why advertising is like sex
Just started reading this book, which I borrowed from @Colman. It's good so far.
Here's a nice bit on media commission:
Gossage was appalled by a situation in which the agency that thrived best was the one which recommended ever higher expenditure on media. As he pointed out, a bad advertisement that ran twenty times earned more for the agency than a good one that ran once. To him this bred 'a sort of immorality and mutual distruct similar to that wich might prevail were the doctor paid for putting you in hospital rather than keeping you out of it – and was paid by the hospital at that.'
Joe Weiner and Howard Gossage broke ranks by insisting that their clients bought less advertising not more. In fact, it was an article of faith with Gossage that if the advertisement was good enough then the audience would notice and you'd only need to run it once. As he said, "It's like sexual intercourse. You don't have to keep doing it nine months to have a baby. You do it right first time and after that it's tender loving care."
Wise words. This is much the same thinking we have applied on accounts like Honda and Nike: rather than assuming that our message is boring/annoying and must be repeated until people are reluctantly forced to submit (the 'skinhead battering on your front door' school of advertising, as used by the likes of Confused.com) let's do something so great that people only need to see it once, or that they will even actively seek out so they can watch it / play with it / find out more about it. Recent examples of this thinking would be Wieden + Kennedy Portland's 2012 Grand Effie (effectiveness) winning campaign for Chrysler 'Imported from Detroit' or our extraordinarily successful My Time is Now campaign for Nike.
Gossage was in the same place sixty-odd years ago.
