Your advertising and marketing should add value. It should help your target audience make their life (or business) a little easier, a little more productive, etc. This is exactly the sort of thing I preach to our (Netconcepts’) clients: deliver something useful to your target audience through your web site, your search ads, your email campaigns, your blog, your RSS feeds, and so on. Here’s an example of value-added advertising that I stumbled across last week. State Insurance, an insurance company in New Zealand, has an ad campaign called “That’s helpful.” They’re running TV commercials and have print materials, like posters at their offices, supporting the campaign. Each poster offers a very practical and useful tip, like…

• Chewing gum while cutting onions will stop you from crying.
• Remove scuff marks from wooden floors with an eraser.
• Dangle a tennis ball from your garage ceiling. It will show you where to stop.
• When on holiday, get your neighbor to clear your letterbox.
• Instead of washing your paintbrush, wrap it up in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer.
• If you want visitors to take their shoes off, leave extra pairs at the door.

I quite like that campaign. They could do a lot more with it though. They haven’t used their website to support the campaign at all. The phrase “That’s helpful” doesn’t even appear anywhere on the site. What a missed opportunity! They should have compiled a big pile of helpful tips into a free e-book and made it available for download on the site and then promoted the e-book in their print materials, commercials, email campaigns, and of course on the website itself.