To attract your audience, you have to talk the same language. This is where the I for interest and then D for desire in AIDA are important – plus understanding customer behaviour and the things that make them tick.

Siemens does this well. Their campaigns may cover similar phones with similar benefits, but they work out carefully how the benefits of the product can be matched to a target group and communicated in a way that arouses interest and focuses this interest on the Siemens product.

For example this press ad, clearly targetted men (and quite possibly older “my wife gets on my nerves” men):

The benefit it was selling was that you could record a noise and make it your ringtone. It was part of a broader campaign showing all the noises you could use. Each noise addressed a different target group.

Then there is this press ad targetted at young, sociables:

It’s pretty see-through. One could ask: to get the benefit understood, should you hold up a mirror to your target group and only show people they can associate with? Well, not always. Older women are easily hooked in advertising by showing pictures of a man holding a baby (better still, a fireman rescuing a baby really gets tear-jerking reactions from the grandma generation).

But it does help to understand what moves them. And attracting interest and focussing the desire on you is the best way to move cognitive reactions in advertising into affective.