Those would be easy fixes. What's always the bigger challenge is getting those item/price/description groupings looking right. We've all been conditioned to know what a professional business ad looks like. We've been into Best Buy and we've seen their advertising, and readers tend to see a correlation between the two. And it's how good these groupings look that many readers use as visual cues to determine wether they should spend more time on the ad (and ultimately respond).
As you can see, our designers were told to make the groupings look more like Best Buy, their main competition, as well as incorporate the other standard elements we teach in our seminars.
The final ad was much cleaner and was designed to get the right people seeing, reading, and responding. And that's exactly what happened. The response increase was dramatic.
