ADVERTISING'S BIGEST EVANGELIST
The book of rules in a business that abhors
discipline.
David Ogilvy was the de facto spokesperson for
creative, accountable advertising. But he didn't get to that point by being the nicest guy
in the business. Like Howard Gossage,
his mentor, he saw advertising for what it was, warts and all, even while holding the best
work up to the light.
"There have always been noisy lunatics on the fringes of the
advertising business", he observed in his introduction. "They are seldom found
out because they gravitate to the kind of clients, who, bamboozeled by their rhetoric, do
not hold them responsible for sales results." Indeed, he says, he was one of them
too, and this book, if anything, reflects his work as a born again ad man.
Copywriting to him was a thinking function --not a mechanical
one: "People who think well, write well", he observed; "Wooly minded people
write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches". He advocated the use of
long, newsy headlines over short ones, and disdained shock value ('babies, beagles and
bosoms'), humour and 'pseudo-scientific jargon'.
The first chapter ('How to produce Advertising that sells') could
have very well been the title of the book that seeks to infuse accountability over
aesthetics. Not all advertising can increase sales, he cautions. Without doing one's
homework (research), a creative idea can actually harm sales. Ogilvy did not strive to be
an award winning copywriter like John Caples, but his passion for research got him there
anyway. Case in point: His client, Rolls Royce. Unable to find anything 'newsworthy' in
the car, Ogilvy asked the factory for any boring empirical data; he then stumbled on a
trivial piece of information about the electric clock on the dashboard. The headline that
ensued, "At sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from
the electric clock" made it one of the most memorable ads. It gave Ogilvy a place in
the Oxford Book of Quotations!
The book is full of lists: do's and dont's and things to look
for. There are:
15 ways to make your illustrations work
10 rules of 'How to make TV commercials that sell
7 ways to avoid office politics
9 bones to pick with researchers
14 qualities to look for in a Creative Director
13 Predictions in Advertising
And finally, he profiles whom he calls the 'Six Giants
who invented Modern Advertising': Albert Lasker, Stan Resor, Ray Rubicam, Leo
Burnett, Claude Hopkins and Bill Bernbach. They may have 'invented' modern advsrtising,
but David Ogilvy had a tougher task: to market it. |
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