Advertising, ad campaigns, ad agencies, and the people that make it happen

I’ve been in advertising for a long time, more than thirty years, and one of the famous quotes I have always considered when sitting down to write an ad is my favorite from David Ogilvy… “The consumer isn’t stupid, she’s your wife.” That’s why one thing I hate, which I have railed on about in “MadScam,” is advertising that talks down to the audience. We’ve come to expect it from certain groups of advertisers such as car dealers, developers, hot tub companies and others. These are also the guys who think that offering free hot dogs and soda will get you down to their site ready to sign up for a ninety thousand dollar Hummer or a million dollar condo. But it’s not just the awful quality of their advertising that’s most upsetting to me, it’s the fact that it never changes. Is that proof it works, or simply that they don’t know any better? But even many major brands fall into the same trap. Just the other night I watched a commercial for a proprietary medicine that had pounding hammers in a transparent head and giant flames in the stomach… OK they were brilliantly (and expensively) produced through the miracle of CGI… But it was the same awful, in-your-face crap Rosser Reeves did nearly sixty years ago for Anacin. No wonder the advertising business is in a mess!

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But officer, I had this terrible pounding in my head, and my stomach was on fire!