal imagery. With online delivery, we have a lot of options available to us—video, interactivity, and more—and we need to start exploring these options if we want to engage our audience.

When the perfect is the enemy of the good

Finally, technical communicators have a reputation for being detail-oriented perfectionists. This serves us well when it comes to the technical content of our documentation. It’s less effective when we spend time and effort worrying about finer points of punctuation and grammar.

The jewelry company puts out a lot of ads during the span of a year—at least one new ad per month. It’s safe to say these ads are far from perfect. They don’t need to be. They just need to be good enough to get the company’s message across. As technical communicators, we need to adapt a similar mindset. We need to define what our “good enough” is and accept that our audience doesn’t care about anything beyond that.

Engaging a content-saturated audience is already challenging. It’s only gong to be more challenging in the future. Imagine a world where our users are exposed to AI-generated, personalized content nearly every waking hour. The shields they will likely build for themselves will be formidable. Conventional documentation simply won’t be able to break through these shields.

So the next time you find yourself on a long commute to work and one of those ads you love to hate comes on the radio, don’t turn down the volume. Listen instead. It might impart some valuable wisdom.