• Story-telling visuals -- e.g., The shot of the Jaguar hood ornament on a heavy-chain leash and Bluto sitting on Popeye (whose can of spinach lies nearby) triumphantly holding up a can of V-8!

All caught up? Well, this is episode four. This time, we’re looking at the vital factors of timing and placement and how you can heighten your message by tailoring it to where and when it appears.

The leaf that did not fall

In 1987, one of my clients at Young & Rubicam was the Royal Canadian Mint. Gold coins were hot investment vehicles then, and we were running a worldwide program to promote sales of the Canadian Maple Leaf, a one-ounce coin. Our main copy point was that the price of gold was an excellent hedge against unexpected fluctuations in the stock market.

Then, in October, it happened. The market crashed. Wall Street laid the biggest egg of the post-war. They say the New York Fire Department had squads patrolling the financial district with nets. But, as bad as it was, the drop proved our point. Stocks fell down and gold went up.

I was on a production trip to California when I heard about it, and I got on the phone to my art director and the account management team in New York. Two days later (we had the weekend to produce the ad), we had a full-page in the Wall Street Journal, showing a Canadian Maple Leaf Coin with the headline, "The Leaf That Did Not Fall." Our timing was exquisite. We not only had the market plunge, but we had every tree in North America (October, remember?) working for us.

We won a few awards, but more importantly, we made a point for the client that the investment community never forgot.

Even so, timing isn’t the only critical factor. Placement can be just as effective. A few years ago, just after take-off from Milwaukee’s Billy Mitchell airport, passengers with window seats could make out a huge sign on the roof of a brewery that said, "Ask Your Flight Attendant for a Miller Lite."

As a rule, outdoor advertising amounts to little more than litter on a stick. But occasionally, somebody uses it inventively and I certainly admire them for it. Like that wonderful series of perfectly placed boards for California Pizza Kitchen. They had one sign over a 99 cent store on Ventura Boulevard with an arrow pointing directly to the store that said, "If They Sold a Pizza for Under a Buck, They’d Really Have Something." Another was over a car wash. This one said, "So What if They Can Make Your Car Smell Like New? We’ll Make It Smell Like Santa Fe Chicken Pizza!"

But my personal favorite example of critical placement was a spread with a panoramic photo of a natural landscape, interrupted by a sign that announced:

"Coming Soon!!! 12-Theatre Cineplex!
Leaving Soon!!! Every plant, mammal, bird and reptile that lives here!"

The ad was signed by the Massachusetts Audubon Society. The sign it showed was so elegantly appropriate that even a picture of it was excellent advertising.