Creativity vs. Effectiveness - a timeless question.
Add creativity to your decision processes - a paper by G. David Hughes.
Bit on Bernbach
An MIT forum transcription from 2001.
QUESTION: I am an ex-Ogilvy guy, and ad man David Ogilvy used to say that advertising has to make the cash register ring. So, where's the evidence that participative advertising makes the register ring? In the heyday of Budweiser's Wassup? advertising campaign, I was watching sales data and Bud's sales were dead flat.
FRANK: This goes back to the 1960s when the last big creative revolution was going on. By the end of the decade, you had these crazy campaigns that were entertaining to the audience, but had little to do with selling a product. In the 1970s you had this reaction against creative advertising. You had the lines drawn in the world, people who said creativity works and those that said it didn't. The Wall Street Journal has been a perpetual enemy of creative advertising.
MONTAGUE: Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and no one can say why, that is why advertising in not a science, it is an art. There was a time in the early 1990s that Reebok pulled ahead of Nike in total world sales and Reebok believed that the way to sell shoes was to talk about the technology contained in the sole of the shoe, and the rational benefits of the shoe.
Nike understood that people don't buy shoes based on rational benefits. Eighty percent of all basketball shoes never touch a basketball court. People buy basketball shoes because of the badge value of wearing them, the way it makes them feel to wear a certain brand. Nike understood that and continued to sell everything but the rational benefits of the shoe. Now, Nike leads the market.
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