David Ogilvy

David Ogilvy’s 13 predictions about the future of advertising

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The final chapter of Ogilvy on Advertising is titled “I predict 13 changes”. As the name might suggest, in it David Ogilvy listed 13 changes related to advertising he thought would occur in the future.

Ogilvy wrote the book in 1983, which means we’re already 42 years into the future, so let’s take a look at some of those predictions, shall we?

Some of them aged like fine wine. Others not so much.

One of the best predictions reads, “There will be a vast increase in the use of advertising by governments for purposes of education, particularly health education.”

I’m not sure how much I agree on the health education aspect, but there’s definitely a big increase in government advertising—an overall good thing to see.

One of my personal favorite prediction reads, “There will be a renaissance in print advertising”. While, as far as I’m aware, this is far from the case—many businesses still overlook print advertising, at least in the form of direct-response advertising (the only exception is B2B advertising, for which direct mail is still being used a ton)—I do feel a movement popping up of people going back to print advertising, particularly direct mail, even direct-response newspaper ads such as the infamous advertorial.

This might just be because that’s what I personally want to see and I’m living in my own bubble. But still, let me have it for now.

Here are a few fun ones that didn’t pan out as expected:

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“Advertising will play a part in bringing the population explosion under control”

“Candidates for political office will stop using dishonest advertising”

“Direct-response advertising will cease to be a separate specialty, and will be folded into the ‘general’ agencies”

“Advertising will contain more information and less hot air”

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The first one, ironically, did happen… only to cause worlwide major underpopulation issue requring government bodies to spend tons of money encouraging people to have more children.

But I’ll let you be the judge of those other three.

As for the last one, that might just be a good sign for you. Most advertisements you see today are nothing more than hot air. Just some branding, a vague slogan, a few nice pictures, quite often some random celebrity to associate with the product (which has been proven to be less effective for over 50 years already), and sometimes the price, or more precisely, a discount…

Yet no or very little information about the product to be found (note: I’m not speaking bad about brand awareness campaigns major multinationals like you see Coca-Cola or Redbull doing—they’replaying a different game)

So what’s, the good news?

Well, that just means there’s less competition for you to create high-converting direct-response style ads that sell.

And one, maybe less intuitive, way I found helpful to teach me how to write better information-rich ads that convert is by writing daily emails. Writing these emails forces me to, well… write. But do it in an engaging, fun, and informational way that keeps people reading day after day. Even if people live busy lives and I have to compete for their attention with all the other unread emails in their emails, forcing me even more to grab their attention straight away without letting go.

So while I can’t promise you’ll be writing killer ads starting tomorrow, you might just find learning to write engaging daily emails a worthwhile skill to get better at.

If so, consider checking out my flagship course which teaches you all about it.

Click here for more information: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/


How important are big ideas, truly?

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Once upon a time the great, late David Ogilvy wrote:

“It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers… Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”

And so it goes for a whole lot more than just your advertising. In fact, chances are, unless your product contains a big idea, it’ll be a pain in the proverbial to sell, let alone sell to a cold audience who’s never heard of you before.

Sure, some products can sell without a big idea. But those usually die off extremely quickly. You also won’t find many such products in many markets. You might have a shot in some unsaturated markets here or there, but for the most part you’re out of luck.

Not having a big idea in your product, service, marketing, advertising, or anything else means you’re either competing on mechanism, brand recognition, or, worst of all, price.

This whole lesson is something I’ve only begon to truly understand in the past couple of months.

I’ve heard about big ideas before then. People had told me how important they are. I acted as if I knew what they were talking about—I even acted as if I made all of my products with big ideas in mind…

But truth be told, I didn’t know jack shit.

It’s a giant concept that takes a whole lot of personal experience and skin in the game to truly comprehend just how important it is.

For one, what makes a big idea “BIG”? And where do they come from? Do you just come up with them or do you have to find them somewhere? Can you turn a regular idea into a “big idea”? How can you truly test, with real life feedback from your target audience, whether your big idea is actually good? And what do you do once you’ve finally found a big idea?

There are so many once you take the time to dig deeper and truly look into it. But luckily for you, I’ve already done most of the heavy lifting in getting to the bottom of it.

More.

I’ve dedicated the entire first issue of my new monthly newsletter, Alex’s Marketing Adventures to the topic of Big Ideas.

I give you all of the information you need to know. All that’s left to do for you is to make sure you’re subscribed to my Marketing Adventures before the deadline, which is tomorrow the 31st at midnight CET, then read the issue I’ll send straight to your inbox the next day.

Go here for more information about my Marketing Adventures: https://alexvandromme.com/adventures/


“Does this catch your attention?”

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Here’s an oddly specific, yet potentially priceless, piece of random information you might be glad to learn.

From the book Ogilvy on Advertising:

“When you put your headline in quotes, you increase recall by an average of 28 per cent.”

More.

Even though it’s wisdom—possibly timeless wisdom—being shared by the great late David Ogilvy, I’m not simply reading it in a book, believing it at face value, writing about it in an email, and sharing it with you, hoping you believe it at face value as well and think more highly of me as a result.

Instead, I’ve been actively testing this odd—be honest, it does seem a bit weird, why would a few curly lines change anything about how people recall information?—piece of advice myself in one of my hobby projects. And I haven’t just been testing the headline of the sales page. No, no, I’ve been testing it on every single sub-headline as well.

You see, where bigger brands, are playing an entirely different game than you and I—a game of brand recognition and perception—I’m playing a more simple game. A more relaxing game I find as well. A game with only two possible outcomes:

Making the sale or not making the sale.

So increased recall isn’t that valuable to me—there’s an argument saying it matters for retargeting campaigns, but let’s not go there now. What is valuable to me is skimmability. After all, we know almost nobody actually reads a sales page. People quickly scroll through it, read the headlines, look for a section or two they care about, and immediately know whether they’ll buy the product or not.

If you don’t believe me, do some heatmap studies of your sales pages (or look up some recent studies) and you’ll see this phenomenon time and time again.

Anyway.

For my, not so, scientific experiment, my question was, “Does putting my subheadlines in quotes (presumably) increase skimmability, and increase my conversion rate?”

Turns out, it does.

Or at least, it might. While this small change improved my metrics, I have no scientifically accurate way of knowing whether the quotes were the actual reason, let alone a causal connection instead of merely a correlation (read: I can’t be arsed setting up a proper scientific experiment in a controlled environment so this will do).

So there you have it.

Try it out if you want, don’t try it out if you think it sounds like a bunch of majoring in the minors, which I won’t deny it might be.

That said, if you enjoy reading tips and tricks on creating better-converting sales pages, then you might want to check out my course, Sales Page Sorcery.

Click here for more information: https://alexvandromme.com/sorcery/