Advertising: Mastering

Chapter 1
Advertising: Mastering
the Art of Promotion
In This Chapter

Being aware of the advertising around you (as if you could avoid it)

Putting the fundamentals of good advertising to work for you

Taking a few lessons from the pros
Advertising is a $300 billion industry in the United States alone. Plunkett
Research, Ltd. (the company that provided this figure) points out that
the large numbers don’t stop there. In the United States, advertisers flood the
following mediums in droves:
1,749 broadcast TV stations (and that’s not including cable and satellite
TV outlets)
13,599 radio stations
2,250 daily and Sunday newspapers
And those figures don’t even take into consideration the thousands of magazines,
direct mail, Web sites, blogs, outdoor advertising (billboards, bus shelters,
and so on), or specialty or alternative advertising, which includes
everything from airplane banners at the beach to tchotchkes, small items like
tote bags, pens, and t-shirts that merchants and businesses give away to
remind consumers to do business with them.
With all these choices of how to get your message out there, how do you
decide what’s the best medium to reach the customers you’re looking for?
And how can you develop an ad campaign that won’t get lost in the morass?
You don’t have to hire an ad agency (though you can: Chapter 16 offers guidance
on how best to do this, and Chapter 20 gives you ten ways to know
whether you need outside help). But you can also do it yourself, and this
book tells how.
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
In this chapter, I fill you in on the basics of advertising — what’s effective and
what isn’t. Then I give you a short course on all your advertising options —
radio, TV (network and cable), magazines and newspapers, direct mail, outdoor,
the Web, and more — and I show how you can put them to work for
you. Finally, I end with stories about two legends of advertising as well as
brief introductions of more recent ad giants, because if you focus on the
best and figure out what they’ve done well, you can try to incorporate some
of their genius into your own advertising — and come out ahead of the
competition.
Making Advertising Work
Effective advertising sells a product or a service that fulfills all the promises
made about it. On the other hand, effective advertising also sells inferior
products or services, but only once!
So what makes advertising effective? Effective advertising is:
Creative: It delivers the advertising message in a fresh, new way.
Hard-hitting: Its headline, copy, or graphic element stops readers or listeners
dead in their tracks.
Memorable: It ensures that the audience will remember your business
when they think about the products and services you’re selling.
Clear: It presents its message in a concise, uncomplicated, easy-to-grasp
manner.
Informative: It enlightens the audience about your business and products,
while giving them important reasons to buy from you.
Distinctive: It is unique and immediately recognizable as yours.
The well-established brands that most people use every day — brands like
Coca-Cola and Pepsi, McDonald’s and Burger King, Budweiser and Miller,
Bayer and Advil, Ford and Chevy, Tide and Cheer — live up to the promises
made in their advertising. In fact, the products live up to the promise in such
a dramatic fashion that those products have become a part of the everyday
lives of millions of people. These products have been branded, which simply
means that when you think of soft drinks, fast food, beer, pain relievers, cars,
or laundry detergents, these brands come to mind. As surely as the cowboys
of the Old West branded the haunches of their cattle, these products have
been branded into your psyche — and the psyches of millions of other
consumers.
10 Part I: Advertising 101
When you begin to create advertising for your product or service, keep these
suggestions in mind:
Don’t make promises you can’t live up to. Although your ad may draw
more people to your product initially, you can’t retain these people as
loyal customers in the long run if you make promises you can’t keep.
Identify the best features of whatever it is you’re selling and develop
your advertising around these features. Think about how your product
stands out from the competition, what sets it apart, and then focus on
those attributes.
Try to create a memorable advertising message for your product. You
want people to think of your store, your product, or your professional
service whenever they’re in the market for such a thing.
If your message is creative, clear, and concise, if your product or service is
something that can truly benefit people and live up to its hype, then you’re
on the road to producing effective advertising.
If your advertising makes bold promises about your product, you may convince
a lot of people to try it. But if those people buy your product and give it
a try, and the product turns out to be less than you advertised it to be, you
will most certainly never see those consumers again. Think about it: How
many times have you responded to an advertising message for a new,
improved, astounding product, only to be disappointed with the item after
you tried it? You probably even felt like you’d been ripped off. If your advertising
message leaves consumers with the same feeling, you simply won’t get
anywhere.
Getting to Know Your Media Options
Advertising comes in all shapes and sizes. And a big part of developing your
ad plans and campaign is to decide which mediums are best suited to advertising
your particular business. Following is a brief overview of your options,
with details from Plunkett Research, Ltd. to give you a ballpark idea on how
many billions of dollars are spent annually in each medium in the United
States.
Regarding radio
Radio advertising is a $20 billion business — and it has expanded both
because listeners can now tune in on the Internet and because of the development
of satellite radio (Sirius and XM subscriber-based programming). But
Chapter 1: Advertising: Mastering the Art of Promotion 11
it’s also competing with MP3 devices, which means there may be fewer listeners
to any given radio station or program.
But if your business appeals to consumers who’re likely to subscribe to this
type of programming, or if you can reach them on broadcast radio during
drive time or particular radio programs (especially those with celebrity
hosts), then you should consider this medium. Chapter 8 provides guidance
on developing memorable radio spots, and Chapter 14 offers information on
buying radio time to maximize your reach — and your budget.
Rating TV
TV is a $68 billion business — and that includes the almost 2,000 broadcast
stations plus the many cable and satellite TV stations. The growth in the
number of stations has actually made it easier for advertisers, because TV
programming is so much more targeted. For example, the audience for The
History Channel is probably very different from, say, Lifetime or Oxygen or
WE, the Women’s Entertainment channel.
Still, TV advertising is the most expensive medium (even with the tips offered
in Chapter 9 on how to create TV commercials and keep down the costs!), so
you should consider TV commercials only if you can afford them. TV is still a
mass medium, even with the more-focused channels mentioned, and your ad
budget may be better spent on a more narrowly focused media. But if you
decide TV is for you, see Chapter 15 for guidance on how to find the right station
and negotiate the best deal for your ad and your business.
Contemplating print
Print advertising encompasses both newspapers (daily and Sunday papers),
which is a $49 billion business, and magazines, which is a $21 billion business.
Newspapers are obviously a good choice if your business is regional and you’re
targeting a broad consumer base; magazines are more-specifically tailored to
different readers — for example, a subscriber to Glamour probably isn’t also
subscribing to, say, Maxim, though the media kits of each provide the details
on the number and demographics of the subscriber base. Chapter 7 offers
insight on how to write and design eye-catching print ads, and Chapter 13
offers ideas for how to choose the right publication and negotiate a good rate
for your ad.
Keep in mind, though, that many people who used to get information from
newspapers and magazines now have the additional option of online
subscriptions — to either those same publications or to alternatives that
have never been printed on paper but are available only on the Internet.
Chapters 6 and 12 cover how to create and buy ad space in this new media.
12 Part I: Advertising 101
Musing upon direct mail
Direct mail is a $45 billion business, and it’s alive and well even with the
growth of e-mail and other Internet advertising. Charitable organizations still
send pitches for funds to continue their good works (like The Red Cross, The
American Cancer Society, and Doctors Without Borders). Similarly, cultural
institutions use direct mail to solicit donor support, which they need to supplement
ticket prices from their audiences (think of your local theater company,
public radio station, and even PBS). And direct mail includes the
myriad catalogs that fill all of our mailboxes — from Land’s End to L.L. Bean
to Victoria’s Secret, to J.Crew (to name just a few). Chapter 10 focuses on
developing strong direct-mail messages that can stand out among the abundance
in the mailbox.
Chapter 1: Advertising: Mastering the Art of Promotion 13
Imitation: The sincerest form of flattery
Every now and then I see or hear an image
advertisement that is so creative, so wonderfully
conceived, and so (relatively) inexpensively
produced that I wish I had written it myself. It
has been said that no original ideas are out
there, but occasionally a fresh, new approach
to delivering the same old message comes
along. And I file it away in my memory as something
that, someday, I may want to imitate. If the
ad is especially impressive, I even find out
which agency is responsible for it and write it a
congratulatory note.
One such ad was a radio spot for Berkeley
Farms, a major Northern California dairy.
Instead of creating a straight, consumerdirected
ad extolling the virtues of its milk, the
company created a recruitment ad for “new
employees.” Instead of just telling its audience
what superior milk they can take home when
they buy the Berkeley Farms brand, a warm,
motherly, female voice opens the spot with the
wonderful line, “If you’re a cow, I want to tell
you about Berkeley Farms — it’s a great place
to work.” She goes on to tell any cows who may
be listening that they can expect to be fed only
the finest hays and grains, which a full-time vet
is always on call in case they get sick, that their
stalls are always kept clean and tidy, and that
they are foolish cows indeed if they chose to
work anywhere else.
This spot is a memorable one because it uses a
creative twist — talking to the cows, not the
consumers — to a great advantage. Hey, if this
dairy is good enough for the cows, then it must
be good enough for you! And this spot can
undoubtedly inspire me to think of a fresh pointof-
view for some retail commercial I write in the
future.
When you sit down to write advertising for your
business, using ideas and techniques from
other advertising to help you find your own
“creative hook” is perfectly okay. No, I am not
giving you permission to lift someone else’s
copy verbatim or to steal a concept out of hand.
But good advertising done by others can be a
great source of creative inspiration. Even the
big boys do it. One advertising agency comes
out with a fresh, new look in its ads, something
that hasn’t been seen before, and everyone else
jumps all over it. It happens all the time. Just be
sure you know the difference between imitating
and plagiarizing, and stick to the former.
Scrutinizing outdoor advertising
Outdoor advertising includes everything from billboards on highways to ads
on bus kiosks, in subway cars, on taxis, or even on benches and other signage.
As a $6 billion industry, it’s a small part of overall annual ad expenditures,
but if you think it’s right for your business, Chapter 11 tells how to choose
the type of outdoor ad that can work best for you and how to design memorable
advertising in this medium.
Ogling online ads
Last, but by no means least, is the newest ad medium — online — even
though the Internet hardly seems “new”; still, it’s only been since the mid-’90s
that companies have used the Web to advertise products, services, and businesses.
Chapter 6 offers the pros and cons of online advertising on various
Web sites (as well as how to develop your own), and it tells how to create
various types of online ad formats, do e-mail advertising, and create your
own blog. Chapter 12 picks up where Chapter 6 leaves off and helps you with
the financial side of online ads: hiring someone to help you create ads or
your Web site and buying space on other sites.
Poring over publicity
Technically, publicity isn’t really part of advertising, but good publicity can
serve to advertise your business. Publicity is really about getting someone
else to advertise your business. Basically, you’re calling attention to what
you’re doing in a way that your newspaper may want to report on it, or a
magazine may want to write a feature article about your business, or a TV
show host or radio host may be so intrigued by something you’ve done that
they talk about you on their shows. The two chapters in Part IV offer lots of
great ideas and success stories on how some businesses have done this
successfully.
Where your advertising appears is every bit as important as what message it
contains — maybe even more so. Advertising is a numbers game: You want to
spend as little money as possible, as effectively as possible, to reach as many
people as possible, in order to make your phone and your cash register ring.
Consider your many media options very carefully. You can waste your advertising
dollars very easily by using the wrong media for your advertising goals.
Mass media advertising is affordable (turn to the chapters in Part III for more
information on costs). But so-called “affordable” advertising in the wrong
14 Part I: Advertising 101
media is a gigantic waste of your dollars and your time. No matter how
affordable the media is, if it doesn’t bring customers through your door, you
aren’t really saving money. On the contrary, you’re draining your limited
budget without being the least-bit effective.
Lessons from the Legends: Figuring Out
Your Advertising Needs
Although your advertising may not come close to the greatest ads created by
the top ad agencies (after all, that’s not your intent in the first place), you can
still gather greatness from the best. The creative legends of the advertising
business have a perceptive understanding of consumers (and how to motivate
them). Because they understood consumers, they were able to produce
advertising that was so effective that it remained memorable decades after
the campaign’s end.
In the following sections, I describe some of the gurus of advertising whose
work has taught me much of what I know — and can do the same for you.
Chapter 1: Advertising: Mastering the Art of Promotion 15
A spectacularly ineffective advertising vehicle
One of the other tenants in our office building —
a small insurance company specializing in
assigned-risk auto coverage (for customers
whose driving records aren’t exactly stellar) —
recently unveiled its latest, breakthrough advertising
vehicle. And I do mean vehicle.
I came to work one morning and couldn’t miss it,
parked out on the curb in all its glory. The company
had pounded out the dents on a 1960s
Volkswagen bus, spent $50 to have it freshly
painted a sparkling bathtub white, and bolted a
4-by-8-foot, double-faced billboard to the roof to
advertise its business. Because the old wreck
needed brakes, our business neighbors quit driving
it around town and parked the thing conspicuously
in the parking lot in front of our
building, much to the chagrin of the other tenants.
The sign that sat atop this moveable beast,
purportedly to tell the world about the company’s
insurance business, included no less
than 32 words (including sure thing and no
driver refused) and an 11-digit phone number,
all arranged helter-skelter in 6 different fonts
and painted in 3 different colors.
The bus was a gigantic waste of advertising dollars.
But the business owner probably thought,
like so many small to mid-sized retailers and
service businesses do, that he couldn’t afford
“real” advertising. So he tried the VW bus routine
instead. I don’t think I have to tell you to
avoid this kind of mistake at all costs.
David Ogilvy
The first book I ever read about the advertising business was Confessions of
an Advertising Man, by David Ogilvy (recently reissued in paperback by
Southbank Publishing). Ogilvy was an inspiration to me — and to thousands
of other advertising professionals. He died in 1999 at the age of 88, yet he’s a
true legend in the advertising world, even though the ads he made famous
were created decades ago.
Ogilvy is also famous for succinct statements about how to create compelling,
memorable ads. Here are just a few that I try to live by when writing
ads for my clients:
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the
body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent 80
cents out of your dollar.”
“Never write an advertisement you wouldn’t want your own family to
read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell lies to mine.”
“Every word in the copy must count.”
“We sell or else.”
“Advertise what is unique.”
Born in England, David Ogilvy didn’t even get into the advertising business
until he was 39 years old. He had tried everything from selling stoves door-todoor,
to a brief tenure as a chef in Paris. He was even a member of the British
Secret Service. Financially broke at the age of 39, he cofounded an advertising
agency — Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather. And he made a list of five clients
he wanted to land: General Foods, Bristol-Myers, Campbell’s Soup, Lever
Brothers, and Shell Oil. Eleven years later, he had them all.
Ogilvy preached the virtues of sales-driven copy. He also expected advertising
copy to be expressed with clarity, relevance, and grace. He knew that the
real purpose of advertising is to sell. His ads may have been gorgeous, but
they were filled with unique product difference and sell — albeit with an emotional
edge. He invented eccentric personalities to capture the reader’s attention,
based on the idea that memorable faces help make memorable brands.
Ogilvy also said, when talking about creative types who worked for (or
wanted to work for) his agency, “Every copywriter should start his career by
spending two years in direct response.” What he meant is that the primary
purpose of advertising is to sell.
16 Part I: Advertising 101
Bill Bernbach
Bill Bernbach was the Creative Director for Doyle, Dane, Bernbach during its
heyday. Working with Helmut Krone as Art Director, Bernbach invented a new
way to project a message to consumers, by introducing wonderful creativity
and a kinder, gentler approach to advertising. The agency led the way with its
fanciful Volkswagen ads from the 1960s, which supplied both entertainment
and product information. Do you remember “Think small”? It was a huge shift
in advertising communication and became the industry standard that lives to
this day.
So memorable and trend-setting was that original Volkswagen advertising
that when the New Beetle was introduced in the 1990s, the agency for
Volkswagen of America, Arnold Communications of Boston, chose not to
Chapter 1: Advertising: Mastering the Art of Promotion 17
Dot-coms to dot-bombs in one easy lesson
Whenever I think of Bill Bernbach’s very insightful
quote, “Dullness won’t sell your product, but
neither will irrelevant brilliance,” I’m reminded
of the super-expensive commercials for various
fledgling dot-com businesses that ran during
the Super Bowl broadcast in January 2000.
Clearly, most of these businesses had never
bothered to read Bill Bernbach, because their
commercials simply reeked of “irrelevant
brilliance.”
And most of the dot-com spots, purchased for
as much as $1.5 million per 30 seconds, were so
contrived, so devoid of a selling message (let
alone a call to action), and so downright confusing
that they wasted most, if not all, of their
millions of ad bucks. This misuse of funds is also
true of companies in other industries that
choose to gamble the entire year’s ad budget
on the Super Bowl commercials, but the 2000
dot-com debacle was the worst. The majority
of these companies didn’t survive more than
six months after their spots appeared — other
than Pets.com, whose adorable sock-puppet
spokesman starred in several Super Bowl
commercials (before the company eventually
went kaput).
Why weren’t these flashy ads successful?
Because they not only forgot Bernbach’s rule,
but they also ignored one of Ogilvy’s — namely,
“We sell or else.” Their spots were so clever
that they forgot to include a selling message
that actually motivates someone to buy. Sadly,
many even forgot to mention what service or
product it was that they were selling. And, most
important, they forgot to tell viewers why
anyone should buy it.
These companies and their agencies got so lost
in having a creative, good time on unlimited production
budgets that they forgot why they were
buying the incredibly expensive time on the
most-watched show on television in the first
place — they simply forgot to sell us something.
create a completely new campaign from the ground up, but rather to emulate
the original concept. For example, the campaign for the New Beetle featured
lots of white space (a Krone innovation that means just what it says — the ad
wasn’t filled with color and copy from edge to edge), a small photo of the VW
New Beetle in profile, and brief copy that read, “Zero to 60? Yes.” This kind of
advertising is great stuff, and a compliment to the original ads created by
Doyle, Dane, Bernbach over 40 years ago. In fact, Arnold Communications,
when submitting its work for awards, still lists Krone and Bernbach as creative
contributors.
Bill Bernbach, like David Ogilvy, was good for a pithy quote now and then,
including the following: “Dullness won’t sell your product, but neither will
irrelevant brilliance.”
Wieden and Kennedy
Dan Wieden and David Kennedy took advertising out of its traditional centers
of the ad world (Madison Avenue in New York City., Chicago, and to some
extent, Los Angeles) by setting up shop in Portland, Oregon. They’re listed on
the top 100 people in advertising (for the last century, no less!). They’ve done
great work for Microsoft, ESPN, and many other clients, but they’re still probably
best known for revolutionizing the sneaker industry — or at least the
advertising of it — by creating Nike’s “Just do it” campaign.
18 Part I: Advertising 101