Yes, yes, I know, print advertising is dead, especially newspaper advertising – but ads still use space in other mediums, so apply these observations as you will.
Make the height of the ad part of the concept
Look how this 1966 Mobil ad really sells the comparison of car collision at 80 mph with the impact of a car dropped from a ten-story building.
You could have used a rooftop shot of the car going over; you could have shown a tighter shot of a car falling past a row of windows; you could have shown the crushed car at the base of the building; but Len Sirowitz of Doyle Dane Bernbach used the height of the newspaper space to show the full size of building, inviting us the imagine the long fall of the automobile and what happens when it hits the ground. And making a static photo feel as dramatic as the same demonstration in the accompanying TV commercial.
(The layout is even more brilliant when you consider that the ad was likely encountered by people reading the newspaper by holding it vertically.)
Make the width of the ad part of the concept
You may not immediately know you’re looking at an ad for Acapulco tourism, but the starkness and drama of this eye-stopping, eye-popping layout instantly pulls you in.
Produced around 1967 by Steve Frankfurt of Young & Rubicam, the ad uses the story of a man who dives daily off a 160-foot-high cliff. (“Acapulco is like that,” the copy tells us. “A little mad. A little wild.”)
You could shown the edge of the cliff and a pair of feet, looking down from the diver’s point of view. You could have shown him coming out of the water, dripping and elated. Or even, like the Mobil ad above, you could shown the height of the cliff, and a tiny diver launching himself into the air.
But Frankfurt used a dramatic angle and graphic simplicity to emphasize the grace of the diver in mid-air, his arms splayed to the very corners of the ad. (Appropriately, the ad ran during the agency’s “The Wings of Man” campaign for the airline.)
Make the corner of the ad part of the concept
I could show the well-known “Think Small” ad for Volkswagen, with its little VW in the upper left corner, but here’s an even better example (also from Doyle Dane Bernbach, this time by art director Charlie Piccarillo).
This 1963 ad for back-to-school clothes at Ohrbach’s department store turned the blank space of the ad into a stark wall, and pushed the boy off-center, slumping unhappily against the “side” of the ad.
You could have positioned the kid in the center of the page with same pouty expression. You could have put him in a tight closeup. But showing him dejected in the corner gets you not just a visually striking layout, it really sells his frustration at the thought of another school year. And note what he’s wearing (and not wearing). Shorts, tennis shoes, and no tee-shirt – more signifiers of the “summer freedom” he’s soon to be losing.
Or just make every square inch of the ad the whole concept
Another 1960s ad that can’t help but draw you in from Steve Frankfurt:
That small bit of copy at bottom right: “… And there are 27 other places in your life where Band-Aid Bandages ought to be.”
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(By the way, you’ll see these and many other classic ads at Dave Dye’s “Stuff from the Loft” web site, where he posts interviews and career retrospectives of advertising's most creative thinkers.)
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