Branding Strategy Insider

David Ogilvy: Direct vs Creative

One of the greatest advertising geniuses of the 20th century was David Ogilvy.

Although he was the head of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, he sided firmly with direct advertising over creative advertising.

Here is an excerpt from a speech he gave to advertising executives in Paris where he laid out the difference between the two approaches and why, in his opinion, direct advertising is the more effective form:.

“There is a yawning chasm between you generalists and we directs. We directs belong to a different world. Your gods are not our gods.

“You generalists pride yourselves on being creative – whatever that awful word means. You cultivate the mystique of creativity. Some of you are pretentious poseurs. You are the glamour boys and girls of the advertising community. You regard advertising as an art form – and expect your clients to finance expressions of your genius. We directs do not regard advertising as an art form. Our clients don’t give a damn whether we win awards at Cannes. They pay us to sell their products. Nothing else.

Children vs. Obesity: Ban Ads or Tax Junk Food?

Recent research has shown that British (and American) children are getting fatter, suggested there is a link between childhood obesity and a slew of adult ailments, and revealed that 95% of food ads aimed at children promote brands that contain unhealthy levels of fat, salt and sugar.

Therefore, argue a number of food lobbying groups, by restricting unhealthy foods advertising to children we will reduce their consumption and thus improve the health of future generations.

Heady stuff. Charlie Powell from Sustain, an alliance of campaigners for better food, claims: "Advertising is designed to exploit children's vulnerabilities." Meanwhile, Kath Dalmeny from the Food Commission says: "Junk food advertisers know that children are especially susceptible to marketing messages. They target children as young as two with toys, cartoon characters, gimmicky packaging and interactive web sites to ensure they pester their parents for the products."

Darren Neville, editor of Consumer Policy Review, claims that children are "bombarded with marketing and advertising for what are often unhealthy foods".

We should take these arguments with a large pinch of (metaphorical) salt.

12 Causes of Bad Brand Advertising

The following will likely result in bad brand advertising:

1.    Design by committee
2.   Opinionated reviewers and approvers who don’t understand marketing
3.    Writing ads that appeal to you rather than the target consumer
4.    Using flowery language that sounds good but that means nothing.  (This is a common ailment of neophyte copywriters.  Substance is good.  Using an economy of words is good.  Simple, persuasive copy is good.  Fluff and filler are bad.)
5.   Squeezing as many features and benefits into the ad as possible (unsophisticated advertising clients often request this)
6.    Revising an emotional or metaphorical ad to make it more literal (another common ailment of unsophisticated advertising clients)
7.    Focusing on reach versus frequency.
8.    Assuming that business-to-business advertising is significantly different from consumer advertising (“It needs to be factual and informative, not emotional.”).  Don’t forget, business decision-makers are people too.  And people are ruled as much by their hearts as by their heads.  Harding’s 1996 study of buyers in ten corporations demonstrated that corporate buyers overwhelmingly rely on personal and emotional reasons over rational ones in their purchase choice.
9.    Jingles.  Unless they are very, very good (and most are not very, very good), they will distract from the brand message. 
10.    Celebrity endorsements tend not to be believable
11.    Making claims that your brand can’t support

And, while this may not result in bad advertising, for consistency’s sake, the following is not a good idea:
12.    A new marketing manager, feeling the need to “make his or her mark” on the brand, hires a new advertising agency and creates a totally new advertising campaign (whether the old campaign was working or not)

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Successful Advertising Approaches

Today's topic - the many keys to successful advertising based on research for my book Brand Aid.

Effective general ad techniques:

•    A good ad will always dramatize your brand’s most important benefit.
•    Simpler ads are usually more powerful. 
•    Create copy in smaller chunks – sentences, paragraphs, etc.   
•    Natural and “real life” writing or dialog
•    Subtly tapping into peoples’ fears and anxieties

Here are some print advertising techniques that have proven to be effective:

•    Try to evoke the reader’s curiosity. Begin by asking a provocative question and/or feature an image that piques the reader’s curiosity.
•    Put quotes around your headlines.
•    Romance/dramatize your product or service.
•    Try to trigger multiple senses – use words that help people feel, hear, smell and taste your product
•    Tell a story.
•    Communicate “news.”
•    Provide information that is useful to the reader.
•    Always write in the present tense.
•    Be as specific as possible.
•    Include customer testimonials (they should seem natural, not scripted or polished).
•    Know how readers read (from right to left top to bottom in the U.S.) and place your headlines, illustrations, captions and copy accordingly.
•    Use white space to focus the reader’s attention on something important
•    In his book Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads, Roy H. Williams indicates that savvy photographers and graphic artists have known for some time that there is a spot on a piece of artwork to which the eye is irresistibly drawn, roughly between the middle and upper right corner of the artwork.
•    Use words that sell: at last, now, new, introducing, announcing, finally, limited, save, free, win, easy, guarantee, breakthrough, wanted, etc.  (Keep in mind that as consumers become more sophisticated and savvy, there may be instances where these words might be cliché or overused and, thus, may not be as effective.)

Evaluating Print Advertising Effectiveness

When evaluating the potential effectiveness of different print campaign ideas, I use the following questions:

•    Does the headline immediately “grab” the reader? (In advertising guru David Ogilvy’s book Ogilvy on Advertising, Ogilvy states that five times as many people read headlines as read body copy.)  Ideally, the headline is nine words or less.
•    Does the headline promise an important benefit? (Ogilvy also states in Ogilvy on Advertising that ads with headlines that promise benefits are read by four times more people than those that don’t.)
•    Is the body copy long enough to provide the reader with useful information and ample proof points for your brand’s promise?  Long copy is more effective than short copy.  This is particularly true for business-to-business advertising.  (Alternatively, Roper Starch Worldwide, which maintains a database of more than 2,000,000 print ads, has found that excessive copy reduces the effectiveness of ads and recommends keeping ad copy to 50 words or less. With whole generations having now grown up on “sound bytes” of information, some cohort groups will respond better to shorter copy.)
•    Increasing white space around the ad or the headline increases the ad’s effectiveness.

Print Advertising offers several benefits: good reach and frequency, can handle complicated propositions, reaches consumers in a receptive context and can be very targeted.

In the days ahead I will share my thoughts on other advertising vehicles here on BSI.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Specifying Your Marketing Objective

A key step in advertising development is specifying the marketing objective for the advertising. That is, what do you want the advertising to achieve?  Do you want it to increase brand awareness, attract new customers, increase brand loyalty, encourage add-on purchases, motivate people to switch from competitive brands to your brand, increase frequency of use, reinforce ongoing use, etc.?

As an example, the marketing objective for Hallmark’s brand insistence advertising campaign in the mid 90’s was very simple and tactical: to get consumers to flip the card over and look for the brand name on the back cover.

Make sure the objective is quantifiable and measurable.

During your brand positioning work, you should have developed the brand promise including identification of the brand’s relevant differentiating benefit.  Next, augment the brand promise with proof points or reasons to believe. 

Proof points may include the following:

•    Product features and attributes (including the design itself or its formula or ingredients)
•    Performance features, statistics and research results
•    Performance guarantees
•    Service claims
•    Side-by-side comparisons
•    Third party endorsements

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Advertising Rules of Thumb

•    Try to budget between 8 and 12% of revenues on advertising and other marketing activities.  (This obviously varies significantly by company and industry.  An average company spends approximately 6% of sales on advertising alone.  Advertising expenditures for computer and office equipment are as low as .09% versus 16.8% for toys, dolls, and games. [Source: Paul A. Scipione, “Too Much or Too Little? Public Perceptions of Advertising Expenditures” Journal of Advertising Research 24, 6 December 1984/January 1985: 23-26.] Industrial companies tend to spend less on advertising (1% to 5% typically) than consumer products companies.)
•    You should spend more on advertising and marketing if the following conditions exist:
•    You are building a new brand
•    You are launching a new product or service
•    Your product offering is large and complex
•    You charge premium prices
•    You sell products and services in a “low involvement” category (typically low priced items for which there is little risk of failure)
•    You are selling commodity products (advertising will be the primary differentiator)
•    Spend approximately $1 on proactive publicity for every $10 you spend on advertising.  (PR budgets are 1% of a company’s revenues on average. )  It will multiply the effectiveness of your advertising. (Advertising in trade magazines also gives you a relationship with the publications, alerts you to editorial opportunities, and sometimes will impact your brand’s presence in articles.)
•    Production costs are usually 10% of the media buy.
•    Know what your brand’s “share of voice” is – or the amount of advertising (or consumer communication) dollars your company spends compared to competitors for a given product category.  It is a good rough measure, despite its flaws that include:   
•    its focus on traditional advertising spending only
•    competitors are usually in different portfolios of businesses and it is difficult to break the spending out for the same categories across all competitors

Brand Terrorists Illuminate the Realities of Advertising

I was rushing out of Bond Street Tube station in London last week when an ad for Iceland Air literally stopped me in my tracks.

The reason it proved so arresting was not because of any personal resonance I have for the brand, or because of a particularly successful piece of copy. It smashed its way through the daily clutter of hundreds of competing ads because it had been changed.

The original, intended purpose of the ad was to build the brand equity of Iceland and, more directly, to promote it as a place for a future holiday.

But with a swift dash of a black marker pen, one active member of the target market has managed to change its appearance slightly, while effecting a total alteration of what it now communicates.

In fact, the ad's intended impact has been reversed. It now damages Iceland's brand equity by drawing attention to a particularly shameful aspect of its culture and actively serves to discourage London commuters from ever even considering it as a tourist destination.

It is a classic example of a behaviour that has fascinated me for many years.

Typically in consumer research, we study whether or not consumers respond to various marketing stimuli in the prescribed manner. Did they see the ad? Do they recall the brand? Did they buy the product?

But there are notable examples where consumers choose not to respond in the prescribed manner.

Advertising in Color

Did you know? Ads in color are read up to 42% more often than the same ads in black and white (as shown in study of phone directory ads).

See here for more on the significant impact of color.

Source: White, Jan V., Color for Impact, Strathmoor Press, April, 1997

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Ad Industry Blind to DVR Threat

In the pivotal scene of the epic movie Spartacus, Kirk Douglas, playing the eponymous renegade hero who has led an uprising of his fellow slaves against their Roman masters, now faces defeat at the hands of the Roman army.

The Roman general announces that if Spartacus identifies himself, he will be crucified, but his fellow warriors will be spared. As Spartacus begins to step forward, a slave next to him announces 'I am Spartacus', then another and another, until the whole battlefield echoes with the cry. Spartacus surveys the tragic scene with a mixture of wonder and doom.

Everyone will be crucified.

I had my own Spartacus moment a few years ago, while addressing a big group of advertising executives. One claimed that consumers welcomed advertising and saw it as interesting and valuable. Surprised by this, I asked for a show of hands to see who else believed in this positive perception of advertising. Arms were slowly raised skyward until the whole lecture theatre was a forest of defiant raised fists.

Ad agencies have spent decades convincing themselves that the production of advertising is a positive, welcomed experience for customers. Until the advent of the Digital Video Recorder this was a harmless delusion. With the introduction of the DVR, however, this rose-tinted view could blind them to the apocalyptic changes looming.