The Age of Involvement in advertising has arrived — yet many advertisers are still groping their way into it. Advertisers with no previous experience in testing and improvement of direct response print advertising are at a disadvantage.

This includes their ad agencies and creative departments. On a major effort or a new campaign, the agency may be seeking — rightly — a unique selling proposition, a high readership and recall scores. And last but not least, to please the client. But nothing else, except overall sales improvement over a period of time.

Then there are ad assignments which are none of the above, but “just another ad.”

I am convinced this is different from the mental attitude of agency and creative departments with direct response testing and results measurement experience. They don't just want to please the client, they're eager for a winner in terms of satisfactory or improved advertising cost per response or per sale, and return on advertising investment. And this eagerness causes them not only to search the product or service for its benefits, but to look into the prospect's mind to anticipate how the advertising message will be received.

These reflections are inspired by the ad for the Hilton HHonors program that I've chosen for this issue's makeover. It seems nobody worried about its readership and recall score, or amount of response. Wasn't important enough. From the look of it, it was “just another ad.” All it really did was please the client who OK'd it, presumably.

You can't even tell from the headline that it's announcing a sweepstakes: “Take the Million and Run.” If you took just the top of this ad out to a shopping mall and asked passersby, “What does this mean?” surely most of them would scratch their heads and say, “I dunno. How to rob a bank?”

Then the copy goes on to explain:

We're giving away a million HHonors bonus points for each day! That's right. Simply book your stay online with a Visa card at any Hilton Family Web site between January 1 and March 31, 2004. Complete your stay using your Visa card by April 15, 2004, and you'll earn 500 bonus points, plus you'll get an automatic entry for the chance to win a million more! Of course, Hilton HHonors is the only hotel program that allows you to Double Dip — or, earn both HHonors points and airline miles for the same stay — at more than 2,500 hotels worldwide. So, now is your chance to make already great rewards more rewarding than ever.

It's OK, but not very exciting. Doesn't make you want to run down to the passport office, does it?

In my makeover, I sought to accomplish three things:

1. Clarify and strengthen the promise in the headline

   One of the most powerful and effective direct response headlines, when possible, is what I call the delightful paradox — “Why, that's impossible, but it would be wonderful if it were true.” That's what I've used here.

   I also chose different illustrations for the headline, since a young couple running through the surf doesn't really convey much beyond “Take the million and run.”

2. Sell the sizzle, not the steak

   My first boss Victor Schwab was fond of quoting (and so am I) Dr. Samuel Johnson's spiel in auctioning off the contents of a brewery: “What we are selling here is not vats and barrels, but the possibility of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.” In the case of this Hilton HHonors ad, what is really being offered is not just a million free Hilton HHonors points, but rather what those free points can mean to you, the reader, if you're one of the lucky winners. My copy spells this out with a few examples.

3. Strengthen the interactivity

   Hilton's ad provides a Web site address but gives no reason for using it. My makeover promises “details” at the Web site, and “links to our Hilton Family establishments.” Furthermore, if I were King Hilton, my coded on-page URL would take you first to an especially created welcome page where visitors could be reminded of the sweepstakes and a counter would tell Hilton exactly how many responses each insertion of this ad stimulated. That way Hilton could measure the effectiveness of the ad as well as the comparative responsiveness of each publication in which the ad appeared.