For a start it uses a technique – most often used by loose inserts – of entwining the very act of reading it into the appeal. A regular user of the genre is Amnesty International with their inserts saying things such as, ‘Don’t throw this away’ and ‘…some people don’t want you to read this’.

Centrepoint have used a related idea with their teaser small ads of a homeless person followed by a large ad with a headline asking ‘Did you see John?’ – or whoever they feature. WaterAid recently ran an insert saying on its cover ’I’ve less than a minute to convince you to support Water Aid’.

This Farm Africa ad cleverly goes a step further by urging the readers to make sure they look at the other side of the page because they are about to cut out the coupon. Brilliant! What chutzpah! What’s more, they carry the idea right through into the body copy. Having set up the reasons they need the money, they say that mutilating your newspaper (by cutting the coupon) could feed the boy shown.

But this attention-getting trick is also neatly woven thoroughly into their appeal. They state the need, make the case why a long-term solution is preferable to yet more emergency aid and give a well- reasoned example of how just £30 will plant an acre of land with drought-tolerant crops. Even the coupon carries the theme through with its big ‘YES’ followed by ‘I want to help Farm Africa cut out hunger by planting drought-tolerant seeds’. Sometimes such wordplay can annoy but this works.