Doing Advertising the Right Way - Part 4

Recap: Last in a 4-part blog covering the time-proven lessons of advertising legend Rosser Reeves, on whom Jon Hamm's character in Mad Men is based.

Lesson 9: The Danger of Creative Originality

If you’ve read the prior blogs on Rosser Reeves you’ve gathered that he believed that advertisers too often got caught up in their ad concepts.  He was an early proponent of empirical testing as he believed that what marketers intuitively like often does not perform at all well.

To underscore his point he relates two stories:

• First, a panel of creative directors from the top 25 Madison Avenue firms to pick the three worst commercials of the past several years.  Two of the three they chose had been campaigns that had garnered terrific results - one of the two advertised products coming from nowhere to grab 60% share!
• Second, a distinguished group of public officials, asked to select the best advertising of the year, chose a particularly striking corporate ad featuring the abstract art of painter William Baziotes.  It has 12 words of copy: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influences stops.”  Reeves subsequently tested the performance of the ad, and found two things:
  • 100% of people did not understand the picture
  • 85% of them did not understand the ad’s message  

In both cases: why were these choices made?  Because, in the former, the ads were regarded as unoriginal, unimaginative and dull.  In the latter, the ad was chosen for its stunning originality.

Reeves’ contention is that marketers, dealing with the enormity of product choices and amount of advertising in the market, have migrated to differentiating the advertising rather than the products they are promoting.

Reeves taught that it mattered little if an ad was viewed as creative or original, or if it won awards.  He debunked the myth of Madison Avenue by quoting historian Arnold Toynbee, “A myth is a curious animal; for it feeds upon itself, and he more it eats, the larger it grows.” 

There is only one true test of the worth of an ad: that it drove penetration (it is remembered by many) and usage pull (it shifts demand).

Lesson 10: Performance = a memorable message + high reach

Albert Lasker is regarded as the founder of modern advertising.  He built Lord & Thomas - better known by its name today, Foote, Cone & Belding.  His legacy is the Lasker Awards - 80 Lasker laureates are Nobel Prize winners.

At age 25, Lasker met John E. Kennedy, an ex-Canadian Mounted Policeman, who told Lasker that he did not understand what advertising was.  When queried, Lasker told him that advertising was communicating news about a product.  Kennedy’s response, “No.  News is merely a technique of presentation.  Advertising is salesmanship in print.”

Reeves defined it differently:

Advertising is the art of getting a unique selling proposition into the heads of the most people at the lowest possible cost.

And he further added that effective advertising has to achieve two things:

1. Create the right message
2. Project this message to the maximum number of buyers

It is this second point that leads him to put forth his view in response to a trade-off dilemma that confronts advertisers: is it better to reach a smaller audience more often, or a larger audience less often?

When the trade-off is between reach and frequency Reeves is unambiguous: always, always go for reach - the largest buyer base you can afford.  This is not just his opinion, but a conclusion reached based on considerable examination of A.C. Nielsen data.  Looked at another way, the data says: continually pounding on the same audience is a smoothly paved road to diminishing returns.

Summary of the Wisdom of Rosser Reeves

As I said in the first blog, if you can find a copy of Reality in Advertising buy it - even at the $150 in today’s dollars for a copy in good condition.  Read it, and then keep it on your bookshelf right beside Execution, by Bossidy & Charan.

Here, in short, are the 10 lessons of advertising from Rosser Reeves:

1. Effective advertising produces sales, but sales is not an adequate proxy for  measuring performance.  Penetration and usage pull are the key factors.
2. If a campaign is performing, maintain it for as long as it continues to perform no matter how bored the CEO becomes.
3. Strive always to convey one memorable message - one moving claim that the buyer can remember - knowing that as penetration into your market goes up, the message penetration for all of your competitors goes down.
4. Find and convey the Ultimate Selling Proposition (USP) in your message: a single, verbalized, unique, credible and powerful claim.
5. Attempting to exaggerate minuscule or cosmetic product advantages by portraying them as significant will alienate buyers and send them to your competitors.
6. Competitive product comparisons can pay off a USP handsomely provided that the attribute being compared is both significant and relevant to buyers, and the comparative brand is a recognized contender.
7. Feelings-based campaigns (brand image) don’t sell nearly as well as compelling and unique product claims (USPs).
8. Stay with one powerful claim, state it simply, and repeat it often.  Cramming in claims or creative inventiveness risks confusing the buyer and diluting your message.
9. Do not confuse ad creativity with ad performance.
10. With the right message in hand, initially opt for the highest market reach first, then frequency second.