The Christmas and Festive season is upon us…

…and that means the annual parade of special Christmas advertisements from Big Names and Big Brands.

This year in the UK, John Lewis…a department store with a food business in Waitrose…is at the front of the pack and has attracted a fair amount of attention.

Here’s the great Drayton Bird…

“Here in the UK the John Lewis Department store runs excessively schmaltzy Christmas ads.

They’re all very well made tear-jerkers put together by very creative people.

The theory is they make you feel so kindly towards the store you go in and buy more.

In their latest a boy discovers a crash landed alien in the woods, and teaches her all about Christmas, before she flies home in her spaceship.”

All well and good you might think…what’s wrong with a “Feel-good” ad at this time of year?

It’s absolutely fine…UNLESS… [Read more…]

The great Tom Fishburne has been taking a look at one of the classic books about advertising…

…”Ogilvy on Advertising” by one of the giants, David Ogilvy.

“I’ve been re-reading the 1983 classic, “Ogilvy on Advertising” to see how much has changed — and how much has remained the same — in advertising over the years. One constant is the challenge of how to measure sales impact in advertising, and the tension of long-term brand building versus short-term direct response.

As David Ogilvy wrote (more than a decade before the first digital display ad):

‘For all their research, most advertisers never know for sure whether their advertisements sell. Too many other factors cloud the equation. But direct-response advertisers, who solicit orders by mail or telephone, know to a dollar how much each advertisement sells … I am convinced that if all advertisers were to follow the example of their direct response brethren, they would get more sales per dollar. Every copywriter should start his career by spending two years in direct response.’”

You can read the whole post at “sales impact of advertising”.

In his article, Tom goes on to mention the entrenched divide in marketing between long-term “brand building” (what we generally think of as “mainstream marketing and advertising) and “short-term” direct response. 

Two points occur to me as I read this article… [Read more…]

From the great Tom Fishburne…“what goes in an ad”.

So…what exactly should go into your ads?

Well, if you are a practitioner of direct response marketing…

…and as you’re reading this piece , I’m assuming that you are…

…then the answer is straightforward (although not always simple or easy to implement).

In direct response marketing, every ad, every marketing action, has a clear purpose. It’s part of a carefully planned marketing sequence with the aim of adding to the bottom line.

Here’s a simple primer from “No B.S. Direct Marketing” by Dan Kennedy… [Read more…]

Gillette has been in the news lately…

…with a storm of controversy over its latest ad campaign.

The company has this to say…

[Read more…]

We tend to assume that things get better over time…

…but that’s not always the case.  Even in the world of business where one would have thought that there would be a very strong incentive to continually increase effectiveness.

Take advertising, for example. Is it more effective today…in terms of driving sales…than say in the 1980s?

Following are a couple of TV/video ads for Range Rover that suggest that advertising may have lost its way a little.

I came across them as the result of an email from Gerald Woodgate, business partner of the great Drayton Bird.

Here is the first one from 1986…

Gerald reckons this is quite a good (read “effective”) ad because… [Read more…]