David Ogilvy on Marketing, Advertising +

Ogilvy on Advertising, Marketing, and Competing with P&G

A candid and indispensable primer on all aspects of advertising from the man Time has called "the most sought after wizard in the business".

Ogilvy on Advertising

Overture
- The reader finds the ad so interesting that they buy the product
- Only one major change: TV
- Consumer buy products whose advertising promises them:
  - Valued for money
  - Beauty
  - Nutrition
  - Relief from suffering
  - Social status
  - And so on
How to produce advertising that sells (directed toward the producer of an ad not the client)
- The wrong advertising can actually reduce the sales of a product
- Do Your Homework
  - Study the product you are going to advertise
  - Find out what kind of advertising your competitors have been doing for similar products, and with what success. This will give you your bearings.
  - Research customers
    - Find out
      - How they think about your kind of product
      - What kind of language they use when they discuss the subject
      - What attributes are important to them
      - What promise would be most likely to make them buy your brand.
    - Use a professional if you can afford it
    - Informal conversations with half-a-dozen housewives
- How do you want to positioning the product
  - What the product does
  - Who it is for
- Brand image (personality)
  - Personality is an amalgam of many things
    - Its name
    - Its packaging
    - Its price
    - The style of its advertising
    - above all The nature of the product itself
  - Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the brand image.
  - Your advertising should consistently project the same image, year after year.
  - It pays to give most products an image of quality.
    - This is particularly true of products whose brand-image is visible to your friends.
  - Examples
    - Jack Daniel's, Grand dad, Taylor
- What's the big idea?
  - Must invent big ideas
  - Examples
    - Pepperidge Farm—horse drawn van along a country lane
      - Imagery
        
        image n images 1 : likeness 2 : visual counterpart of an object formed by a lens or mirror 3 : mental picture vb 4 : create a representation of —
        noun: what exists in the mind as a representation (as of something comprehended) or as a formulation (as of a plan).
        
        impression, intellection, notion, perception, thought, idea, apprehension, conceit, concept, conception
        
        noun: one strikingly like another especially in appearance or manner.
        
        double, picture, portrait, ringer, spit, spitting image
        
        verb: to reproduce or show as a mirror does.
        
        mirror, reflect, glass
        
        verb: to present an image or lifelike imitation of (as in art).
        
        interpret, picture, portray, render, represent, delineate, depict, describe
        
        verb: to form an idea of something in the mind.
        
        imagine, project, realize, see, vision, visualize, think, conceive, envisage, envision, fancy, feature
    - Hathaway eyepatch
    - Dove—doesn't dry your skin the way soap can
    - American Express—Do you know me?
    - Marlboro—the cowboy
  - Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.
  - Difficult to recognize a good idea
    - 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 thirty years.
    - Recognition aids
      - 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
  - How many campaigns even run for five years?
- Make the product the hero of the advertisement
  - The writer must be personally interested in the product.
  - When faced with selling 'parity' products, all you can hope to do is explain their virtues more persuasively than your competitors, and to differentiated them by the style of your advertising.
- 'The positively good'
  - Don't have to convince consumers that the product is superior to competitor's
  - It may be sufficient to convince consumers that your product is positively good.
  - If you and your competitors all make excellent products, don't try to imply that your product is better. Just say
    - What good about your product
    - And do a clearer, more honest, more informative job of saying it.
      - This creates confidence that his product is positively good.
- Repeat your winning ads until it stops selling
- Word of mouth—nobody know how to do it.
- Down with committees
  - By attempting to cover too many things, they achieve nothing
- Ambition
  - Few copywriters are ambitious.
  - Might double the client's sales
- Pursuit of knowledge
  - The good ad agents know more.
    - What books he has read about advertising?
  - Millions are spent on testing individual commercials and advertisements, but next to nothing is done to analyze the results of those tests in search of plus and minus factors.
  - Advertising agencies waste their client's money repeating the same mistakes
- The lessons of direct response (mail/telephone ads)
  - Most advertisers never know for sure whether their advertisements sell.
  - Watch the kind of advertising they do
    - 30-second vs 2 minute commercial
    - Prime time vs late at night
    - Short copy vs long copy
- The cult of 'creatively'
  - What happens to Clio winners.
    - Lost the accounts
    - Out of business
    - Taken its budget out of TV
    - Given half of its account to another agency
    - Client refused to put the winning ad 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 test is relevance
  - Advertising reflects the mores of society, but does not influence them.
  - Would the use of this … in an ad shock a lot of people?
- Summary
  - Do your homework
  - Avoid committees
  - Learn from research
  - Watch what the direct-response advertisers do
  - Stay away from irrelevant sex
Jobs in advertising—and how to get them
- Four different career paths
  - Sell time or space to advertisers and their agencies
  - Copywriter, art director or advertising manager for a retailer
  - Brand manager
  - Advertising agency
- Types of work at an agency
  - Copywriters
  - Art directors
  - Account executives
  - Researchers
  - Media
  - Chief executive officer
  - Creative director
- Issues
  - Women in advertising
  - Firing and hiring
  - Education for advertising
  - Social status
  - Moonlighting
  - Be happy while you're living
- How to apply for a job
  - Spell all names right
  - Identify the sort of job you're applying for
  - Be specific and factual
  - Be personal, direct and natural
  - Propose a specific next step
How to run an advertising agency
- Fun atmosphere
- Hiring
- Crown princes
- Who not to hire
- Office politicans
- Discipline works
  - discipline n disciplines 1 : field of study 2 : training that corrects, molds, or perfects 3 : punishment 4 : control gained by obedience or training vb 5 : punish 6 : train in self-control.
    verb: to inflict a penalty on in requital for a wrongdoing.
    
    punish, castigate, chasten, chastise, correct
    
    noun: the act or an instance of punishing.
    
    rod, punishment, castigation, chastisement, correction
    
    verb: to cause to acquire knowledge or skill.
    
    educate, instruct, school, train, teach
    
    noun: power of controlling one's actions, impulses, or emotions.
    
    willpower, will
  - Report to work on time
  - Telephones answered promptly
  - Security of secrets
  - Performance—Is that a world class performance
  - Live up to business agreements
  - There is nothing like an occassional all-night push to enliven morale—provided you are part of the push. Never leave the bridge in a storm
  - Begin each year by writing down what you want to accomplish & end each year by measuring how much you have accomplished.
- Leadership
- Alcholics
- Written principles—purposes
- Profits and all that
  - How to get paid
  - What to do with your profits
- Fortunes
- Five tips
  - Avoid too many people for one job
  - Go to people's offices
  - Communicate verbally
  - Go to meeting if you want the voting to go your way
  - Use the products of your business associates
How to get clients
Open letter to a client in search of an agency
- Dediciding to hire a new agency
  - Do it yourself
  - Leaf through some magazines
  - Tear out the ads you envy
  - Find out which agencies did them
  - Watch TV for 3 evenings, making a list of the commercials you envy and find out which agencies did them.
  - Which of these agencies are working for your competitors
  - Meet the head of each agency and his Creative Director
  - Make sure the chemistry is right
  - Ask to see each agency's six best ads and six best television commericials.
  - Pick the agency whose campaigns interest you the most.
  - Ask what the agency charges.
    - Pay more than it charges
    - Don't haggle
    - Insist on a five-year contract
- Are you going to get the best out of them?
  - Don't strain your agencies output through more than two levels
- If your account is too small to interst a good agency
Views on specific advertising mediums?
- Wanted: a renaissance in print advertising
- How to make TV commercials that sell
- Advertising corporations
- How to advertise foreign travel
- The secrets of success in business-to-business advertising
- Direct mail, my first love and secret weapon
- Advertising for good causes
- Competing with Procter & Gamble
- 18 Miracles of research
What little I know about marketing
Is Americal still top nation?
Lasker, Resor, Rubicam, Burnett, Hoskins and Bernbach
What's wrong with advertising?
I predict 13 changes

Ogilvy on Marketing

New products
- 35 % of supermarket sales come form products that did not exist 10 years ago
- Spending on new product research
  - Years may go by without results
  - Then bingo
- 8 out of 10 new products fail
  - Some times too new
  - Not new enough
    - No perceptible point of difference
- Success keys
  - Point of difference
    - Better quality
    - Better flavor
    - Better value
    - More convenience
    - Better solutions
  - Strike a chord of familiarity
    - A disposable diaper
    - A light beer
    - A diet cola
    - A paper towel
Naming your product
- Good luck
- Should be short so that it name can be big on the package
- No obscene or offensive foreign meaning
Sleeping beauties
- Products that sell well without advertising
- Advertise them
The end of the block-buster brand
- Cost to much to launch them
Don't waste time on probem babies
- Back you winners
- Abandon you losers
Don't dawdle
- Set control cycles in terms of months
Promotions
- Advertising is a better use of the money
Pricing is guesswork
- Superior products at premium prices
Marketing in recession
- Continue to advertise
- Set aside money in a reserve
Heavy users
- Keep your eyes glued on heavy users
Why advertise at all?
- Cheapest form of selling
Repertory of brands
- Consumers buy a repertory of brands not just one
  - They almost never buy a brand which has not been admitted to their repertory during it first year on the market.
- Advertising role—reinforcement and assurance
Sales meetings in the WC
- Standing room only creates an atmosphere of success
What is marketing?—Objectivity

Competing with P&G

Reasons for its overwhelming success
Disciplined
- Plan thoroughly
- Minimize risk
- Stick to their proven principles
To get broad trial
- Distribute home-delivered samples on a massive scale
- Satisfied customers
  - Firsthand experience with the product
    - The other elements of the marketing mix
Never enter small categories
- Except when they expect them to grow
Set out to dominate every category they enter
- Building huge volume
- Achieve lower manufacturing cost
- Sell at lower prices
- Enter more than one brand in a category
  - Allows each brand to compete with its sibling—with no holds barred
Market research
- Identify customer needs
- What lies around the corner
  - Consumer
    - New trends
      - Tastes
      - Needs
      - Environment
      - Living habits
Creating products
- Superior product performance to their competitors
  - Blind in-home tests
    - Superiority is apparent to the consumer
New brand launch
- Advertise heavily
- Large budgets
Test-marketing
- Unbelievably thorough — and patient
- Regional expansion program
- Prefer to be right rather than first
Advertising principles
- Use research
  - Determine the most effective strategy
- Never change a successful strategy
  - Continually test new executions of the ongoing strategy
- Promise the consumer
  - One important benefit
    - If an opportunity to increase sales by promising more than one
      - Run two campaigns
        
        Often in the same medium
- Communicate
  - Effectively
  - Not
    - to be original
    - entertaining
  - Measure
    - Before the copy is written
    - After the commercials are produced
    - Test markets
  - Don't believe that testing can measure persuasion
- Commercial content
  - 'Moment of confirmation'
    - A woman squeezing the Charmin and attesting to its softness
  - Demonstrations
    - Bounty absords more liquid
  - Talk directly to consumer
    - Use familiar language
    - Use familiar situtions
      - The place of usage
        
        Not in the laboratory
  - Brand name
    - Verbally
    - Visually
      - Appear within the first 10 seconds
      - 3 times there after
    - Short, simple
  - The promise
    - Verbally delivered
    - Reinforce it with supers
    - End with a repititon on the promise
    - Explaining why it does it
      - Less than half the commercial
  - Emotional benefits
    - Often show users deriving some emotional benefit
  - Television techniques
    - Proven to sell
      - Slices of life
      - User testimonials
      - Talking heads
    - Little music
    - Little touches of humor
  - Lots of words
    - > 100 in a 30 second commercial
  - When a continuing character sell
    - Unknown actor or actress
    - Never a celebrity
  - Refer to 'the other leading…'
- Budget
  - Continually test higher levels of expenditure
  - 30% prime evening time
  - 70%
    - Daytime
    - Fringe
  - Trying the use of 45 second commercial
    - Situation involvement
    - Viewer involvement
  - Adverstise through the year
Achilles' heel
- Consistency
- Market a better product

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