In today’s modern media age you shouldn’t base your advertising future on the newspaper. But when I recently saw a newspaper ad and poster hanging in the window of a carpet store in Iowa I immediately did a U-turn because it caught my attention.

Now, it’s true that if I wasn’t in the advertising business I probably wouldn’t have paid attention to it, but it was still striking enough to make me look.

Too many advertisers try to put too many messages in an ad just because they have the space. This is a great example of an ad that sells a couple of key points and then the poster focuses on the most important message.