David Ogilvy on How to Create Good Marketing Campaigns
How modern advertisers can great good campaigns. Teachings from a master.
David Ogilvy is one of the pioneers of the advertising industry. He was one of the first to recognize the art and the science of advertising bringing an incredible track record of lucrative adverts that sold millions of dollars. Companies like dove soap, shell oil, Campbell soup and more. Although his prime days were during the age of television, newspaper, and magazine advertainments, his insights into what creates a good ad campaigns gives us guidance on how us internet marketers can create our online campaigns in a way that interests the viewer and gets them to buy our products or services.
I’ll be giving you an overview on what he says creates the best selling campaigns. These are excerpts from his book “Confessions of an Advertising Man” These aren’t all that he mentioned in his musings on creating great campaigns, but to me, these are the points that will stick in my head when creating my next one. Let me know what you think!
What you say is more important than how you say it.
He says “You’re most important job is to decide what you’re going to say about the product, What benefit are you going to promise.”
Saying rather than guess what the best promise is, we should be testing at all times. A/B testing as we know is one of if not the most important aspects of testing ad copy. We should be narrowing down our list of the best promises/benefits our services offer and testing them to the same type of customer.
Unless the campaign is built around a great idea, it WILL flop.
If our campaigns are centered around ideas that don’t have huge implications on the lives of our targets they will flop. Who cares if your SEO services will get your clients more organic traffic, the big idea is that your services WILL MAKE MORE MONEY.
Give the facts
Consumers are interested in facts. In B2B marketing and sales, the consumer doesn’t want flowery text on the features of your products, they want to know exactly how buying your products effect their lives.
He says, “The consumer isn’t a moron, she’s your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.”
He goes on to talk about when he was marketing for Shell, the oil company, he wrote an advertisement giving basic facts about the oil industry that every other oil company could give. His advertisements sold more oil than any other oil advertiser simply because he gave the consumer facts.
You cannot bore people into buying
Even back then, he knew that the average person was seeing 1,000 adverts a day. That was in the 60s I’d venture to say that number has at least doubled. We know within seconds of seeing the ad whether we’re going to pay attention to an ad. You’ve got to make it interesting enough for people to even pay real attention to it.
“We make advertisements that people want to read. You can’t save souls in an empty church.”
Make your advertisements contemporary.
He says, “At the age of 51, I am finding it increasingly difficult to tune in on the young married couples who are starting out in life; that is why most of the copy writers at our agency are so young.”
We know that an advert to Gen-Z isn’t going to interest a baby boomer. Keep your target audience in mind and mirror the style of advert that will appeal to them.
If you’re lucky enough to write a good advertisement, Repeat it until it stops pulling.
“You aren’t advertising to a standing army, you are advertising to a moving parade.”
You will get tired of seeing an ad, but the newly married couple looking to buy a new refrigerator hasn’t seen the ad that the couple from three years ago saw and bought from. If it is still selling, don’t pull the ad.
Think about the image and the Brand
“The golden rewards await the advertiser who has the brains to create a coherent image, and the stability to stick with it over a long period.”
“The greater the similarity between brands, the less part REASON plays in brand selection.”
When we create our campaigns, it’s rare that we think of the image and the brand of the company we are running the campaign for. We create these ad hoc campaigns that give no brand consistency making it next to impossible to tell you from joe down the road. Cultivating a consistent image will make your brand salient in the market in the minds of your targets.
Don’t be a copy cat
“They copied all they could follow, but they couldn’t copy my mind, And I left ‘em sweating and stealing, a year and a half behind.”
Don’t copy others, not only does it show that you don’t think you’re good enough to produce great work, the things you’re copying are almost surely the old techniques that’ll soon be deprecated.