When you are flipping through a magazine how much attention, do you usually give to an advertisement? Quite often while I'm looking at a magazine I'll just flip right past the pages with the ad, giving it only a second or so of my attention, if that.

This does not mean I never pay attention to magazine ads. Quite often I will stop to give one ad or another more of my attention. Why? Because in those few seconds I glanced at it the ad managed to make me want to see more. How did it accomplish this? The image.

A catchy headline is always effective, true, but not as the only hook. If a headline is large enough and short enough I might be able to take it in enough during those few seconds to want to read more, but quite often, my mind does not pick up any of it. An image can achieve what a headline is incapable of.

Images register in the mind a lot faster than any sentence ever could. What this means for your color printing is the need for an eye grabbing picture.

I cannot tell you any one kind of image that will always work because there simply is not one. Every product is going to have a different kind of style or design that best suits it and best grabs a person's attention.

There are some pitfalls you should be careful about avoiding.

Unlike words, an image is open to a certain amount of interpretation. You can have a specific meaning within the image in relation to your product and be completely unaware of another possibility that might hurt you more than help. Be sure to do the right kind of research on whatever your picture is going to be before releasing it in order to avoid these possibly negative interpretations.

Another factor is how prominent your company name or logo is within the picture. Quite often, a company will spend so much of its energy on creating a unique, eye grabbing image, and then shove their logo into the bottom corner of the ad. It might grab my attention, but that does not mean I will come away being aware of whom the company is, or even what product they are trying to sell me.

I have seen quite a few ads before with interesting images. After looking over them I cannot fathom who the company is or even what kind of products they sell because too much time was spent on making something catchy without considering how it relates to the company.

The image is merely meant to grab their attention. An ad needs to have more than just the image if it is going to convey a useful point to the person looking at it.

Given how little time is spent on any given ad, if you want people to really look at yours you have to use color printing to create that unique, vibrant image. Just be sure that you are doing more than just making them linger. Seize the opportunity, and make something people will remember for days afterwards, along with the name of your company.