Martin I Williams (Minneapolis)

For starters, I want to apologize for the blurry photo! I searched and searched for this advertisement online and this was the best I found. This print advertisement for Syngenta's Lumax herbicide, created by Minneapolis-based agency Martin I William, was targeted specifically to farmers, who have a reputation of being very tough and untrusting of advertising. Lumax was a new herbicide that needed to be sprayed only once a season, unlike other weed control products that farmers needed to spray three or more times. Martin I William's difficult task was to encourage trial use of Lumax among farmers in a specific Northern corn belt region, on a tight budget. The campaign ran in an agricultural publication called Farm Journal because Martin/Williams knew it would reach and influence Lumax's target audience. Martin I Williams defeated all odds and came up with a humerous ad that not only helped Lumax onto an impressive 2.5 million acres in its first year, but also won the agency "Best in Show" at the 8th Annual Creative Excellence in Business Advertising (CEBA) Awards. The copy of this print ad says "The beehive hairdo was "sprayed 32 times" while the cornfield was "sprayed once." It was very interesting for me to research an ad targeted to a very small/specific target group because I'm use to seeing advertisements with big target audiences such as Nike, Target, Honda, etc. I think the Martin I Williams agency did an excellent job with this print ad because it's simple, funny, and clearly makes its point. They were smart to place this ad directly into a Farming magazine because had they put it in a popular mainstream magazine they just would have wasted money.