To make a commercial, you need to have a message. As is often the case, you need to have a target audience as well. In the case of Veterans Affairs, your target audience is veterans. The first step to any effective commercial is to make a connection. It doesn’t matter if you have a TV commercial, radio commercial or even a print ad – without that connection, your readers are lost.
Let’s say you wanted to make a commercial about how to help veterans apply for VA benefits. In this case, you can cater to the mental connection by displaying images of people serving their country. This can be people in uniform, an American flag waving in the background, or display someone who has clearly been in the military but is now disabled. The point of this first part of your message is to tell people that you know what it’s like to be in their shoes. To make this connection, people mentally need to say to themselves, “Hey! That can be me.”
For a typical 30-second television commercial, time is not on your side. That’s OK because it doesn’t take more than six or seven seconds to make that initial connection. That clearly leaves you from 20 to 25 seconds to get your message across. The message, in this case, is to inform veterans how easy it is to apply for VA benefits.
There’s lots of information you need to include in that little time slot you have. You need to include who you are, what your organization does or represents, and then your message. To really construct your message, you may want to qualify your readers or viewers. You can do that by giving out three or four small bullet points of information that is easy to understand so that the reader or viewer can instantly see if he passes the “qualification test.” The qualification test can also be a small question or two that “qualifies” the person in their mind that tells them whether or not they are eligible for VA benefits.
Qualifying a person lets them know if they should proceed with the next step. Afterward, you need to include things like the website, the form you need to fill out which is the 10-10EZ: Application for Health Benefits. You may be able to include these links on your own website or simply direct them to the government website. The point is you have very little time to convey a massive amount of information. Use your time wisely, and you can successfully get your information in front of the right target audience. The more people you reach, the more effective your commercial will be. Click here to find more info
