A “Half-Baked” Ad That Misses the Mark: Why Copywriters Should Avoid “Borrowed Interest” Advertising

“Borrowed interest” is perhaps the most inept—and ineffective—approach to advertising today … yet its use is widespread.

In “borrowed interest advertising,” the marketer can’t think of anything interesting to say about their product. So they “borrow” interest for the ad from somewhere else.

A case in point is CHEMCAD.

CHEMCAD is “process simulation software” sold by a company called ChemStations. Process simulation software is used by engineers to design chemical plants.

The full-page, four-color ad ChemStations currently running in Chemical Engineering Progress (CEP) magazine has this headline: “What is CHEMCAD?”

Not terribly strong, because most readers have no awareness of CHEMCAD and therefore the first reply that comes to their mind is: “Who cares?”

The visual, surprisingly, is not an image of a chemical plant—but rather, a photo of a big cake on a large white cake dish.

The body copy in the ad is a list of five things you can do with CHEMCAD software. Incredibly, one of the bullets, highlighted to make it stand out from the rest, says that CHEMCAD “Bakes the perfect cake.”

Huh?

Of course, CHEMCAD has absolutely nothing to do with baking cakes.

The creators of borrowed interest ads—including ChemStations and their misguided cake ad—operate under the erroneous belief that the product is uninteresting and would bore the reader. The fallacy in this thinking is that it doesn’t take into consideration the question of: boring to whom?

They attempt to compensate by bringing in a subject that, although way off-topic, they think for some odd reason might grab the reader’s attention. Now, I suppose you could argue that baking a cake from a recipe has some vague similarities to software design—though that’s a real stretch.

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Chemical engineers buy process simulation software to help drive productivity, accomplish day-to-day tasks, and tackle the toughest chemical process design challenges. That’s what’s important to the chemical engineer reading the ad and tasks with designing process simulation software.

Their company’s success, along with their own careers, compensation, and success, depends on good process software design. So why not state that plainly instead of using the metaphor of baking a cake?

Any way you slice it, ChemStations’ borrowed interest CHEMCAD ad is simply subpar—totally misses the mark. And unlike real cake, leaves a bad taste in my mouth.