"If you break the rules, you're going to stand a better chance of breaking through the clutter than if you don't," he says. "If you try to live with the rules, in all likelihood the work will be derivative, it won't be fresh, it won't have the necessary ingredients to disarm the consumer, who increasingly has got his defenses up against all sorts of advertising messages coming his way."
It's hard to write a book telling you how to break the rules. But authors like Roman and Maas at least bring us to the point where we know what rules to break.
BETWEEN SOFT COVERS
Books from our writers
Microsoft Excel, by Inc. columnist Charles W. Kyd, has recently been published by Microsoft Press. The book includes more than 100 practical business applications for the company's spreadsheet software.
VIEWS FROM THE TOP
Wit and wisdom from Madison Avenue's mandarins
Advertising, like most industries, has its share of cult heroes. But unlike the heroes of (say) the plastic-extruding business, these heroes tend to write books. Among the best: Ogilvy on Advertising (Vintage Books, 1985), From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor (Simon & Schuster, 1970; out of print), and The Trouble with Advertising (Times Books, 1980).
David Ogilvy, founder and former chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, is the industry's éminence grise: he's the one you always see quoted on the back of everyone else's books on advertising. And it is nice to hear from someone who not only created great ads ("At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock") but who has some perspective on what he does. Ogilvy's theme: good advertising depends on good research. "Advertising people who ignore research," Ogilvy says in a chapter devoted to the subject, "are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals."
From Those Wonderful Folks, by well-known agency head Jerry della Femina, confirms what you always knew: the people who create ads live on a different plane of reality from the rest of us. The title, for example, comes from the headline della Femina wrote for a Panasonic ad. The good news is that the ad never appeared. The bad news is that della Femina showed it to Panasonic. Shortly thereafter the consumer electronics giant switched agencies.
The Trouble with Advertising is by John O'Toole, former chairman of Foote, Cone & Belding, who has just been named head of the industry's trade group. O'Toole takes on advertising's perennial critics; he also tells some entertaining stories. Our favorite is the one about the young adman back in the days when radio was king. Seems this fellow had made the perfect buy for his coffee-company client: a Sunday afternoon program so prestigious eight other sponsors had wanted it. But the client refused, saying nobody would hear the program. And why not? Shades of George Bush. "Because on Sunday afternoon," he replied, "everyone's out playing polo."
Finally, we have to say we were really looking forward to reading Stan Freberg's It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Times Books, 1989). It was Freberg, after all, who gave the world "Today the pits . . . tomorrow the wrinkles," in explaining the wonders of Sunsweet seedless prunes.
Alas, this is an autobiography. Advertising doesn't even get a mention until you are a third of the way in. Freberg had warned us of this in the introduction, promising to devote volume two of his memoirs to advertising. Still, we were disappointed -- until we understood what was going on here. We were dealing with a pro.
Freberg was using a classic marketing strategy called line extension -- taking one name and spreading it over more than one product, like Miller High Life and Miller Lite. In this case, he was line-extending his book. Why write one when you can write (and sell) two?
How smart. In Freberg's case the medium is the message. Would that everybody in advertising were so clever.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
Before you advertise, you need a tactic
What's your marketing message -- the single idea that you try to get across in your advertising, your sales campaigns, and so forth? Don't say a superior product or a better service; everyone says that. You need something -- a tactic -- that differentiates your company from the competition.
Examples? "Home delivery in 30 minutes" (Domino's Pizza). "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight." (Remember when Federal Express's guarantee was new?) Apple Computer's emphasis on desktop publishing.
Find such a tactic, say authors Al Ries and Jack Trout in Bottom-Up Marketing (McGraw-Hill, 1989), and your marketing strategy will define itself as everything that reinforces the tactic. But note well: your tactic dictates not only marketing but operations. (Don't guarantee overnight delivery unless you can do it.) Most advertising campaigns, say the authors, try to change the mind of the marketplace by promising better this or better that. That's exactly backward: what you should be doing is changing your company so that it offers something unique, then telling the customer about it.
Like Ries and Trout's other books ("Guerrilla Marketing," April 1987), Bottom-Up Marketing is both witty and engagingly skeptical. Take the authors' reaction to the popular Joe Isuzu commercials.
The ads? Clever. Undoubtedly "the most admired, most awarded, most respected advertising campaign in recent years."
The effect? Well, Isuzu Motors Ltd. spends $30 million a year on advertising in the United States and still manages to sell fewer than 40,000 cars here -- one-sixth what Hyundai sells, less even than Audi and Yugo. "People remember Joe the liar," say Ries and Trout, "but don't remember why they should buy one of his cars."
Contributor: John Case
