Your Six Supporting Messages

A warning from a lifelong adman. Believing a pitch is all about one element alone is a dangerous ploy.

I caught Jonathan Gabay on the airwaves impart this wisdom;

‘with any ad campaign … you have to have a very key and clear message … if you have a number one message that’s fine, but then you’ve got to have the six supporting messages that give it gravitas, meat on the bone’

At once, I was both touched with hope and concern by this copywriter’s creed.

To begin with, it is surely widely recognised how beneficial it is to develop a singular, prime and core message behind which to line up.

It’s amazing how many product sells fail to exhibit clarity from such pitch focus.

Then you think about how handy having a backup sextet of deeper pitches would be.

Anything that helps hammer home your main point is to be welcomed.

Yet I couldn’t help recalling instances where trying to mould a salesteam into nailing delivery of even just a sole, dominant message floundered.

Trying to imprint a further half-dozen in their routines can seem tricky enough. But to then also attempt to not only cement that their right order and weighting gets applied but there’s also apt deployment of the follow-up six in conversation, with everything else selling that is required to be kept for rapid retrieval, can feel practically beyond the horizon.

The potential saving grace for giving this approach a go, is in the jab of the six.

Winning examples boast just a handy two or three words short. Easy to run formats, like; better ‘x’, ‘n’ more ‘y’, eliminated ‘z’.

So perhaps there is Sales merit in this advertising suggestion after all.