The CPA advertising battle for your mind

Harkening back more years than I probably want to remember, I arrived in Denver anxious to begin my college experience. It was my first trip to the Mile High City and after one of the hottest summers on record in New York it was a welcome relief to experience the refreshing atmosphere of the Southwest.

Strangely, one of the first things that struck me was the difference between the two cities in the quality of advertising – whether on television, radio or print. Coming from the literal heartbeat of advertising – Madison Avenue – the commercials in Colorado seemed humorously amateurish including one – and I kid you not - for a used car lot run by a man who went by the moniker “Honest Ira.”

Well flash forward several decades to in fact last week, where the spouse and I returned from a 7-day cruise that left from Miami. For those of you who are familiar with the East Coast of Florida – specifically the I-95 corridor from Miami to Palm Beach, among the most common sites along that route are massive billboards touting personal injury attorneys or ones promising spiritual redemption. I guess Florida logs far more auto or slip and fall accidents than the rest of the country and hosts an influx of residents seeking to repent.

But as it is “the season” as the accounting profession likes to refer to it, I did notice a few signs advertising the services of CPAs several of which carried warnings to the effect of “don’t try this at home.”

One obviously designed to appeal to Millennials advised them not to Instagram their completed 1099 forms, while another featured a man in what appeared to be a holding cell with the caption “I had no idea that it wasn’t deductible.”

I once interviewed one of the legends of Madison Avenue – Al Ries – who with his partner Jack Trout were often on the cutting edge of advertising and in the early 1970s introduced the concept of mind positioning – where an ad actually occupied a place in your head thereby multiplying its effectiveness.

So if you think about it, how many ads among the hundreds for tax services – including many large T100 firms can you specifically name? H&R Block? Turbo Tax? The reason being is that the commercials for those companies have positioned themselves up there somewhere. So naturally when you need tax preparation services, those two would be at “top of mind awareness.”

But if you happen to come across an ad for a CPA named Honest Ira, my advice would be to run – and fast.