Total Recall Find out what the latest research can teach you about creating ads your prospects won't forget.

Companies spend billions of marketing dollars each year todesign memorable ad campaigns. But what does it really take to makeyour business's name or message stick in a prospect's mind?These methods will make your next campaign memorable:

• Engage prospects. The moretime someone spends with your ad, the more likely he or she is toremember it. "Vivid processing leads to better storage ofmemory," says Elizabeth F. Loftus, University of California,Irvine, distinguished professor of psychology, author of 21 booksand an expert on memory malleability. The best ads get theadvertiser or brand into the minds of prospects as they considerdifferent possibilities.

How can you get prospects to spend more time with your ads?According to Philip W. Sawyer, director of Starch Communications, aHarrison, New York, testing firm specializing in readershipstudies, the most memorable print ads have messages that grab thereader. Those ads include headlines that contain a benefit and astrong visual focal point, such as a close-up of a model lookingdirectly at you. One large photo works best in magazines, while innewspapers, you can use multiproduct visuals. A StarchCommunications study on behalf of the Newspaper Association ofAmerica showed that when three-quarters of ad space was devoted toillustrations, recognition rates improved by 50 percent.

• Add color and contrast. Formagazine readers, high-contrast images also boost recognition. WhenStarch Communications tested two identical ads for Stolichnayavodka-one with a white background and another with a blackbackground-twice as many people remembered seeing the version withthe black background, even though everything else in the ad was thesame.

Testing also shows that, on average, larger ads in print mediaare more memorable. However, a creative ad in a small space can bemore memorable than a so-so one that takes up a full page.

Some colors enhance memorability in print media-including skyblue, golden yellow and shades of blue-green. Red is a good spotcolor in newspapers, where Sawyer says color increases recognitionby 20 percent. But there's new information about four-color adsin magazines: A few years ago, color ads earned 24 percent higherrecognition scores than black-and-white ads. Now, full-pageblack-and-white campaigns are breaking through the clutter, andfour-color ads have lost their advantage.

• Communicate frequently.Repetition is important to memorability. At the Washington University School ofMedicine in St. Louis, psychologist Mark E. Wheeler conducted astudy of memory in which a word was paired with a picture or soundmany times over several days to test subjects' recognitionrates. He says exposure to information in different contexts helpsyou remember it. So when you see a message in different formats,such as a print ad, a billboard and a TV commercial, he says,"You associate the different impressions, and that helps youretrieve the information when you need it."

• Use memorable benefits. Adsthat grab and hold a prospect's attention are those thatimmediately communicate a benefit that answers the question,What's in it for me? The bottom line, says Sawyer, is thatfeatures aren't memorable-benefits are. "If you have aheadline that states a benefit, people will read it, remember itand clip it out of the magazine or newspaper and hold onto it. Andthat's the trump card for everything."