I emailed Sean Triner last week, but he was on his holidays, so I got his very entertaining out of office reply. After thanking his clients, providing alternative contact details for his colleagues, and plugging his blog he finished off with:
Still reading? Well I guess you have time to spare - so if you haven’t already, take this time to order “Ogilvy on Advertising” - you can get it from www.amazon.com.
I know I shouldn’t admit it, but I haven’t read said book - even though it’s been on my list of books to read for ages. So, inspired by Sean, I dropped into my local bookshop and picked it up. I’m only one chapter in but I’m having to resist the temptation to underline large chunks of text and scrawl notes in the margin reminding me to tell so-and-so about this or that piece of wisdom.
Anyway, I thought I’d share, in no particular order, some of the words of wisdom that have already inspired me from the book (which you can buy here)
On big ideas:
It will help you recognize a big idea if you ask yourself five questions:
1. Did it make me gasp when I first saw it?
2. Do I wish I had thought of it myself?
3. Is it unique?
4. Does it fit the strategy to perfection?
5. Could it be used for 30 years?
(yes, he did say 30 years.)
For the next time you CEO says s/he’s tired of your longest running, best performing campaign:
If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling. Scores of good advertisements have been discarded before they lost their potency.
To keep you focussed when you’re writing the brief for your next campaign:
Most campaigns are too complicated. They reflect a long list of objectives, and try to reconcile the divergent views of too many executives. By attempting to cover too many things, they achieve nothing.
On juvenile mistakes:
Advertising agencies waste their client’s money repeating the same mistakes. I recently counted 49 advertisements set in reverse (white type on black background) in one issue of a magazine, long years after research demonstrated that reverse is difficult to read.
On ’story-appeal’, and the importance of details
One of his [Harold Rudolph] observations was that photographs with an element of ’story appeal’ were far above average in attracting attention. This led me to put an eye-patch on the model in my advertisements for Hathaway shirts.
(more of this subject in Aline Reed’s terrific post here)
And finally (for now) on direct response:
For all their research, most advertisers never know for sure whether their advertisements sell. But direct-response advertisers… know to a dollar how much each advertisement sells. So watch the kind of advertising they do.
In their magazine advertisements, general advertisers use short copy, but the direct response people invariably use long copy. Who, do you suppose, is more likely to be right?
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