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Ogilvy on Advertising — Chapter-08: How to make TV commercials that sell

• Source: /library/Ogilvy on Advertising/source-file.pdf
• PDF pages: 176–194
• Pages without text: 190, 193
• 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.

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8 HOW TO MAKE TV COMMERCIALS THAT SELL Everyone who writes about television commercials faces the same insoluble problem: it is impossible to show them on the pages of a book. All I can do is reproduce some storyboards which illustrate my points and pray that you can decipher them. In my chapter on print advertising, I have relied not only on research, but also on long experience. My experience in television has been more limited. True, I once won an award at the Cannes Festival, but it wasn’t a good commercial. So most of this chapter will have to rely on research, and the judgments I have formed while looking at thousands of other people’s commercials. My most valuable source of information is the factor analyses I commission at regular intervals from Mapes & Ross. They measure changes in brand preference. People who register a change in brand preference after seeing a commercial subsequently buy the product three times more than people who don’t. Research organizations also measure the recall of commercials, and this method finds favor with many advertisers. But some kinds of television commercials which get high recall scores get low scores on changing brand preference, and there appears to be no correlation between recall and purchasing. I prefer to rely on changes in brand preference. I will start by telling you about ten kinds of commercial which are found to be above average in their ability to change people’s brand preference, and three kinds which are below average.

ABOVE AVERAGE

1. Humor. Conventional wisdom has always held that people buy products because they believe them to be nutritious, or labor-saving, or good value for money – not because the manufacturer tells jokes on television. Claude Hopkins, the father of modern advertising, thundered, ‘People don’t buy from clowns.’ I think this was true in Hopkins’ day, and I have reason to believe that it remained true until recently, but the latest wave of factor analysis reveals that humor can now sell. This came as a great relief to me; I had always hated myself for rejecting the funny commercials submitted for my approval. But I must warn you that very, very few writers can write funny commercials which are funny. Unless you are one of the few, don’t try.
2. Slice of life. In these commercials one actor argues with another about the merits of a product, in a setting which roughly approximates real life. In the end, the doubter is converted – your toothpaste really does give children healthier teeth. These playlets have been successful in case after case. Copywriters detest them because most of them are so corny – and because they have been in such wide use for such a long time. But some agencies have succeeded in producing slices which are not only effective at the cash register, but realistic and charming.
3. Testimonials. The most effective testimonial commercials are those which show loyal users of your product testifying to its virtues – when they don’t know they are being filmed. The interviewer pretends to find fault with the product and the loyal user rises to its defense with far more conviction than if you simply asked him what he thought of it. Here is an example: The scene is the forecourt of a Shell station. We see an actor disguised as the man on the pump. Announcer: ‘This man is an imposter. He’s not really a Shell dealer. He’s going to see if he can talk our customers out of buying Super Shell. Let’s watch through this hidden camera.’ Shell dealer: ‘I’ll bet you get bad mileage with Super Shell.’ Mrs. Longo, a customer: ‘It’s good. I’ll tell you where a penny saved is a penny earned.’

Shell dealer: ‘Aw, come on. What do you know about gasoline?’ Mrs. Longo: ‘You see this little dog I have back here? I bought this little dog because it saves money on food. Now I can save on Super Shell.’ Shell dealer: ‘Bunk! B-U-N-K.’ Mrs. Longo: ‘You are absolutely wrong. That is the best gasoline. Why, if I were them, I would fire you.’ Announcer: ‘We’ll give him another chance because he got you to say nice things about Super Shell.’ When you pick loyal users to testify, avoid those who would give such polished performances that viewers would think they were professional actors. The more amateurish the performance, the more credible. A French agency picked an 80-year-old laundress as the heroine in a campaign for washing machines. This keg-shaped, wrinkled old woman came to be recognized by three out of four people in France, and sales of the washing machine went from fourth place to second. The use of unusual characters increases the power of commercials to change brand preference by a remarkably high percentage.   4. Demonstrations which show how well your product performs are above average in their ability to persuade. Demonstrations don’t have to be dull. To demonstrate how strong paper- board can be, International Paper spanned a canyon with a bridge made of paper-board – and then drove a heavy truck over it. The Paris office of Ogilvy & Mather demonstrated the strength of a client’s glue by applying it to the soles of the announcer’s shoes and hanging him upside down from the ceiling – from which position he delivered his sales pitch. If you use a demonstration to compare your product with your competitor’s, think twice before identifying the competitor by name. It is illegal in Germany, but the US Government encourages it as providing information which will help the consumer make an informed choice. Studies conducted by Ogilvy & Mather found that commercials which name competing brands are less believable and more confusing than commercials

which don’t. There is a tendency for viewers to come away with the impression that the brand which you disparage is the hero of your commercial.   5. Problem solution. This technique is an old as television. You show the viewer a problem with which he or she is familiar, and then show how your product can solve it. One of the best problem-solution commercials I have seen was made in Madras for Train matches. It starts by showing a man unable to strike ‘ordinary’ matches in the muggy climate of southern India. He goes mad with impatience. Then his cool, beautiful wife comes to the rescue with a box of Train matches which strike immediately.   6. Talking heads. This is the derisive name given to commercials which consist of a pitchman extolling the virtues of a product. Agency people find them non- creative, and are sick of them, but several advertisers still use them because they are above average in changing brand preference. Talking heads are particularly appropriate for announcing new products. More than a hundred new brands of cigarette have been introduced in Germany in recent years, and the only one which succeeded was launched by a talking head. Perhaps the most persuasive talking head of all time is John Houseman saying, ‘Smith Barney make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it.’ As a former door-to-door salesman, I shall go to my grave believing that, given two minutes on television, I could sell any product on the face of the earth. Any offers?   7. Characters. In some commercials, a ‘character’ is used to sell your product over a period of years. The character becomes the living symbol of the product – like Titus Moody, the Crusty old New England baker who has been extolling the quality of Pepperidge Farm bread for 26 years, or Cora, who sold Maxwell House coffee for seven years. Provided they are relevant to your product, characters are above average in their ability to change brand preference.   8. Reason why. Commercials which give the viewer a rational reason why they should buy your product are slightly above average. When Maxim Instant Coffee was launched, the commercials said Maxim was superior because it was freeze-dried. Nine out of ten advertising people will tell you that consumers

don’t give a hoot about how products are made. They may be right, but the process of freeze-drying was sufficiently new and interesting. to persuade many viewers to try the coffee.   9. News. Commercials which contain news are above average. But even when they have news to tell, which is all too rare, some copywriters underplay it, or leave it out altogether. They should be boiled in oil. Products, like human beings, attract most attention when they are first born. For an old product, you can create news by advertising a new way to use it, like using baking soda to keep refrigerators smelling sweet.   10. Emotion. Researchers have not yet found a way to quantify the effectiveness of emotion, but I have come to believe that commercials with a large content of nostalgia, charm and even sentimentality can be enormously effective. The commercials for Hovis bread in Great Britain and Blitz-Weinhard beer in Oregon strike me as among the most persuasive I have seen. (See pages 166 and 171.) Emotion can be just as effective as any rational appeal, particularly when there is nothing unique to say about your product. ‘But,’ says my partner Hal Riney, ‘here is where things get sticky. Most clients – and I’m afraid most agency people – think the rational appeals for their products are much more important than the consumer thinks they are. If your advertising is going to be successful, if it is going to stand out from the clutter, you must be objective about the benefits of your product. What exactly are the “benefits” of candy bars, cigarettes, soda pop and beer?’ I hasten to add that consumers also need a rational excuse to justify their emotional decisions. So always include one. Above all, don’t attempt emotion unless you can deliver it. BELOW AVERAGE

1. Testimonials by celebrities. These are below average in their ability to change brand preference. Viewers guess that the celebrity has been bought, and they are right. To get Farrah Fawcett for three years, Fabergé is reported to have paid $2,000,000. Bob Hope, Gregory Peck, Candice Bergen and Dean Martin charge about $1,000,000 each. The spokesman everyone wants is Walter Cronkite, but he isn’t available at any price. However, for a beggarly $10,000

you can get Ronald Biggs who escaped from jail after being convicted for his part in England’s Great Train Robbery. He lives in Brazil. Viewers have a way of remembering the celebrity while forgetting the product. I did not know this when I paid Eleanor Roosevelt $35,000 to make a commercial for margarine. She reported that her mail was equally divided. ‘One half was sad because I had damaged my reputation. The other half was happy because I had damaged my reputation.’ Not one of my proudest memories.   2. Cartoons can sell things to children, but they are below average in selling to grown-ups. They don’t hold the viewer as well as live action, and they are less persuasive. Two commercials were made for a fabric softener. One used live action, the other used cartoons. The cartoon commercial had no effect on the downward trend in sales. The live-action commercial reversed it.   3. Musical vignettes, with a parade of fleeting impressions, were once fashionable, but are on their way out. Entertaining, perhaps, but impotent if you want to sell. SIXTEEN TIPS

1. Brand identification. Research has demonstrated that a shocking percentage of viewers remember your commercial, but forget the name of your product. All too often they attribute your commercial to a competing brand. Many copywriters think it crass to belabor the name of the product. However, for the benefit of those who are more interested in selling than entertaining, here are two ways to register your brand name:   • Use the name within the first ten seconds. I have seen a brilliant commercial which repeated the brand name 20 times in 340 seconds, without irritating anyone. • Play games with the name. Spell it. Veterans will remember Alex Templeton, the blind pianist, spelling out the name C.R.E.S.T.A. B.L.A.N.C.A. to the accompaniment of pizzicato strings. When you advertise a new product, you have to teach people its name on television.

1. Show the package. Commercials which end by showing the package are more effective in changing brand preference than commercials which don’t.  
2. Food in motion. In commercials for food, the more appetizing you make it look, the more you sell. It has been found that food in motion looks particularly appetizing. Show chocolate sauce in the act of being poured over your ice cream, or syrup over your pancakes.  
3. Close-ups. It is a good thing to use close-ups when your product is the hero of your commercial. The closer you get on the candy bar, the more you make people’s mouths water.  
4. Open with the fire. You have only 30 seconds. If you grab attention in the first frame with a visual surprise, you stand a better chance of holding the viewer. People screen out a lot of commercials because they open with something dull. You know that great things are about to happen, but the viewer doesn’t. She will never know; she has gone to the bathroom. When you advertise fire extinguishers, open with the fire.  
5. When you have nothing to say, sing it. There have been some successful commercials which sang the sales pitch, but jingles are below average in changing brand preference. Never use a jingle without trying it on people who have not read your script. If they cannot decipher the words, don’t put your jingle on the air. If you went into a store and asked a salesman to show you a refrigerator, how would you react if he started singing at you? Yet some clients feel short- changed if you don’t give them a jingle. Many people use music as background – emotional shorthand. Research shows that this is neither a positive nor a negative factor. It does no harm and it does no measurable good. Do great preachers allow organists to play background music under their sermons? Do advertising agencies play background music under their pitch to prospective clients?  
6. Sound effects. While music does not add to the selling power of commercials, sound effects – such as sausages sizzling in a frying pan – can make a positive difference.

A commercial for Maxwell House was constructed around the sound of coffee percolating. It worked well enough to run for five years.   8. Voice-over or on-camera? Research shows that it is more difficult to hold your audience if you use voice-over. It is better to have the actors talk on camera. A manufacturer made two commercials, identical in every respect except that one used voice-over and the other used on-camera voice. When he tested them, the voice-on-camera version sold more of his product.   9. Supers. It pays to reinforce your promise by setting it in type and superimposing it over the video, while your soundtrack speaks the words. But make sure that the words in your supers are exactly the same as your spoken words. Any divergence confuses the viewer. Many people in agencies resist the use of supers. If you tell them that they increase sales, as they do, the stupid buggers turn a deaf ear.   10. Avoid visual banality. If you want the viewer to pay attention to your commercial, show her something she has never seen before. You won’t have much success if you show her sunsets and happy families at the dinner table. The average American family has the television turned on for six hours a day, and is exposed to 30,000 commercials a year. Most of them slide off the memory like water off a duck’s back. For this reason you should give your commercials a touch of singularity, a visual burr that will stick in the viewer’s mind. One such burr was the herd of bulls thundering towards the camera, with the superimposed title: ‘Merrill Lynch is bullish on America.’   11. Changes of scene. Hal Riney uses a great many scenes without confusing people, but I can’t, and I bet you can’t either. On the averrage, commercials with a plethora of short scenes are below average in changing brand preference.   12. Mnemonics. This unpronounceable word is used to describe a visual device repeated over a long period. It can increase brand identification, and remind people of your promise. Example: the car driving through the paper barrier in Shell commercials.   13. Show the product in use. It pays to show the product being used, and, if possible, the end result of using it. Show how your diapers (nappies) keep the

baby dry. In a commercial for motor oil, show how the pistons look after 50,000 miles.   14. Everything is possible on TV. The technicians can produce anything you want. The only limit is your imagination.   15. Miscomprehension. In 1979 Professor Jacoby of Purdue University studied the ‘miscomprehension’ of 25 typical television commercials. He found that all of them were miscomprehended, some by as many as 40 per cent of viewers, none by fewer than 19 per cent. If you want to avoid your television commercials being misunderstood, you had better make them crystal clear. I cannot understand more than half the commercials I see.   16. The great scandal. Television programs cost about $4 a second to produce, but commercials cost $2,000 a second. Which is $60,000 for a 30-second commercial. This obscene extravagance is largely the fault of the agencies. Says Hooper White, ‘Production dollars are typed into the commercial by the copywriter and drawn into the commercial by the art director.’ Miner Raymond of Procter & Gamble tells the story of an art director who objected to a table on the set. The client pointed out that it was covered by a cloth and thus invisible. ‘But I would know what’s under the cloth,’ said the art director, ‘and it just wouldn’t be right.’ So another table was found and the delay cost the client $5,000.* The easiest way to reduce the cost of a commercial is to cut actors out of the storyboard. Every actor you cut will save you between $350 and $10,000, depending on how long you run the commercial. Copywriters specify that a commercial should be shot in Bali when it could equally well be shot in a studio for half the price. They insert expensive animation into live-action commercials. They insist that original music be composed for background purposes, as if there were nothing suitable in the whole repertoire of existing music. Worst of all, they use expensive celebrities when an unknown actor would sell more of the product. I have no research to prove it, but I suspect that there is a negative correlation between the money spent on producing commercials and their power to sell products. My partner Al Eicoff was asked by a client to remake a $15,000 commercial for $100,000. Sales went down.

RADIO – THE CINDERELLA MEDIUM Once upon a time, I spent six months studying radio at the feet of John Royal, the pioneering head of programming at NBC. In those days every family in America tuned in to Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Fred Allen, Amos and Andy, Burns and Allen. Some of us also listened to Roy Larsen’s marvellous March of Time, and Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra. All this was swept away by television. For most people radio has become no more than a security blanket, a reassuring noise in the background. Radio has become the Cinderella of advertising media, representing only 6 per cent of total advertising in the United States. There is no research to measure the efficacy of the commercials, so nobody knows what works. A pilot study I commissioned suggests four positive factors:  

1. Identify your brand early in the commercial.
2. Identify it often.
3. Promise the listener a benefit early in the commercial.
4. Repeat it often.   Ninety commercials out of a hundred do none of these things. In my opinion – and it is nothing more than that – the first thing your radio commercial has to do is to get people to listen. Surprise them. Arouse their curiosity. Wake them up. Once they are awake, talk to them as one human being to another. Involve them. Charm them. Make them laugh. Here is the script of a radio commercial in a series which increased the sale of Red, White and Blue Beer by 60 per cent: ANNOUNCER: And now, another inflation-fighting message from Mr. Harmon R. Whittle. WHITTLE: One of the biggest strains on our budget is the foreign aid program. Each year, we send billions of dollars worth of planes, computers, tractors and things to foreign countries … Then we pay technical advisers to train them how to use it all. This is expensive. A more responsive form of foreign aid would be to send them beer. American-made Red, White and Blue beer.

Red, White and Blue is less expensive than planes or computers. So we’d save a bundle, right off. It costs less than other premium-quality beer, so we’d save on that. And Red, White and Blue is easier to teach people to use than a computer. So we’d save on technical advisers, too. And if there’s any doubt whether our international popularity would increase, ask yourself this: if you lived in one of those hot, dusty countries, what would you rather have? A computer, or an ice-cold, Red, White and Blue? It’s an honest beer. At an honest price. ANNOUNCER: Mr. Whittle’s comments do not necessarily reflect the views of this station. They do however, reflect the views of the RWB Brewing Company, Milwaukee. Because radio is a high-frequency medium, people quickly get tired of hearing the same commercial. So make several. Compared with television, radio commercials cost almost nothing to produce. In some developing countries radio still reaches more people than television. Yet even there nobody really knows what kind of commercials make the cash register ring. Isn’t it time somebody tried to find out?

My favorite from the brilliant series of nostalgic commercials for Hovis bread by

the British agency Collett Dickenson Pearce. This wrinkled old lady was cast as the heroine in French commercials for washing machines. She came to be recognized by three out of four people in France, and sales of the product jumped from fourth place to second.

I paid Mrs. Roosevelt $35,000 to make a commercial for margarine. Here she is telling the viewers, ‘The new Good Luck margarine really tastes delicious.’ In those days I did not know that it is a mistake to use celebrities. They are remembered but the product is forgotten.

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Voiceover:Look!We are going toshow you the incredible... ...bondingefficiency.ofSuperGlue3 Sound:Stopwatchticking VO:This sequencewas filmedwithoutediting. COLLEEN1OSECONDES SUPER Read the instructions. Super Glue 3 also sticks rubber. . · plastic .. .china. ..in just a few seconds.

This French commercial demonstrates how well Super Glue-3 works by applying it to the announcer’s shows and hanging him upside down from the ceiling. Super Glue-3 became the brand leader and the commercial won First Prize at the Cannes Festival. A successful example of using a character to reinforce the authenticity of your product.

The funniest commercial I have ever seen, by Doyle Dane Bernbach for Volkswagen. I used to reject funny commercials on the grounds that people don’t buy from clowns. Now research shows that humor sells as effciently as other techniques.

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This beer commercial, written by my partner Hal Riney, is the best example I know of the use of emotion in advertising. Notes * For more information about what goes on during the filming of commercials, read Michael J. Arlen’s book, Thirty Seconds, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980.