Transcript What makes a successful ad campaign?

What makes a
successful ad
campaign?
Week 2
Source: How to Create Advertising that Sells - By David Ogilvy
There isn’t any significant difference between the
various brands of whiskey, or cigarettes or beer. They
are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes
and the detergents, and the margarines… The
manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to
building the most sharply defined personality for his
brand will get the largest share of the market at the
highest profit.
- David Ogilvy
1. How should you
position your product?
• The effect of your advertising on your sales depends
more on this decision than on any other
• Positioning should be decided before the
advertising is created.
• Research can help. Look before you leap.
2. Large promise
• what should you promise the customer?
• A promise is not a claim, or a theme, or a slogan. It
is a benefit for the consumer.
•
It pays to promise a benefit which is unique and
competitive, and the product must deliver the
benefit your promise.
3. Brand image
• 95% of all advertising is created ad hoc. Most
products lack any consistent image from one year
to another.
• Every advertisement should contribute to the
complex symbol which is the brand image.
4. Big ideas
• It takes a big idea to jolt the consumer out of his
indifference – to make him notice your advertising,
remember it and take action.
• Big ideas are usually simple ideas.
• Big, simple ideas are not easy to come by. They
require genius – and midnight oil.
Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in
art, in science, and in advertising. But your
unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will
be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with
information, then unhook your rational thought
process. You can help this process by going for a long
walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of
claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your
unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you.
- David Ogilvy
5. A first-class ticket
• It pays to give most products an image of quality –
a first-class ticket.
• If your advertising looks ugly, consumers will
conclude that your product is shoddy and they will
be less likely to buy it.
6. Don’t be a bore
• Nobody was ever bored into buying a product.
• Yet most advertising is impersonal, detached, cold –
and dull.
• It pays to involve the customer. Talk to her like a
human being. Charm her. Make her hungry. Get
her to participate.
7. Innovate
• Start trends – instead of following them.
• Advertising which follows a fashionable fad or is
imitative, is seldom successful.
• Innovation is risky… look before you leap
8. Be suspicious of awards
• The pursuit of creative awards seduces creative
people from the pursuit of sales.
• Successful advertising sells the product without
drawing attention to itself, it rivets the consumer’s
attention on the product.
• Make the product the hero of your advertising.
9. Psychological
Segmentation
• Any good agency knows how to position products
for demographic segments of the market – for men,
for young children, for farmers in the south, etc.
• But Ogilvy and Mather has learned that it often
pays to position for psychological segments of the
market.
10. Don’t bury news
• It is easier to interest the consumer in a product
when it is new than at any other point in its life.
• Most advertising for new products fails to exploit the
opportunity that genuine news provides.
•
It pays to launch your new product with a loud
boom-boom.
11. Go the whole hog
• Most advertising campaigns are too complicated.
• By attempting too many things, they achieve
nothing.
• Boil down your strategy to one simple promise – and
go the whole hog in delivering that promise.
True Blood: Revelation
• Brand: HBO
• Creative Partners: Campfire
• By creating a complex backstory about a synthetic
beverage that enabled vampires to “live among
humans,” HBO and its creative partner, Campfire,
were able to tap into an existing community of
horror aficionados and organically build an
audience that made True Blood one of HBO’s most
anticipated and successful show debuts.
• http://bloodcopy.com/
The Man Your Man
Could Smell Like
• Brand: Old Spice
• Creative Partner: Weiden + Kennedy
• The Old Spice Man debuted in a 2010 Super Bowl
ad, bringing humor, sex appeal, and intrigue to a
brand that was all but forgotten. Five months later,
he made marketing history by appearing in a series
of 180 near real-time videos helped Procter &
Gamble amass over 40 million views on YouTube
and enjoy a 107% increase in body wash sales
within 30 days of the campaign launch.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE
The secret of all effective advertising is not the
creation of new and tricky words and pictures,
but one of putting familiar words and pictures
into new relationships.
- Leo Burnett
Replacing old ideas with
new ones
Source: http://www.95percent.com.my/blog/2012/how-to-replace-old-ideas-with-new-ones.html
Step 1: Walk away
• Don’t immediately do a google search of what your
audience is like, or for insight from another research
agency.
• Get away from your desk, your laptop, and your
office. Bring only one thing with you: a blank piece
of paper/notebook. On this piece of paper, write
down two questions:
1. What is the problem we are trying to fix?
2. What is the Brand’s best self?
The Brand’s Best Self is not a list of attributes and
benefits. It is bigger than that. It is about what the
brand is like when it is at its best – what contexts and
situations does it seek out and revel in.
– Ogilvy & Mather
• Remove any preconceived notions you have of
your target consumer.
• Start with the belief that you know nothing about
your consumers.
Step 2. Experience the Product
• Pretend like it’s the first time you’ve ever seen the
product/service etc.
• Go out there and check it out in its element (if it’s a
chocolate drink, go to the store and experience
buying it. What other brands would you buy
instead, and why?).
• Taste it as if you’re tasting it for the first time. If it’s a
service – go to them and test it out as a consumer.
• KEY: Immerse yourself in the product
Step 3. Try Method Acting
• You know the target audience you’ve been trying
to avoid thinking about this whole time? Become
them.
• Go and actually speak to them. Understand them.
Become one of them.
• Revisit your product in its element and this time, put
use the insight you’ve gained from talking to your
audience and imagine this journey through their
eyes. Better yet, bring them with you and ask as
many questions as you can.
If you’re trying to persuade people to do something,
or buy something, it seems to me you should use their
language, the language they use every day, the
language in which they think. We try to write in the
vernacular.
- David Ogilvy
Step 4: Try working somewhere
other than your desk
• Sometimes a new environment can be just the thing
to get ideas flowing.
• A new change of scenery can subconsciously
affect the way you work, inspiring you with different
sounds, smells, sights and emotions.
• Revisit your piece of paper and look at it with your
new eyes. You should be able to answer those
questions by now, or at least have an idea of how
you could go about it.
Step 5: Keep on learning new
things
• We tend to naturally fall into a routine of sorts and
stay away from anything that may cost us too much
effort.
• By doing this we limit our social interactions to
familiar circumstances – we don’t open ourselves
up to new ideas, people, beliefs or insights.
“There may be no such thing as creative
people, just sharp observers with
sensitive hearts.”
-Yasmin Ahmad