What is good advertising, anyway?

Here is an illuminating excerpt from David Ogilvy’s classic “Confessions of an Advertising Man”.

“What is a good advertisement? There are three schools of thought. The cynics hold that a good advertisement is an advertisement with a client’s OK on it. Another school accepts Raymond Rubicam’s definition, ‘The best identification of a great advertisement is that its public is not only strongly sold by it, but that both the public and the advertising world remember it for a long time as an admirable piece of work … ‘ I have produced my share of advertisements which have been remembered by the advertising world as “admirable pieces of work,” but I belong to the third school, which holds that a good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself. It should rivet the reader’s attention on the product. Instead of saying, ‘What a clever advertisement,” the reader says, ‘I never knew that before. I must try this product.’

“It is the professional duty of the advertising agent to conceal his artifice. When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march against Philip.’ I’m for Demosthenes.”

Ogilvy believed creativity without context does not sell. Was he right?

Super Bowl commercials support his view. People may remember a clever ad, but not the company behind it. DM News points out that Sales Genie’s unadorned and unfunny Super Bowl spot generated more than 10,000 registrations! Other more “creative” Super Bowl advertisers fared much worse, as they notoriously have for as many years back as you can count by Roman numerals.

Ogilvy wrote all this in the 1960’s. One possible flaw in his argument lies in the phrase, “rivet the reader’s attention.” In Ogilvy’s day, a fair number of people had the attention span to read such things as The History of the Peloponnesian War. It may have been possible for an advertiser to walk consumers through a logical sequence of selling points leading up to a persuasive call to action. Nowadays, consumer focus is measured in seconds rather than minutes. With so little time, “shock and awe” might be the only way for advertisers to do their riveting.

Word Sell … Scrambled Toast