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.

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 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.”

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.

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 Figuring Out Your Advertising Needs, 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.
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.