46KB
Ogilvy on Advertising — Chapter-02: How to produce advertising that sells
- Source: /library/Ogilvy on Advertising/source-file.pdf
- PDF pages: 11–48
- Pages without text: 25, 27, 29, 32, 38, 42
- OCR note: OCR is supplied below for image-only pages; multi-column reading order may be imperfect, so consult the PDF for layout and visuals.
2 HOW TO PRODUCE ADVERTISING THAT SELLS Pretend you started work this morning in my agency, and that you have dropped by my office to ask for advice. I will start with some generalities about how to go about your work. In later chapters I will give you more specific advice on producing advertisements for magazines, newspapers, television and radio. I ask you to forgive me for over-simplifying some complicated subjects, and for the dogmatism of brevity. We are both in a hurry. The first thing I have to say is that you may not realize the magnitude of difference between one advertisement and another. Says John Caples, the doyen of direct response copywriters: ‘I have seen one advertisement actually sell not twice as much, not three times as much, but 19½ times as much as another. Both advertisements occupied the same space. Both were run in the same publication. Both had photographic illustrations. Both had carefully written copy. The difference was that one used the right appeal and the other used the wrong appeal.’* The wrong advertising can actually reduce the sales of a product. I am told that George Hay Brown, at one time head of marketing research at Ford, inserted advertisements in every other copy of the Reader’s Digest. At the end of the year, the people who had not been exposed to the advertising had bought more Fords than those who had.
In another survey it was found that consumption of a certain brand of beer was lower among people who remembered its advertising than those who did not. The brewer had spent millions of dollars on advertising which un-sold his beer. I sometimes wonder if there is a tacit conspiracy among clients, media and agencies to avoid putting advertising to such acid tests. Everyone involved has a vested interest in prolonging the myth that all advertising increases sales to some degree. It doesn’t. DO YOUR HOMEWORK You don’t stand a tinker’s chance of producing successful advertising unless you start by doing your homework. I have always found this extremely tedious, but there is no substitute for it. First, study the product you are going to advertise. The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a big idea for selling it. When I got the Rolls-Royce account, I spent three weeks reading about the car and came across a statement that ‘at sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise comes from the electric clock’. This became the headline, and it was followed by 607 words of factual copy. Later, when I got the Mercedes account, I sent a team to the Daimler-Benz headquarters in Stuttgart. They spent three weeks taping interviews with the engineers. From this came a campaign of long, factual advertisements which increased Mercedes sales in the United States from 10,000 cars a year to 40,000. When I was asked to do the advertising for Good Luck margarine, I was under the impression that margarine was made from coal. But ten days’ reading enabled me to write a factual advertisement which worked. Same thing with Shell gasoline. A briefing from the client revealed something which came as a surprise to me; that gasoline has several ingredients, including Platformate, which increases mileage. The resulting campaign helped to reverse a seven-year decline in Shell’s share-of-market. If you are too lazy to do this kind of homework, you may occasionally luck into a successful campaign, but you will run the risk of skidding about on what my brother Francis called ‘the slippery surface of irrelevant brilliance’. Your next chore is to find out what kind of advertising your competitors have been doing for similar products, and with what success. This will give you your bearings.
Now comes research among consumers. Find out how they think about your kind of product, what language they use when they discuss the subject, what attributes are important to them, and what promise would be most likely to make them buy your brand. If you cannot afford the services of professionals to do this research, do it yourself. Informal conversations with half-a-dozen housewives can sometimes help a copywriter more than formal surveys in which he does not participate. POSITIONING Now consider how you want to ‘position’ your product. This curious verb is in great favor among marketing experts, but no two of them agree what it means. My own definition is ‘what the product does, and who it is for’. I could have positioned Dove as a detergent bar for men with dirty hands, but chose instead to position it as a toilet bar for women with dry skin. This is still working 25 years later. In Norway, the SAAB car had no measurable profile. We positioned it as a car for winter. Three years later, it was voted the best car for Norwegian winters. To advertise a car that looked like an orthopedic boot would have defeated me. But Bill Bernbach and his merry men positioned Volkswagen as a protest against the vulgarity of Detroit cars in those days, thereby making the Beetle a cult among those Americans who eschew conspicuous consumption. BRAND IMAGE You now have to decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the market place. The personality of a product is an amalgam of many things – its name, its packaging, its price, the style of its advertising, and, above all, the nature of the product itself. Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the brand image. It follows that your advertising should consistently project the same image, year after year. This is difficult to achieve, because there are always forces at work to change the advertising – like a new agency, or a new Marketing Director who wants to make his mark. It pays to give most products an image of quality – a First Class ticket. This is particularly true of products whose brand name is visible to your friends, like beer, cigarettes and automobiles: products you ‘wear’. If your advertising looks
cheap or shoddy, it will rub off on your product. Who wants to be seen using shoddy products? Take whiskey. Why do some people choose Jack Daniel’s, while others choose Grand Dad or Taylor? Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don’t make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to different kinds of people. It isn’t the whiskey they choose, it’s the image. The brand image is 90 per cent of what the distiller has to sell. Researchers at the Department of Psychology at the University of California gave distilled water to students. They told some of them that it was distilled water, and asked them to describe its taste. Most said it had no taste of any kind. They told the other students that the distilled water came out of the tap. Most of them said it tasted horrible. The mere mention of tap conjured up an image of chlorine. Give people a taste of Old Crow, and tell them it’s Old Crow. Then give them another taste of Old Crow, but tell them it’s Jack Daniel’s. Ask them which they prefer. They’ll think the two drinks are quite different. They are tasting images. I have always been hypnotized by Jack Daniel’s. The label and the advertising convey an image of homespun honesty, and the high price makes me assume that Jack Daniel’s must be superior. Writing advertising for any kind of liquor is an extremely subtle art. I once tried using rational facts to argue the consumer into choosing a brand of whiskey. It didn’t work. You don’t catch Coca Cola advertising that Coke contains 50 per cent more cola berries. Next time an apostle of ‘hard sell’ questions the importance of brand images, ask him how Marlboro climbed from obscurity to become the biggest-selling cigarette in the world. Leo Burnett’s cowboy campaign, started 25 years ago and continued to this day, has given the brand an image which appeals to smokers all over the world. WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA? You can do homework from now until doomsday, but you will never win fame and fortune unless you also invent big ideas. It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea. I am supposed to be one of the more fertile inventors of big ideas, but in my long career as a copywriter I have not had more than 20, if that. Big ideas come from
the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath or drinking half a pint of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you. My partner Esty Stowell complained that the first commercial I wrote for Pepperidge Farm bread was sound enough, but lacking in imagery. That night I dreamed of two white horses pulling a baker’s delivery van along a country lane at a smart trot. Today, 27 years later, that horse-drawn van is still driving up that lane in Pepperidge commercials. When asked what was the best asset a man could have, Albert Lasker – the most astute of all advertising men – replied, ‘Humility in the presence of a good idea.’ It is horribly difficult to recognize a good idea. I shudder to think how many I have rejected. Research can’t help you much, because it cannot predict the cumulative value of an idea, and no idea is big unless it will work for 30 years. One of my partners came up with the idea of parading a herd of bulls through Merrill Lynch commercials under the slogan – ‘Merrill Lynch is bullish on America.’ I thought it was dopey, but fortunately it had been approved before I saw it. Those bulls are still parading, long after the account moved to another agency. It will help you recognize a big idea if you ask yourself five questions:
- Did it make me gasp when I first saw it?
- Do I wish I had thought of it myself?
- Is it unique?
- Does it fit the strategy to perfection?
- Could it be used for 30 years? You can count on your fingers the number of advertising campaigns that run even for five years. These are the superstars, the campaigns that go right on producing results through boom and recession, against shifting competitive pressures, and changes of personnel. The Hathaway eyepatch first appeared in 1951 and is still going strong. Every Dove commercial since 1955 has promised that, ‘Dove doesn’t dry your skin the way soap can.’ The American Express commercials, ‘Do you know me?’ have been running since 1975. And Leo Burnett’s Marlboro campaign has been running for 25 years.
MAKE THE PRODUCT THE HERO Whenever you can, make the product itself the hero of your advertising. If you think the product too dull, I have news for you: there are no dull products, only dull writers. I never assign a product to a writer unless I know that he is personally interested in it. Every time I have written a bad campaign, it has been because the product did not interest me. A problem which confronts agencies is that so many products are no different from their competitors. Manufacturers have access to the same technology; marketing people use the same research procedures to determine consumer preferences for color, size, design, taste and so on. When faced with selling ‘parity’ products, all you can hope to do is explain their virtues more persuasively than your competitors, and to differentiate them by the style of your advertising. This is the ‘added value’ which advertising contributes, and I am not sufficiently puritanical to hate myself for it. ‘THE POSITIVELY GOOD’ My partner Joel Raphaelson has articulated a feeling which has been growing in my mind for some time: ‘In the past, just about every advertiser has assumed that in order to sell his goods he has to convince consumers that his product is superior to his competitor’s. ‘This may not be necessary. It may be sufficient to convince consumers that your product is positively good. If the consumer feels certain that your product is good and feels uncertain about your competitor’s, he will buy yours. ‘If you and your competitors all make excellent products, don’t try to imply that your product is better. Just say what’s good about your product – and do a clearer, more honest, more informative job of saying it. ‘If this theory is right, sales will swing to the marketer who does the best job of creating confidence that his product is positively good.’ This approach to advertising parity products does not insult the intelligence of consumers. Who can blame you for putting your best foot forward?
REPEAT YOUR WINNERS If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling. Scores of good advertisements have been discarded before they lost their potency. Research shows that the readership of an advertisement does not decline when it is run several times in the same magazine. Readership remains at the same level throughout at least four repetitions. You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to couples who got married last year will probably be just as successful with couples who get married this year. A good advertisement can be thought of as a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar, and keep it sweeping. Henry Ford once said to a copywriter on his account, ‘Bill, that campaign of yours is dandy, but do we have to run it forever?’ To which the copywriter replied, ‘Mr Ford, the campaign has not yet appeared.’ Ford had seen it too often at too many meetings. The best way to settle such arguments is to measure the selling effectiveness of your campaign at regular intervals, and to go on running it until the research shows that it has worn out. WORD OF MOUTH It sometimes happens that advertising campaigns enter the culture. Thus the musical theme in a Maxwell House coffee commercial became Number 7 on the hit parade. After Commander Whitehead started appearing in Schweppes advertising, he became a popular participant in talk shows on television. This kind of thing is manna from heaven, but nobody knows how to do it on purpose. At least, I don’t. Fifty years ago attempts were made in England to cultivate word-of-mouth advertising by spreading anecdotes like this one: ‘An old farmer was walking down a road, bent double with rheumatism. Someone in a Rolls-Royce stopped to speak to him. Told him to take Beecham’s Pills. Do you know who it was? The King’s Doctor!’ DOWN WITH COMMITTEES
Most campaigns are too complicated. They reflect a long list of objectives, and try to reconcile the divergent views of too many executives. By attempting to cover too many things, they achieve nothing. Many commercials and many advertisements look like the minutes of a committee. In my experience, committees can criticize, but they cannot create. ‘Search the parks in all your cities You’ll find no statues of committees.’ Agencies have a way of creating campaigns in committees. They call it ‘team- work’. Who can argue with team-work? The process of producing advertising campaigns moves at a snail’s pace. Questions of strategy are argued by committees of the client’s brand managers and the agency’s account executives, who have a vested interest in prolonging the argument as much as possible; it is how they earn their living. The researchers take months to answer elementary questions. When the copywriters finally get down to work, they dawdle about in brain-storming sessions and other forms of wheel-spinning. If a copywriter averages an hour a week writing, he is exceptional. The average period of gestation is somewhere between that of hyenas (110 days) and goats (151 days). For example, storyboards for commercials are argued at level after level in the agency, and level after level in the client’s organization. If they survive, they are then produced and tested. The average copywriter gets only three commercials a year on air. AMBITION Few copywriters arc ambitious. It does not occur to them that if they tried hard enough, they might double the client’s sales, and make themselves famous. ‘Raise your sights!’ I exhort them. ‘Blaze new trails! Hit the ball out of the park!! Compete with the immortals!!!’ Leo Burnett said it better, ‘When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.’ PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE I once asked Sir Hugh Rigby, Surgeon to King George V, ‘What makes a great surgeon?’ Sir Hugh replied, ‘There isn’t much to choose between surgeons in
manual dexterity. What distinguishes the great surgeon is that he knows more than other surgeons.’ It is the same with advertising agents. The good ones know more. I asked an indifferent copywriter what books he had read about advertising. He told me that he had not read any; he preferred to rely on his own intuition. ‘Suppose,’ I asked, ‘your gall-bladder has to be removed this evening. Will you choose a surgeon who has read some books on anatomy and knows where to find your gall-bladder, or a surgeon who relies on his intuition? Why should our clients be expected to bet millions of dollars on your intuition?’ This willful refusal to learn the rudiments of the craft is all too common. I cannot think of any other profession which gets by on such a small corpus of knowledge. Millions are spent on testing individual commercials and advertisements, but next to nothing is done to analyse the results of those tests in search of plus and minus factors. Advertising textbooks have nothing to say on the subject. When he had been head of J. Walter Thompson for 45 years, the great Stanley Resor told me, ‘Every year we spend hundreds of millions of dollars of our clients’ money. At the end of it, what do we know? Nothing. So two years ago I asked four of our people to try and identify factors which usually work. They already have twelve.’ I was too polite to tell him that I had 96. Advertising agencies waste their client’s money repeating the same mistakes. I recently counted 49 advertisements set in reverse (white type on black background) in one issue of a magazine, long years after research demonstrated that reverse is difficult to read. What is the reason for this failure to codify experience? Is it that advertising does not attract inquiring minds? Is it that any kind of scientific method is beyond the grasp of ‘creative’ people? Are they afraid that knowledge would impose some discipline on their work? It has not always been so. When George Gallup was Research Director at Young & Rubicam in the thirties, he not only measured the readership of advertisements, he accumulated the scores and analysed them. Certain techniques, he found, consistently out-performed others. A brilliant art director called Vaughn Flannery latched on to Gallup’s discoveries and applied them. Within a few months, Young & Rubicam advertisements were being read by more people than any other agency’s, to the incalculable benefit of their clients. Mills Shepherd conducted similar research on the editorial content in McCall’s, and came up with similar results. He found, for example, that photographs of finished dishes consistently attracted more readers than
photographs of the raw ingredients. Recipes, printed on recipe cards, were sure- fire with housewives. Using the same research technique, Harold Sykes measured the readership of advertisements in newspapers. He reported that ‘editorial’ graphics were consistently high performers. In 1947, Harold Rudolph, who had been Research Director in Stirling Getchel’s agency, published a book on the subject.* One of his observations was that photographs with an element of ‘story appeal’ were far above average in attracting attention. This led me to put an eye-patch on the model in my advertisements for Hathaway shirts. Later, the advertising community turned its back on such research. Agencies which pioneered the search for knowledge now excel in violating the principles their predecessors had discovered. Clients sometimes change agencies because one agency can buy circulation at a slightly lower cost than another. They don’t realize that a copywriter who knows his factors – the triggers which make people read advertisements – can reach many times more readers than a copywriter who doesn’t. For 35 years I have continued on the course charted by Gallup, collecting factors the way other men collect pictures and postage stamps. If you choose to ignore these factors, good luck to you. A blind pig can sometimes find truffles, but it helps to know that they are found in oak forests. It is remarkable how little the plus and minus factors have changed over the years. With very few exceptions, consumers continue to react to the same techniques in the same ways. THE LESSONS OF DIRECT RESPONSE For all their research, most advertisers never know for sure whether their advertisements sell. Too many other factors cloud the equation. But direct- response advertisers, who solicit orders by mail or telephone, know to a dollar how much each advertisement sells. So watch the kind of advertising they do. You will notice important differences between their techniques and the techniques of general advertisers. For example: General advertisers use 30-second commercials. But the direct-response fraternity have learned that it is more profitable to use two-minute commercials. Who, do you suppose, is more likely to be right?
General advertisers broadcast their commercials in expensive prime time, when the audience is at its peak. But direct-response advertisers have learned that they make more sales late at night. Who, do you suppose, is more likely to be right? In their magazine advertisements, general advertisers use short copy, but the direct-response people invariably use long copy. Who, do you suppose, is more likely to be right? I am convinced that if all advertisers were to follow the example of their direct- response brethren, they would get more sales per dollar: Every copywriter should start his career by spending two years in direct response. One glance at any campaign tells me whether its author has ever had that experience. Do I practice what I preach? Not always. I have created my share of fancy campaigns, but if you ask which of my advertisements has been the most successful, I will answer without hesitation that it was the first ad I wrote for industrial development in Puerto Rico. It won no awards for ‘creativity’ but it persuades scores of manufacturers to start factories in that poverty-stricken island. Sad to say, an agency which produced nothing but this kind of down-to-earth advertising would never win a reputation for ‘creativity’, and would wither on the vine. What is a good advertisement? An advertisement which pleases you because of its style, or an advertisement which sells the most? They are seldom the same. Go through a magazine and pick out the advertisements you like best. You will probably pick those with beautiful illustrations, or clever copy. You forget to ask yourself whether your favorite advertisements would make you want to buy the product. Says Rosser Reeves, of the Ted Bates agency: ‘I’m not saying that charming, witty and warm copy won’t sell. I’m just saying that I’ve seen thousands of charming, witty campaigns that didn’t. Let’s say you are a manufacturer. Your advertising isn’t working and your sales are going down. And everything depends on it. Your future depends on it, your family’s future depends on it, other people’s families depend on it. And you walk in this office and talk to me, and you sit in that chair. Now, what do you want out of me? Fine writing? Do you want masterpieces? Do you want glowing things that can be framed by
copywriters? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?’* THE CULT OF ‘CREATIVITY’ The Benton & Bowles agency holds that ‘if it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.’ Amen. You won’t find ‘creativity’ in the 12-volume Oxford Dictionary. Do you think it means originality? Says Reeves, ‘Originality is the most dangerous word in advertising. Preoccupied with originality, copywriters pursue something as illusory as swamp fire, for which the Latin phrase is ignis fatuus.’ Mozart said, ‘I have never made the slightest effort to compose anything original.’ I occasionally use the hideous word creative myself; for lack of a better. If you take the subject more seriously than I do, I suggest you read The Creative Organization, published by the University of Chicago Press. Meanwhile, I have to invent a Big Idea for a new advertising campaign, and I have to invent it before Tuesday. ‘Creativity’ strikes me as a high-falutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday. A few years ago, Harry McMahan drew attention to the kind of commercials which were winning the famous Clio awards for creativity: Agencies that won four of the Clios had lost the accounts. Another Clio winner was out of business. Another Clio winner had taken its budget out of TV. Another Clio winner had given half his account to another agency. Another refused to put his winning entry on the air. Of 81 television classics picked by the Clio festival in previous years, 36 of the agencies involved had either lost the account or gone out of business. WHAT ABOUT SEX? The first advertisement I ever produced showed a naked woman. It was a mistake, not because it was sexy, but because it was irrelevant to the product – a cooking stove.
The test is relevance. To show bosoms in a detergent advertisement would not sell the detergent. Nor is there any excuse for the sexy girls you sometimes see draped across the hoods in automobile advertisements. On the other hand, there is a functional reason to show nudes in advertisements for beauty products. Advertising reflects the mores of society, but does not influence them. Thus it is that you find more explicit sex in magazines and novels than in advertisements. The word ‘fuck’ is commonplace in contemporary literature, but has yet to appear in advertisements. There used to be an unwritten law against showing women in advertisements for cigarettes. It was not until long after people got used to seeing them smoke in public that this taboo was lifted. I was the first to show women in liquor advertisements – 30 years after they started drinking in public. Not long ago, all Paris was agog over a series of posters which appeared on the hoardings. The first showed a nubile girl in a bikini, saying, ‘On September 2, I will take off the top.’ On September 2 a new poster appeared – she had taken off the top. This time she promised, ‘On September 4, I will take off the bottom.’ All Paris was asking if she would also keep this promise. She did. Few Parisians were shocked. But I would not advise you to put up these posters in South Dakota. In Pakistan, an Islamic authority recently complained that ‘our women are being exploited and commercialized on television and in the newspapers. This goes against God’s will and violates the tradition of purdah dictated in the Qur’an.’ He proposed a ban on women appearing in advertisements. In Saudi Arabia it is illegal to use photographs of women in advertising, but OK to use drawings, provided you don’t show bare arms or cleavage. When a commercial for a soft drink showed a little girl licking her lips because she liked the taste, it was banned as obscene. While we are on the subject of taste, I deplore the current fashion of using clergymen, monks and angels as comic figures in advertising. It may amuse you, but it shocks a lot of people. But I don’t object to scatological humor in advertising. I had no qualms about presenting the Grand Prize in a Clio ceremony to a Japanese soap commercial which featured a small boy farting in a public bath. The most risqué copy I have seen was for Paco Rabanne men’s cologne. Sales went up 25 per cent, and the advertisement was voted the best to appear in magazines in 1981. The Health Education Council in England uses advertising to encourage girls to get free contraceptives from Family Planning Clinics.
If you follow the advice I have given you, you will do your homework, avoid committees, learn from research, watch what the direct-response advertisers do, and stay away from irrelevant sex. In later chapters I will uncork some of the things I have learned about producing print advertisements which make the cash register ring. After that, television.
[OCR from image-only PDF page; verify layout and illustrations in the PDF.]
The Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud-S13,995 “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock What makes Rolls-Royce the best car in the world? “There is really no magic about it- it is merely patient attention to detail,” says an eminent Rolls-Royce engineer. 1.“At 60 miles an hour the loudest ihree years.With a new network of 12.There are thrce separate system noise comes from the electric clock,” dealers and parts-depots from Coast of power brakes, two hydraulic an reports the Technical Editor of THE to Coast, service is no problem. one mechanical.Damage to one wi MOToR. Three muffers tune out sound 7. The Rolls-Royce radiator has never not affect the others. The Rolls-Royc frequencies-acoustically. changed, except that when Sir Henry is a very safe carand also a very livel 2. Every Rolls-Royce engine is run for Royce died in 1933 the monogram RR car. It cruises serenely at eighty-five seven hours at full throttle before in- was changed from red to black. Top speed is in excess of 100 m.p.h. stallation, and each car is test-driven 8. The coachwork is given five coats 13. The Bentley is made by Roll: for hundreds of miles over varying of primer paint, and hand rubbed be- Royce. Except for the radiators, the road surfaces. tween each coat, before nine coats of are identical motor cars, manufacture 3.The Rolls-Royce is designed as an finishing paint go on. by the same engineers in the sam Owner-driven car.It is eighteen inches 9. By moving a switch on the steering works.People who feel diffiden shorter than the largest domestic cars. column, you can adjust the shock- about driving a Rolls-Royce can bu 4.The carhaspower steering,power a Bentley. absorbers to suit road conditions. brakes and automatic gear-shift. It is 10. A picnic table, veneered in French PRICE. The Rolls-Royce illustrated i very easy to drive and to park. No walnut, slides out from under the this advertisement-f.o.b. principa chauffeur required. dash. Tivo more swing out behind the ports of entry-costs $13,995. 5. The finished car spends a week in front seats. If you would like the rewarding the final test-shop, being fine-tuned. Il. You can get such optional extras experience of driving a Rolls-Royce o Here it is subjected to 98 separate or- as an Espresso coffee-makingmachine, Bentley, write or telephone to one o deals. For example, the engineers use a dictating machine, a bed, hot and the dealers listed on opposite page. a stethoscopeto listen for axle-whine. cold water for washing, an electric Rolls-Royce Inc., 10 Rockefeller Plaza 6. The Rolls-Royce is guaranteed for razor or a tclephone, New York 20, N. Y. Clrele 5-1144.
Before I wrote this – the most famous of all automobile ads – I did my homework. It ran only in two newspapers and two magazines, at a cost of $25,000. The following year, Ford based their multi-million-dollar campaign on the claim that their car was even quieter than a Rolls.
[OCR from image-only PDF page; verify layout and illustrations in the PDF.]
You give up things when you buy the Mercedes-Benz 230S. Things like rattles, rust, and shabby workmanship. Apoxonthestatus symbol thar'sal body won't sem as if it's piastered to3 glitterandoguts.AtS4,754, sheet of fypaper Mercedes-Benz 230S is an efficien Comfort without trivia machine, built to endure. lts bod: is welded 10,000 timesand paintes Mercedes-Besz engineers waste oo time with 7 enamel coats. A 24-poun onfrivolous gadgets. No buit-inrecord layer of undercoating stifles rust piayers, to card tables. no coffee urns. Yet sensibir smenities abound ltem: Read on for thefullstory of why th Smali notrles at either end of the isstru- Mercedes-Benz 2305 is a shrews ment panel. They shoor warm air to de- investment indeed. frost the front side windows Purists: Note thar wood-grain instru- AnINadniohe20 mentpanei trinCoetrarytoapopular Aa body vtyle finst.seen in 1959. tread, it's reel wood, Coetrary to as- Mercedex-Benz enginers refuve t ooplarrnditfSoy makc changec for the ake of changt thingelseon the 2305.Oneofeveryt1 Superficial styfing changes don1reake ccd tor to keep it that way technical advances And the 2305 body is advancedit Safety is an obligation are welded at 10,000 points. Afte Mercedes-Bent considers safety a sober 50,000) mile- you may begin to wonde obligationsot apublic relations prob- if it will ever rattle. lemSafety starts withbasic car deaign. NorilikelyorustThntibod not a few tacked-on aferthoughts " plunged out of sight in a primer bati The 230S bedy is a patented safety before painting A lough caulking coa feature Fromt and rear sectioms are de vwih intoevery crevice, evry pore. N signed to yieid on violcet impact, ab- sonoer is the prisier haked on than 24. sorbing shock before it can reach the pound praying of plusticized undercoat seals bummning atmost endlessly at near maumum out sending shivers through the whole body pasengerarea Front disc brakes anda dual the car> unJerbody aguinst the inenace of perdi with no hint of sdrais. If this system weren't so coutly to build. ruad salt anJ rust. American cars migh have it. No fullsized Sixty-minute engine test Then comes paint49 pounds of it,spreau domestic cat does in new cars-is sulved with saper premism- on in 7 careful layens The fial coart is hand European lourirs You’ see the 300SLR grade tires on every 2305 Duor locks are de- factory on a pecial lest >tand, To flush away aprayed, in a paint shop cleaner than a hospi at the Daimler-Benz Museum ia Stuttgan. tal operating room. Unterturkheim. You'lspot a few dozen other any angle Inside, there are no sharp edpes Note to mitpickers: You won't find lumpy changed 52 fime> during thistrial run. famous racing machines too; Mercedes-Benz Safetypadding extendseventothesteering “orangepeei'fasinthepaint.Andyouwon't wheel hub-and the rear vition mirror is u doniestic V8. Yet the 230S hitsapeak speed fisd pits im the chtrome It's backed by tuo uafed rsdojdu spring maunted.tobreak away on heasy platings of coppct and one of nickel over a of 109 mph and in normai driving queezes Forget brake fade cver 20 miles from > yallon. impact. teelbuseRuutandrot arethwartedagain A lesson from racing The 2305 weighs 1in tons. Caliper-type, 9. last theMeof the cat.tt soperfectly bal. inch disc brakes at front (where 70G of the Going to Europe? Mercede-Beszengineensknou how lo build anced (enpine tolerances are as fine us car'sweightisshiftedinstopping)helpsupply Asyoer Mercede-Benu deaie.w Cat ↓ 10,000tha of an isch) that you can keep it braking ablityadequatefor wicrthisweigh heryotse MercedeBenrYouu cip aztrangt alt deiails for Eluropean dt vedan there's no doubt ztout that in our Disc brakes shrug off heat buildup in hard muety.timanderryaad iure ppe use You can virtually forget the threatof fad. Mercedes-Benz motor cars: Mrvionges yoe reiurs MePeierGramlEuroeasDdlieyM Farfuf informalionweerne from 522,942 to 53,929 wilf do wonders for ber driving morale) Mayhe yoa can afford SMerirdes-Benz America lac_PO Box 211 Chthide -ihoutiscsingit Suggeun retal pice* Science defeats fatigue for a few popular modehs Wied ree chreln aettdependently Long trips are no ordeal in the 230s Seats c00 Gtand Merctles 572.942 6144 front andearare almostchairheight.They're 230SL Raudtrr mubdacomnencs CAR LIFE magarine. deply comtoured and frmiy paddedrjust like 4.754 the doctot orderedorthopedic physicists AsyrM-Bzdalegay 230.Sedan worid champiomship sports-racing car, the guided seat design)- 300 Diese/ Sedan 4.142 arrange thorough demorstration drive is 3005LR.Thenthey adapled its suipentionto Youcan tiltbothindividualfront-seatbacks 3.929 this or anyother Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz sedans. to 4reclining positioms.Oehot,humid day model It is something of areve- A11 4 xheehs on the 2305 aie separately you'l feel the benefit of thove thouuands of lation to drive a car built to.be yruag They suk up ruts and bumps with- miniscule air vents in the srat material Your the testnot the beut seller
I resigned the Rolls-Royce account when they sent 500 defective cars to the United States. Two years later, we took Mercedes, and sent a team to interview their engineers in Stuttgart. From this sprang a campaign of long factual advertisements which increased sales from 10,000 cars a year to 40,000.
[OCR from image-only PDF page; verify layout and illustrations in the PDF.]
A challenge to women who woulc never dream of serving margarin Lever Brothers defy you to tell the difference between GooD LUCK margarine and you-know-what TEAvE us face it.We know dlozens After dinner we let the cat out of Pasteurized Milk of womenwhowouldn'tput the bag. Nobody could belicve that We add thonsands of gallons of tl margarine on their tables for all the they had bcen cating marganne. tea in China. They had bcen taken in, completcly finest skim milkto GooDLUCK.V also put about 15.000units of Vi We don't blame these persnickety and absolutely, cvery man jack of min.A in every golden pound-whi pcople, not one bit. As a matter of them. And they loved it! We made cight convcrts to GooD fact, our own wife used to be the is more than you get in thirty glass ol Grade A milk. More than you g sane way. Her prcjudice against LUcK that night. in two doen fresh farm cggs. margarine dated back to her child. Top Secret Research hood, when she was given old-fush. These vitaminswill build upyo The insicde story behind this new ioned olco.It was made of beeffitt- resistance to colds.And if you ha GooDLucK isabsolutely fascinating. children, our Vitamin A will mal and tasted perfectly awful. Lever Brothers set out to produce Laist weck she tasted our newgold. Them stronger. It is hard to think of anything ye en GooD LtcK.lotell you the truth amargarinewhichcould holditsown could give children which would e shehad totasteit.because wework for with you-know-what. A margarine which the nost snobbish fecelers Lever Brothers and our wife knows them more good. Acording to tl would be happy to gobble on their dotors,Goon uck providesabo which side her bread is margarined on.Our consort was jlabbergusted. crumpets.Amargarine which would twice the energy of beefsteak. “Here"she said,“is something to be indistinguishable -even when be proud of. I would never have melted for lobster or artichokes.In known that it uns margarine. This short.a table margarine. stuff is in a class by itscl. From now Ittookfourteenyearsoftopsecret on, anyone who pays cighty cents a rescarch to do this trick. ound is a dope.” And so forth, for The actual fiaor of GooD Luck half an hour. was achieved by adapting a remark. able techniquc disovered at a ft That night wegavea dinner party. mousState CollegeofAgriculturein the farm belt. As a matter of fct, We filled our liule French crorks 97eof our ingredients come from with GooDLr'cK,and printe them American farus. There is mothing withiantiquemoldslikeyouscchere. “synthetic"about GooD Lt'cK. Farmers'Wives Switch We never espected to sce famers Save50saPound switch to margarinc, We thought Take our word for it, GooD LucK they would be the last to scc the in a class by itself, really and trul light. One bite,and you will getoveryot But the truly astonishing fact is espensive prejudice against marg this: in those rural arcas where we rine. havcalrendyintrorlucedGoopLcCK (We knowa Greenwich child wh in a guiet way.thousands of ftrmcrs sat down and ate a quaricr of wives are now serving this new gold- pound of GooD LtCK-shraighr.) cn glony at every mcal. Even heir Goon Luck will save you as muc husbands can't tell the difference! asto centsapound-enoughtogi Belicve it or not, Amcrican farm. NEW YORKER subscriptions TO a They looked very chic-more chic crs are now cating almost as much your best Iriends. than anything clsc on our table, in. margarineascityfolks.Shrewd souls, Inthe words ofourwife,don'tl cluding the family Lowestoft. those farmers wives. a dope-get GooD Ltck.
When I got a margarine account, I was under the impression that margarine was made from coal. Ten days reading the literature taught me otherwise. I positioned Dove as a toilet bar for women with dry skin, and used a promise which won in test: ‘Dove creams your skin while you bathe.’
Robert Townsend, the eccentric head of Avis, asked me to do his advertising. When conflict with another client forced me to refuse, Doyle Dane Bernbach created one of the most powerful campaigns in the history of advertising. ‘When you’re only Number 2, you try harder. Or else.’ This diabolical positioning made life miserable for Hertz, who was number 1.
[OCR from image-only PDF page; verify layout and illustrations in the PDF.]
Think small Our little car isn't so much of a novelty flivver don't even think 32 miles to the gal. some of our economies, you don't ever lon is going any great guns. any more, think about them any more. A couple of dozen collegekids don't Orusing five pints of oil instead of five Exceptwhen you squeeze into a smal try to squeeze inside it. quarts. parking spot. Or renew your small insur. The guy at the gas station doesn't ask Or never needing anti-freeze. ance.Orpaya smallrepairbill where the gas goes. Orrackingup40,000milesonasetof Ortrade in your oldvWforc Nobody even stares at our shape. tires. new one. In fact, some people who drive our.lile That's because once you get used to Think it over.
Doyle Dane Bernbach positioned Volkswagen as a protest against Detroit, thereby making the Beetle a cult among non-conformists. The copywriter was Julian Koenig, the art director Helmut Krone. Sales of the car went up to 500,000 cars a year.
An essay in the art form of image-building. For 18 years I used the face of my client Commander Whitehead as the symbol of his own product. It worked to beat
the band on a peppercorn budget.
When you choose a brand of whiskey you are choosing an image. Jack Daniel’s
advertisements project an image of homespun honesty and thereby persuade you that Jack Daniel’s is worth its premium price.
[OCR from image-only PDF page; verify layout and illustrations in the PDF.]
万宝路 美国销量第一世界销量第一 larboro Cometowheretheflavoris CometoMarlboro Country. The filter doesn't get between you and the fiavor! Marlboro Marlboro Malorn THE NEW PILTER CIGARETTE FROM PHILIP MORR the goods on fasur, Popalar flter price, This new Marlloru bon te change to a flter. Thin ars yoe'l like.
Leo Burnett’s campaign for Marlboro projects an image which has made it the biggest-selling cigarette in the world. It has been running, almost without change, for 25 years.
Sometimes, the best ideal of all is to show the product (Royal Copenhagen
Porcelain designed by Grethe Meyer) – with utter simplicity. This takes courage, because you will be accused of not being ‘creative’.
[OCR from image-only PDF page; verify layout and illustrations in the PDF.]
sor sTETson, Do Tlook fan Seuffaf airt Rrlar! Ben! Clam by self. Doyrum atsr raitno- Dry FuntHord te beliee. Ter Tereon: Durto.Bican rum! Cleaz. Light-bodied. Many bruade available. Jast the thinr fue tall drinks. IEHS: Whioh brond shere? seE eTETo-Merite bere.Tep aotch Herry p. Yo Beautifelly played Calls for foat. SEsT PRIENO.Sher luck. Noorl experiesce. TEts oN+ Deservis rcvel toast. New drink. Everybody aking for. Do tol. Drxn- Comes fron Puerto Rice._ Lightur bodied. Superh with sode ansd leeron twix. Or favorite mixrr Bat end sode. Serious? Couldn't be more., With Buerte_Rican rum., People BESYFRIEND.COM,MRZ. Sperify trasd. Maraca.here Spectacular drink. Jor sTeYson; Happy returns, Manv.
To my chagrin, this campaign, which I thought enchanting, created scarcely a ripple. The dog was my briard Crème Brûlée. Judson Irish wrote the dialogue in the style of Alfred Jingle in The Pickwick Papers. Good ideas come from the unconscious. The author dreamed about an old baker during his horse and wagon along a country lane on his way to deliver Pepperidge Farm bread. Twenty-five years later, the horse and wagon are still in the commercials.
Advertising agencies have a genius for wheel-spinning. The average time it takes them to produce a campaign is 117 days – faster than goats but slower than hyenas.
If more copywriters were ambitious, they too would find fame and fortune. This is Touffou, the medieval castle where the author holes up when he is not visiting one of the Ogilvy & Mather offices.
Rosser Reeves: ‘Do you want fine writing? Do you want masterpieces? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve start moving up?’
For a long time, the idea that women might drink liquor as well as men affronted American puritanism sufficiently to keep women out of liquor ads. I was the first to break this taboo.
The Health Education Council in England ran this advertisement to encourage girls to get free contraceptives from Family Planning Clinics – ‘whether you are married or not.’ Notes * Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples. Prentice-Hall, 1975. * Attention and Interest Factors in Advertising, by Harold Rudolph. Funk & Wagnall, 1947. * Reality in Advertising, by Rosser Reeves. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1961.