[Re: Loose Cannon: David Ogilvy, Soothsayer, Direct Newsline, May 14, 2007]:
“U.S. population in 1980: 226,542,199. U.S. population in 2000: 281,421,906. World population in 1980: 4,434,682,000. World population in 2000: 6,070,581,000. Where have the agencies been hiding the condoms?”
LOL!!! Richard, thank you for a not only insightful but delightful column on the future as Ogilvy saw it 25 years ago. And special thanks for using the word “prognostications”. In an age of sound bites it is important to occasionally utilize the riches of the English language!
PS – would offer some suppositions as to exactly what the agencies have been doing with the condoms, but don’t want to risk castigation for promulgating pornography on the Internet.
Lauretta Harris
Write Communications Inc.
Scarsdale, NY
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Thanks, Richard, for bringing up David Ogilvy. This English-born genius became one of the three or four top Americans in the advertising agency business. His career was built on selling well-known household products that included Hathaway shirts, Steuben glass, Dove soap, Pepperidge Farm bread, Shell gasoline, and Maxwell House coffee.
I’d like to follow up on Ogilvy’s quotation that in the future, “advertising will contain more information and less hot air.” Many marketers now agree with your comment that “the long-form direct mail letter is not currently in vogue, and the text-heavy print ad is considered a quaint anachronism.”
But long copy can still work under the right conditions, as it has always done.
In “Confessions of An Advertising Man” (1964), Ogilvy states that the headline is 80% of an ad, but the body copy still makes the sale. Short copy is okay for chewing gum; “there isn’t much to tell.” But if your product has many special features and benefits, long copy works best: “The more you tell,” he writes, “the more you sell.”
He said the legendary pioneer, Claude Hopkins, wrote five pages of solid text for Schlitz beer. “In a few months, Schlitz moved up from fifth place to first.”
Ogilvy himself wrote a famous one-page ad with one photo for Rolls Royce. It was packed solidly with small type. The headline: “The only sound you hear in this car at sixty miles an hour is the ticking of the clock.”
When you admire David Ogilvy, it’s pretty painful to watch today’s TV ads, the fashion ads with no copy, and the high tech ads with vague, quirky headlines.
Fred Morath
Fred Morath Direct Marketing
Natick MA
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