(Karen E. Hipp, Author, Do-It-Yourself Marketing) You've followed all "rules". You took out a few ads to promote your company, ran ad frequently and gave it time to turn into sales. Yet, here you are left with advertising bills to pay, and not much to show for it.

What went wrong? Maybe you were a Tom, Dick or Harry.

That means that actual ad itself that was produced by you, newspaper, your graphic artist etc. looked like every other ad you see in print. "But, you say, I was just doing what everyone else does." Exactly. Hopefully you don't have a product quite like everyone else so why should your advertising look like everyone else?

Just like your product, your advertising must "stand out" from crowd to get noticed.

I'm not making this up. But when I was working for a large company, I was responsible for "creation" of ads. The size, headline, overall look, etc. We placed a lot of ads. Sometimes up to 5 times a week in our local paper. One day as I was skimming through paper looking for our ad, I couldn't find it. Irate because someone at paper must have screwed up, I called my account executive. She started going through that morning's paper on her desk and15 seconds later said,

"Here it is, on page 4."

Yup. There it was. Sheepishly, I apologized to my account rep and gently put down phone.

I couldn't find our own ad! And it was big! If I couldn't find it, I'm certain there were many others who didn't either. Ok, there were two possible scenarios.

I had seen ad in paper so much, that it became invisible to me. The ad never really did stand out.