Developing value for the customer is central to every business. Recently, I had a very interesting conversation regarding advertizing with Rick, a member of aitendant’s advisory board. The conversation centered on effective advertisements. Rick main point was on communicating value. He was a broken record, but with good reason. Rick simply states that the most effective way to communicate with the customer is to speak in terms of their value. Additionally, he continued, a good ad should meet the following criteria: be current, relevant and surprise the customer with a pleasant fork in the road. The fork in the road comment are my words and it means give the customer a pleasant surprise. More on that later. First is value, value, value, value! And there must be four of them. According to Rick, if you can demonstrate two ways you deliver value then the customer, they will listen; three ways their interest will be piqued and they will ask you questions and if you demonstrate value in four ways, they will sign on the dotted line. What is meant by value is the demonstration of each singular essence of what the product intends to deliver that is of tangible benefit to the customer. Having an appreciation of how your product or service delivers value will foster amazing conversations with your customer. The task before us was to create a very small ad that demonstrated value, was current, relevant and provided a pleasant surprise for the viewer. Please visit https://www.aitendant.com/solution/ad/everest/ for a practical example of our efforts. There are several basic rules that an ad must follow but for this example we wanted to additionally point out the three below: • Compelling headline (less than or equal to eight words) • A differentiated comparison • Call to action What is the value proposition of the ad? The most important value proposition is demonstrating the ability to sell products and services directly from a customer’s advertisement (image or video). The service or product is sold “in context†which the advertiser has determined to be most engaging to the customer thus maximizing the potential sale as well as advertizing dollar spent. The next two demonstrated value propositions are, (1) customers are not required to leave the ad to complete the sale thereby reducing pre/post purchase dissonance and (2) minimizing shopping cart abandonment. This increases customer engagement and presents a true “one click†checkout. Additional value features are demonstrated but those three are key to the strategic importance of the ad. The most important word in the last two paragraphs is “demonstrate†in its various forms. The message also had to be fresh and current. We focused on this by applying our method to the current technology of tablet computing and the perceived impact it will have on casual computing and thus ecommerce. We also maintained relevance by highlighting the change in technology with tablet computing and that aitendant is already a perfect fit. We don’t clam to have a crystal ball but at a minimum tablet computing is melding the very media rich content of magazines/video to portable casual computing devices. Games, books and newspapers are popular today but informational rich media is entering the tent. The last point is that a good ad will deliver a pleasant surprise to the viewer. I will demonstrate this by quoting Rick, “The best thing that can happen is that as a guy is riding the train home from the gym, he stumbles upon an aitendant enabled advertisement. He then goes home and tells his wife that he found this great feature that allows him to get the sneakers he always wanted by clicking on them and he never had to go anywhere else.†We hope you find this useful in creating your own ad and if you have any questions about our ad, how we can improve it or a path less traveled, please do not hesitate to contact us at www.aitendant.com, we will be happy to assist in any way we can (a team member have traveled the world, so we mean it literally).