If there’s one type of ad campaign that gets me riled up and shouting epithets at magazines or the TV screen, it’s that of the random analogy. There’s one running now for a financial company whose name (lucky for them) escapes me. It features people doing senseless things -- a man attempting to relax in a beach chair in the midst of raging whitewater, for example -- with a line to the effect of “Not saving for retirement doesn’t make much sense either."

Well, yeah, true. Then again, choosing an unreliable cell phone service doesn’t make much sense either. Neither does buying a sub-par network server for your business. Or paying a lot for your muffler, for that matter. My point? The analogy between sitting in the middle of a raging river and not saving for retirement, as executed, is so loose that you could use it to talk about almost anything. What’s the point?

When you’re trying to market fairly intangible products and services of the sort we specialize in here at PARTNERS+simons -- financial services, healthcare, biotech, pharma, etc. -- as opposed to, say, laundry detergent or blue jeans, it can be challenging to creatively represent value propositions. The random analogy is tempting: it’s easy, and can be visually arresting. (I did, after all, stop and read the ad I described earlier.)

But in this grumpy writer’s opinion, an ad is much more effective -- and makes the company that runs it look a lot smarter -- if the analogy is tight. In the case of the aforementioned financial ad, how about a visual that’s actually about not planning ahead? Or at the very least, a line that draws a direct comparison between the visual and the problem at hand? Something like, “If you’re too relaxed about planning for retirement, you could find yourself in deep water.” It still wouldn’t be a very good ad. But at least it would make sense.