If you use print advertising as part of your marketing mix and your ads are cluttered they generally will not pull like clean and crisp advertising does with simple messages. As a young man I sold advertising for a very popular Aviation Magazine Called the Pacific Flyer and the Editor and Publisher Wayman Dunlop use to always tell me to keep my clients from cluttering their advertising.

Eventually I realized if I allowed my customers to clutter their ads too much they would not pull the proper results and there would be fewer repeat customers. He was right then and that same principle is very true today.

Do not clutter you ads. You see, today even more so, because people are busy and only scan the advertising, you only have a second to catch their eye and make them look and if it is too cluttered their eye moves on that the advertising dollar is lost.

So, often small business owners who advertise want to put as much as they can in their yellow page ads and in their newspaper or print advertising and often against better judgment from their advertising representative mostly due to ego the ad stays cluttered and is not effective.

If you pick up any trade journal in any industry you will see the same thing. Every month I read over 70 Trade Journals or rather page thru them and read parts. Due to habit I also look at all the ads and only rarely do you see the perfect, simple ad, which conveys the message and grabs the reader. You should consider all of this in 2006.