Medspa Advertising: White space & upscale.

c1672.gifAdvertising is a common concern for cosmetic physicians and medispas. (Medspa Advertising & Marketing Discussions l Advertising & PR Category)

One of my businesses is an advertising agency and I understate the situation to the extreme when I say that the discussion of what constitutes good design and what clients think is effective is something of a joke in the industry. Clients see white space and instantly want to put something in it which aggravates designers to no end. First, because it really does look ugly, and second, because it makes it look cheap (and more than anything else, creatives hate cheap).

You can see that the Surface print ads we run have a fair amount of white space. Some of them are almost completely free of copy. We do this because it's effective and it speaks to our target audience.

I acknowledge of course that this site is not a blazing example of the use of white space or fantastic design skills. Why? Information is a tricky thing on line. I've opted to use the 'find it now' strategy of keeping the most used links readily available.

A list Aparts post on white space is spot on. The excerpt below is discussing a direct mail piece.

Take the following example.

Examples of direct mail vs. luxury brand design

Figure 3. Examples of direct mail vs. luxury brand design

The content is the same on both designs, as are the other elements, such as photography. Yet the two designs stand at opposite ends of the brand spectrum. Less whitespace = cheap; more whitespace = luxury.

A lot more goes into brand positioning than just whitespace, but as a brief lands on your desk for a luxury brand, it’s very likely that the client—and their target audience—expects whitespace and plenty of it to align the product with its competitors.

If your ads look like the first example, you're shooting yourself in the foot. There has never been a woman (and our patients are 93% female) that has ever wanted to have any medical treatment on her face performed by a medspa because it was the cheapest.

If you're in need of better advertising, you can contact Wild Blue Creative here