Know your audience

16th November 2006, Design, Other

Ryan Carson’s response to my last post on zero advertising got me thinking. He wonders why the advert was so unsuccessful. To me it has to be point one - “DropSend is not right for the audience.” It could be their readership is down but i checked the circulation printed inside the edition in question and it was 19,512 - I’d say if the audience was right you’d get a better return than 1 in nearly 20,000. Creative Review’s audience is designers which suits DropSend, but most are in ad agencies and the like who have subscriptions - you can buy it off the shelf but I think its mostly an industry mag.

From my early days of agencies and production rooms I remember online infrastructure was adopted extremely early. ISDN lines were installed and pretty good online links were established between printers and production rooms. These guys have been swapping large files for the best part of a decade at least.

This being the case, I’d imagine most of the readership that saw an advert selling the ability to send large files probably thought, “So what?” and flicked onto the next page.