Ogilvy on Advertising

Author: David Ogilvy

• When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.

• Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on. All over the world. In saying this, I run the risk of being denounced by the idiots who hold that any advertising technique which has been in use for more than two years is ipso facto obsolete.

• I hate rules. All I do is report on how consumers react to different stimuli. I may say to a copywriter, ‘Research shows that commercials with celebrities are below average in persuading people to buy products. Are you sure you want to use a celebrity?’ Call that a rule? Or I may say to an art director, ‘Research suggests that if you set the copy in black type on a white background, more people will read it than if you set it in white type on a black background.’

• I ask you to forgive me for oversimplifying some complicated subjects, and for the dogmatism of my style – the dogmatism of brevity. We are both in a hurry.

• The wrong advertising can actually reduce the sales of a product.

• Everyone involved has a vested interest in prolonging the myth that all advertising increases sales to some degree. It doesn’t.

• You don’t stand a tinker’s chance of producing successful advertising unless you start by doing your homework.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.’

• 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.

• You now have to decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality.

• 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.

• Why do some people chose 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.

• Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising.

• 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 will help you recognize a big idea if you ask yourself five questions: 1 Did it make me gasp when I first saw it? 2 Do I wish I had thought of it myself? 3 Is it unique? 4 Does it fit the strategy to perfection? 5 Could it be used for 30 years?

• If you think the product too dull, I have news for you: there are no dull products, only dull writers.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Many commercials and many advertisements look like the minutes of a committee. In my experience, committees can criticize, but they cannot create.

• 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 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 a good advertisement? An advertisement which pleases you because of its style, or an advertisement which sells the most? They are seldom the same.

• 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.

• At the start of your career in advertising, what you learn is more important than what you earn. Some agencies take great pains to train their people. As in teaching hospitals, their top people devote an enormous amount of time to teaching the interns.

• The hallmarks of a potentially successful copywriter include: Obsessive curiosity about products, people and advertising. A sense of humor. A habit of hard work. The ability to write interesting prose for printed media, and natural dialogue for television. The ability to think visually. Television commercials depend more on pictures than words. The ambition to write better campaigns than anyone has ever written before.

• ‘Most good copywriters’, says William Maynard of the Bates agency, ‘fall into two categories. Poets. And killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end.’ If you are both killer and poet, you get rich.

• Some young men and women are attracted by the travel and entertainment which attach to the work of an account executive. They soon find that lunching in expensive restaurants is no fun if you have to explain a declining share-of-market while eating the soufflé.

• Always tell your client what you would do if you were in his shoes, but don’t grudge him the prerogative of deciding what advertising to run. It is his product, his money, and ultimately his responsibility.

• A habit of graceful surrender on trivial issues will make you difficult to resist when you stand and fight on a major issue.

• Said Winston Churchill, ‘PERFECTIONISM is spelled PARALYSIS.’

• When I was a door-to-door salesman for Aga cooking stoves in Scotland, I paid a cold call on an aristocrat. He threw me out. What right had I to invade his privacy? ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘you are a Director of two companies which sell their products door-to-door. How dare you insult me for doing something which your own salesmen do every day?’

• In the words of the Scottish proverb, ‘Be happy while you’re living, for you’re a long time dead.’

• How to apply for a job

• Giving out the titles reminds me of Louis XIV: ‘Every time I give someone a title, I make a hundred people angry and one person ungrateful.’

• ‘Mr. Morgan buys his partners,’ said Andrew Carnegie; ‘I grow mine.’

• Hard work, says the Scottish proverb, never killed a man.

• For example, it is one thing to be a good leader of Americans, who are raised in a tradition of democracy and have a high need for independence.

• But the American brand of democratic leadership doesn’t work so well in Europe, where executives have a psychological need for more autocratic leadership. That is one of many reasons why it is wise for American agencies to appoint locals to lead their foreign subsidiaries.

• Marvin Bower, who made McKinsey what it is today, believes that every company should have a written set of principles and purposes.

• First, you have to pay 52 per cent corporation tax. If you distribute what is left as dividends, your shareholders have to pay a further 40 per cent as income tax. When they spend their dividends, they have to pay sales tax. The Government has taken 73 cents out of every dollar you made as profit.

• Tell your prospective client what your weak points are, before he notices them. This will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points.

• However, there will always be more small accounts than big ones, so small agencies are not an endangered species. Within the limits of their resources, they can often out-perform the big ones. Creativity is not a function of size. Small can be beautiful.

• Wanted: a renaissance in print advertising ‘God is in the details’

• Conclusion: if you need a long headline, go ahead and write one, and if you want a short headline, that’s all right too.

• When you put your headline in quotes, you increase recall by an average of 28 per cent.

• When you advertise in local newspapers, you get better results if you include the name of each city in your headline.

• For a pile remedy: Send us your dollar and we’ll cure your piles, or keep your dollar and keep your piles.

• The average readership of the body copy in magazine ads is about 5 per cent.

• Do not, however, address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone.

• You cannot bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it.

• On the other hand, testimonials from experts can be persuasive – like having an ex-burglar testify that he had never been able to crack a Chubb safe.

• Always try to include the price of your products. You may see a necklace in a jeweler’s window, but you don’t consider buying it because the price is not shown and you are too shy to go in and ask. It is the same way with advertisements. When the price of the product is left out, people have a way of turning the page.

• A Harvard professor used to begin his series of lectures with a sentence that took his students by the throat: ‘Cesare Borgia murdered his brother-in-law for the love of his sister, who was the mistress of their father – the Pope.’

• On the average, headlines below the illustration are read by 10 per cent more people than headlines above the illustration. You may not think the difference worth writing about, but consider the fact that 10 per cent of, say, 20,000,000 readers is two million.

• There is no law which says that advertisements have to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract more readers.

• If you pretend you are an editor, you will get better results. When the magazine insists that you slug your ads with the word advertisement, set it in italic caps, in reverse.

• Layouts are often pinned up on bulletin boards at meetings and approved at a distance of 15 feet, as if they were posters. This leads to setting headlines in 72-point, which is impossible to read at the normal distance of 20 inches.

• But nine times out of ten, double-spreads are no more than self-indulgence by an art director who wants his advertisements to look big and juicy.

• Only 15 per cent of passengers carry anything to read. The other 85 per cent have nothing to do but read your copy.

• One of my clients was persuaded that his company’s symbol was too old-fashioned and paid a fancy firm $75,000todesignanewone.AttheunveilingIwhisperedtooneoftheVice-Presidents,‘Atyroinourartdepartmentcouldhavedesignedabettersymbolfor$75.’ ‘No doubt,’ he replied, ‘but we would have argued it to death.’

• At the unveiling I whispered to one of the Vice-Presidents, ‘A tyro in our art department could have designed a better symbol for $75.’ ‘No doubt,’ he replied, ‘but we would have argued it to death.’

• Good typography helps people read your copy, while bad typography prevents them doing so.

• Advertising agencies usually set their headlines in capital letters. This is a mistake. Professor Tinker of Stanford has established that capitals retard reading. They have no ascenders or descenders to help you recognize words, and tend to be read letter by letter.

• Another way to make headlines hard to read is to superimpose them on your illustration.

• Another mistake is to put a period at the end of headlines. Periods are also called full stops, because they stop the reader dead in his tracks. You will find no full stops at the end of headlines in newspapers.

• Which typefaces are easiest to read? Those which people are accustomed to reading, like the Century family, Caslon, Baskerville and Jenson. The more outlandish the typeface, the harder it is to read.

• Says John Updike, ‘Serifs exist for a purpose. They help the eye pick up the shape of the letter. Piquant in little amounts, sanserif in page-size sheets repels readership as wax paper repels water; it has a sleazy, cloudy look.’

• If you have a lot of unrelated facts to recite, don’t use cumbersome connectives. Simply number them – as I am doing here.

• People who register a change in brand preference after seeing a commercial subsequently buy the product three times more than people who don’t.

• 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.

• Emotion can be just as effective as any rational appeal, particularly when there is nothing unique to say about your product.

• Testimonials by celebrities. These are below average in their ability to change brand preference.

• Commercials which end by showing the package are more effective in changing brand preference than commercials which don’t.

• When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open with the fire.

• When you have nothing to say, sing it.

• 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 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.

• The easiest way to reduce the cost of a commercial is to cut actors out of the storyboard.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• William H. Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon, used to say, ‘The public be damned.’ Abraham Lincoln thought otherwise: ‘With public opinion on its side, nothing can fail.

• William H. Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon, used to say, ‘The public be damned.’ Abraham Lincoln thought otherwise: ‘With public opinion on its side, nothing can fail. With public opinion against it, nothing can succeed.’

• In 1979-80, the Media Institute studied the image of businessmen as they are portrayed in television programs. Two out of three are portrayed as foolish, greedy or criminal.

• A few years ago, the British Labour Party announced their intention to nationalize the banks. Six months of well argued advertising produced good research numbers, and the banks have not been nationalized.

• Simplistic distortion can insult people’s intelligence and do you more harm than good.

• You can reach Congressmen and others in the Federal Government with a campaign that need not cost more than $800,000 a year, but it Won’t do you much good. Unless legislators know that you are talking to their constituents, they turn a deaf ear.

• Most advocacy campaigns are too little and too late. They are addressed to the wrong audience, lack a defined purpose, don’t go on long enough, are weak in craftsmanship, and advocate a hopeless cause. So they fail. Advocacy advertising is not a job for beginners.

• For 24 countries, foreign tourists represent one of the three biggest sources of foreign exchange, but the majority of foreign governments fail to give their departments of tourism enough money to advertise.

• Some copywriters, assuming that the reader will find the product as boring as they do, try to inveigle him into their ads with pictures of babies, beagles and bosoms. This is a mistake. A buyer of flexible pipe for offshore oil rigs is more interested in pipe than anything else in the world. So play it straight.

• In a Harvard Business Review article, Professor William K. Hall reported on a study of eight industries, from steel to beer. The most successful companies were those that best differentiated their product or service.

• According to Professor Hall, the most successful commodity products differentiated themselves in one of two ways: either by low cost or by having the best reputation for quality or service.

• Analyse your inquiries and the action they produce. This will enable you to answer your boss’s inevitable question: ‘What tangible results am I getting from my advertising?’

• One day a man walked into a London agency and asked to see the boss. He had bought a country house and was about to open it as a hotel. Could the agency help him to get customers? He had $500 to spend. Not surprisingly, the head of the agency turned him over to the office boy, who happened to be the author of this book. I invested his money in penny postcards and mailed them to well-heeled people living in the neighborhood. Six weeks later the hotel opened to a full house. I had tasted blood.

• Sweepstakes, premiums, free offers, and low prices will build up your initial response, but the customer who is attracted by these devices is not always the customer who turns into a long-term buyer.

• Once you have evolved a mailing which produces profitable results, treat it as the ‘control’ and start testing ways to beat it.

• Innovations, provided you test them, can work wonders. Prospects for a new Cessna Citation business jet were surprised when we sent them live carrier pigeons, with an invitation to take a free ride in a Citation. The recipient was asked to release our carrier pigeon with his address tied to its leg. Some of the recipients ate the pigeons, but several returned alive, and at least one Citation was sold – for $600,000.

• Readers often skip from the headline to the coupon, to find out what your offer is. So make your coupons mini-ads, complete with brand name, promise and a miniature photograph of your product.

• Watch the media your competitors use, in particular the media they continue to use.

• The most productive times are early morning, late evening and weekends. January, February and March are the most profitable months.

• The better the program on which your commercials appear, the fewer sales you make. When viewers are bored by an old movie, they are more likely to pick up the telephone and order your product than when they are riveted by an episode of Dallas.

• Their Achilles’ heel is their consistency. They are always predictable. It helps to win battles when you can anticipate the enemy’s strategy.

• ‘Promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement,’ said Samuel Johnson.

• Advertising which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell, yet the majority of campaigns contain no promise whatever.

• Consumers judge the quality of a product by its price.

• I admit that research is often misused by agencies and their clients. They have a way of using it to prove they are right. They use research as a drunkard uses a lamppost – not for illumination but for support. On the whole, however, research can be of incalculable help in producing more effective advertising.

• Most marketers spend too much time worrying about how to revive products which are in trouble, and too little time worrying about how to make successful products even more successful. It is the mark of a brave man to admit defeat, cut his loss, and move on.

• In the long run, the manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined image for his product gets the largest share of the market. The manufacturer who finds himself up the creek is the short-sighted opportunist who siphons off his advertising dollars for short-term promotions.

• It is usually assumed that marketers use scientific methods to determine the price of their products. Nothing could be further from the truth.

• The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.

• Studies of the last six recessions have demonstrated that companies which do not cut back their advertising budgets achieve greater increases in profit than companies which do cut back.

• On a train journey to California, a friend asked Mr. Wrigley why, with the lion’s share of the market, he continued to advertise his chewing gum. ‘How fast do you think this train is going?’ asked Wrigley. ‘I would say about ninety miles an hour’ ‘Well,’ said Wrigley, ‘do you suggest we unhitch the engine?’

• ‘The task of advertising is not primarily one of conversion but rather of reinforcement and assurance…sales of a given brand may be increased without converting to the brand any new consumers, but merely by inducing its existing users, those who already use it at least occasionally, to use it more frequently.’

• Always hold your sales meetings in rooms too small for the audience, even if it means holding them in the WC. ‘Standing room only’ creates an atmosphere of success, as in theatres and restaurants, while a half-empty auditorium smells of failure.

• What is marketing? I once heard Marvin Bower define marketing as objectivity.

• British commercials tend to be less direct, less competitive, more subtle, more nostalgic, funnier and more entertaining.

• French advertising is distinguished for its wit, charm and beautiful art direction, qualities which are seen to best advantage in magazine ads and posters.

• In Belgium and Sweden, advertising is not allowed on television.

• New Zealand. Considering that the population is only three million, it is remarkable that New Zealand plays the best Rugby football in the world, produces the best sheep, and one of the two greatest sopranos.

• There is very little advertising in India – 37 cents per head per annum, compared with $224intheUnitedStatesand$77 in Japan. Indian agency people have an impressive theoretical knowledge of advertising, but it seldom shows in their output. The 19-year-old daughter of my Indian partner Mani Ayer calles it ‘organized graffiti’. Nevertheless, I have seen a few Indian campaigns, such as that for the Indian Cancer Society, which compare favorably with anything in the West. Indian advertisers have problems unknown in the West. Their campaigns have to be translated into 12 languages, and the majority of the population cannot read any language. The average Indian has an income of $5 a week. Is it fair, do you think, to advertise products which the majority of people will never be able to buy? The population of India has doubled since Independence in 1947. If it doubles again in the next 25 years – to 1,400,000,000 – the consequence will be massive starvation. I came away from India recently with an unshakeable resolve to find out if the skills I have spent my life acquiring can help to solve the problem of the birthrate. Says Mani Ayer, ‘The elimination of human suffering is too serious to leave to government alone.’ The Government of India has been spending less than 10 cents per child-bearing couple per year on family planning.

• ‘The task of our Soviet advertising is to give people exact information about the goods that are on sale, to help to create new demands, to cultivate new tastes and requirements, to promote the sales of new kinds of goods and to explain their uses to the consumer.’

• It was Helen Resor who insisted that the agency’s offices should be decorated with antique furniture, each executive being allowed to choose the period he liked the best. She was said to believe that if their offices were more attractive than their homes, they would work longer hours.2

• ‘Advertising has a responsibility to behave properly. I proved that you can sell products without bamboozling the American public.’

• ‘I guess my feeling is pretty well summed up in the remarks of the vice president of a competitive agency. When asked why he was smoking a not-too-popular brand of cigarette which his company advertised, he replied: “In my book there is no taste or aroma quite like that of bread and butter.” ’

• ‘Human nature hasn’t changed for a billion years. It won’t even vary in the next billion years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about a man, you can touch him at the core of his being.

• Nobody suggests that the printing press is evil because it is used to print pornography. It is also used to print the Bible. Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

• Wilfrid Sheed had a point when he wrote that ‘the sound of selling is the dirge of our times’.

• ‘the sound of selling is the dirge of our times’.

• In his book The Duping of the American Voter,4 my colleague Robert Spero analyzed the commercials used by Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. He concluded that they were ‘the most deceptive, misleading, unfair and untruthful of all advertising … the sky is the limit with regard to what can be said, what can be promised, what accusations can be made, what lies can be told’.

• Highways with billboards have three times as many accidents as highways without billboards.

• In California, Governor Pat Brown said, ‘When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable to a fine of $50. When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded.’

• It is often charged that advertising can persuade people to buy inferior products. So it can – once.

• The best way to increase the sale of a product is to improve the product. This is particularly true of food products; the consumer is amazingly quick to notice an improvement in taste and buy the product more often. I have always been irritated by the lack of interest brand managers take in improving their products.