How to Build Great Campaigns
As I continue reading David Ogilvy’s “Confessions of an Advertising Man”, I find well-constructed ideas that everyone involved in advertising should consider and several are especially suited to those engaged in social media. Here I have taken his 11 points on what makes a campaign great, and added my own abbreviated explanation of what Ogilvy means.
What you say is more important than how you say it. Ogilvy says large promise is the soul of advertising. The promise you make should not be left to chance. Testing and refinement with a qualified audience are essential to determining the most successful promise.
Unless your campaign is built around a great idea, it will flop. The trick is in having clients who recognize which ideas are the great ones, or rightly trust that you are capable of recognizing the great ideas for them.
Give the facts. The more information you give about your product, the more you depend on the consumer’s intelligence to decide for themselves whether your product is something they want. Armed with information, consumers are willing to spend more in order to get more benefit.
You cannot bore people into buying. We are all inundated with advertising throughout the day. If you want your advertising to be heard, it must be done with a unique voice. Create ads that people look forward to experiencing.
Be well-mannered, but don’t clown. People tend to respond best to trustworthy, respectful spokespersons.
Make your advertising contemporary. Use the lexicon of your audience and speak to their experience, A 25 year old and a 65 year old may share similar views, but they arrived at those views in vastly different ways.
Committees can criticize advertisements, but they cannot write them. As the number of people involved in creating an idea increases, the ability to express the idea with a personal voice diminishes. The most effective advertising is spoken in the voice of one individual.
If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops pulling. A person buys a major appliance perhaps every 10 years, but appliances are sold every day because the audience is always changing. Stopping a successful advertisement simply because the advertisers are tired of seeing it is a poor reason.
Never write an advertisement that you wouldn’t want your own family to read. Be honest. Don’t lie to the consumer. You cannot sustain a brand through dishonest advertising.
The Image and the Brand. Every advertisement contributes to the brand image. A brand cannot be all things to all people. The image must be defined. A defined brand image is to the advertiser what a blueprint is to the architect. Changing a brand image, once acquired, is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming.
Don’t be a copycat. Every great advertising campaign is copied by someone. Those who copy are inferior to those who create original, successful campaigns.
Do you agree with David Ogilvy? What would you add or change? How would you apply these rules to your social media campaign?
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