What AC/DC can teach you about advertising

They’ve been recording and touring for 35 years. And in all that time they’ve remained an icon of anti-innovation. AC/DC began their career playing three-chord rock songs and they’re still playing three-chord rock songs. Almost nothing has changed.

Has it hurt them? Well, when the band recently released its new album, Black Ice, it went straight to the top of the Billboard charts, selling 784,000 copies in the first week. So I’d say no. Their lack of innovation seems to be working quite nicely, thank you.

We live in a time of endless, often mindless, change. DVDs killed VHS, and now your DVDs face their own mortality. You thought you’d caught up when you got that tiny little cell phone, now big Blackberries with keyboards are the rage. The GPS is cool, but the maps were out of date the moment you got into your car.

Everywhere you turn, something is changing and that out-of-breath feeling you used to get now and then is with you every day. And all you want is to find something that’s stable and familiar.

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March 17, 2009 | Filed in Advertising

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$#!* Happens - A dirty story about ad testing

It was about 11:00 a.m. when we started up the mountain outside of San Pedro Sula in the northwest corner of Honduras. The humid air lay heavy and still in the valley below, causing the fields of sugar cane to shimmer in the hot sun.

We were videotaping b-roll for a few TV spots one of my fundraising clients wanted to test. Our task that day was the same as it had been every day that week: to capture images of the devastating poverty these people suffer.

The camera crew donned their battery belts, cables, and assorted gear and we followed the narrow dirt path toward the shacks above. As we ascended a steep rise and veered to the right, we came across a young boy toting an armload of dry firewood. One of our videographers wanted to shoot this and positioned himself in the middle of the path.

That’s when it happened. And to understand what happened, you must understand the term “wrap-and-throw.”

Many of the people my client helps are so poor they live in makeshift shacks, some of mud or wood, others little more than plastic or cardboard nailed to sticks. These places often have no sanitary facilities. So the residents have developed a practical way to deal with their waste: They wrap it in a small bag and throw it.

Thus, we were walking in a “wrap-and-throw” community. And while the videographer set himself to shoot the kid with the wood, one of our guides trotted ahead to ask the child’s permission. The boy agreed, and the guide came running back toward the cameraman.

A wrap-and-throw lay silently in the path, aged and ripe. A group of unsuspecting, sunblock-smeared gringos stood stupidly smiling three feet away, anticipating nothing but the beautiful picture they were about to record. Our guide’s foot came down hard at ground zero … and the principles of ballistics did the rest.

It gave new meaning to the term “$#!* happens.” Read more

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November 6, 2008 | Filed in Advertising, Direct Marketing

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Favorite quotations about advertising

I love a good quotation.

Over the years, I’ve collected a few hundred quotes about advertising and selling that are variously inspiring, funny, or instructive. Here are some of my favorites.

“Advertising is totally unnecessary. Unless you hope to make money.” -Jef I. Richards

“A good ad should be like a good sermon: It must not only comfort the afflicted, it also must afflict the comfortable.” -Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

“Exuberance is better than taste.” -Gustave Flaubert

“The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.” -Howard Luck Gossage

“Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can’t.” -Morris Hite

“When executing advertising, it’s best to think of yourself as an uninvited guest in the living room of a prospect who has the magical power to make you disappear instantly.” -John O’Toole

“Thinking is the hardest work many people ever have to do, and they don’t like to do any more of it than they can help. They look for a royal road through some short cut in the form of a clever scheme or stunt, which they call the obvious thing to do; but calling it doesn’t make it so. They don’t gather all the facts and then analyze them before deciding what is really the obvous thing, and thereby they overlook the first and most obvious of all business principles.” -Robert R. Updegraff

“You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going ’cause you might not get there.” -Yogi Berra

“The headline is the ‘ticket on the meat.’ Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising.” -David Ogilvy

“Advertising in the final analysis should be news. If it is not news it is worthless.” -Adolph S. Ochs

“Let’s say you have $1,000,000 tied up in your little company and suddenly your advertising isn’t working and sales are going down. And everything depends on it. Your future depends on it, your family’s future depends on it, other people’s families depend on it. Now, what do you want from me? Fine writing? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?” -Rosser Reeves

“Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.” -Edmund Burke

“Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.” -Samuel Johnson

“I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.” -Leo Burnett

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October 22, 2008 | Filed in Advertising

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Does negative advertising work?

Yes. No. Well, sometimes.

Whether negative advertising works depends on who you ask. Ask a political campaign manager, and the answer is yes. Ask an product advertising manager, and the answer is no. Usually.

I’m thinking about this for two reasons:

One, the current election season is producing some very negative advertising. And if you think national politics gets nasty, watch the local races. That’s where the gloves really come off.

Two, Apple has been running some negative TV advertising for a few years that actually works. While these are not direct response ads, they are instructive.

The rule of thumb is that negative advertising doesn’t work. Why? In Scientific Advertising, Claude Hopkins said it best:

To attack a rival is never good advertising. Don’t point out others’ faults. It is not permitted in the best mediums. It is never good policy. The selfish purpose is apparent. It looks unfair, not sporty.

If you abhor knockers, always appear a good fellow.

Show a bright side, the happy and attractive side, not the dark and uninviting side of things. Show beauty, not homeliness; health, not sickness. Don’t show the wrinkles you propose to remove, but the face as it will appear. Your customers know all about wrinkles.

In addition to making you look petty, negative advertising puts your prospects in the wrong frame of mind, gets them thinking about your competitor instead of you, and fails to make the positive emotional connection that is the linchpin for any sales pitch. Read more

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October 9, 2008 | Filed in Advertising

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Duke University offers vintage print ad library

I’ve always been fascinated by print ads of days gone by. Besides their cultural value, they provide a unique insight into advertising tactics.

Vintage Lifebuoy Ad Duke University’s Ad*Access Project has collected and scanned more than 7,000 ads printed in the United States and Canada between 1911 and 1955. This is not a collection of direct response advertising. From my brief perusal, these appear to be mass market, brand building ads from newspapers and magazines.

The ads represent five product and subject areas: radio, television, transportation, beauty and hygiene, and World War II.

I don’t know if these ads are representative of all advertising during the time period because they’re from a single collection put together by J. Walter Thompson, which could be skewed by whatever interest JWT had when assembling the ads.

Still, there’s a lot to be learned by studying mass market advertising. Ads of the past also tend to be easier to analyze since they are aimed at sensibilities of former generations, allowing a good measure of objectivity that you may not have when looking at ads directed at you today.

This is an excellent collection worthy of a bookmark. If you know of other quality collections online, let me know.

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April 14, 2008 | Filed in Advertising

Why pissing people off can be good advertising

Many advertisers put a lot of emphasis on the “likability” of their ads. The idea is that if people like the ad, they’ll buy the product. But is that always true?

There’s nothing wrong with people liking your ads, but I’m not so sure that likability is a prerequisite for selling. Consider the infamous “Head On” TV ads.

(If you can’t see the video here in my feed, click on to the blog to watch.)

Likable? Hardly. It’s one of the most hated ads on TV. It’s so disliked, it has become an icon of annoying advertising. The company even acknowledges this in follow-up ads where the commercial is interrupted by “viewers” who say, “Head On, I hate your commercials, but I love your product.”

Personally, I love these ads. Well, I don’t love them exactly. I think they’re annoying, too. But I wish I’d written them. Why? Because they’re pure genius. They do exactly what they’re supposed to do — burn a brand into your brain so when you’re at the store you’ll recognize it and buy it. Can you think of any headache medicine with a commercial this memorable? I sure can’t.

I would love to have sat in on the meeting where the ad team presented this idea to the Head On people. “You want to do what? Say it how many times? You’re joking, right?”

Likability? I don’t put much faith in that. I like what works. Sometimes that means creating an ad people like. Other times it means creating an ad that pisses people off. The question is, do you have the guts to do what it takes no matter what that is?

I touched on this in a popular article I wrote some years ago about a lesson my grandfather taught me with a dead chicken. In that article I quote Charles F. Kettering, inventor of the electric self-starter for cars, who once said, “My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. … You can be sincere and still be stupid.”

I think that’s what I really like about that Head On ad, and it’s what I like about all effective advertising. It does the right thing at the time it has to be done. Unflinchingly. Unapologetically.

Can you think of other ads past or present that were annoying but effective? Have you created annoying ads, mail, or promos of any kind that worked like gangbusters?

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February 22, 2008 | Filed in Advertising

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