What can and cannot be achieved by advertising.

One of the names associated with advertising which is known outside the business, in addition to Saatchi and Saatchi, is David Ogilvy. He is a legendary figure who built up an agency of world renown which has only recently been bought by WPP Group plc. It is too early to say whether the new ownership will change much but we do know that the old agency was a remarkable one that borc the stamp of the man who created i t , with his beliefs about how advertising works. If you read his books (Ogilvy, 1963, 1978) you will find them entertaining and didactic as well as self-contradictory. Although he had, and has, strong views about how advertising works. David Ogilvy is still interested to learn more. so a few years ago he decided to set up a foundation to study how advertising works. He and his board looked for people to head the foundation and the headhunters they cmployed were surprised to find that the same names kept being recommended; it was a small list and the people on it were all over 40 years of age. Few young people in the advertising industry in the UK today spend much time on the theory of how advertising works. They concentrate their intellectual effort o n the precise positioning of the individual product: who do they expect to buy i t , what is the most economical way to reach these people, and what message is likely to persuade them to buy. All these things are important, but over recent years the actual mechanism of how advertising works. how the persuasive mechanism works, has been neglected. This was not always so. In the late 1960s there was a need for more effective advertising. more reasonable and. if you like, more scientific or precise advertising. You will find quite a range of American books written at that time by people who were confident that all you had to do was to identify a unique selling proposition, communicate it to people so that they noticed it and remembered i t , and you would successfully sell the product. If I asked you to tell me the advertising slogans that came most readily to mind and then ask how many of you have ever purchased those particular products, the fallacy of this position is evident. Some theories were a little more complex and were given names like Awareness, Information, Desire and Action (AIDA) and Defining Advertising Goals for Measured Advertising Results (DAGMAR), but basically they showed little subtlety in their appraisal of how people receive and act on information (Broadbent. 1980). When I joined McCann Erikson for example in 1971, I was asked to work on how we could be accountable to clients for the advertising we produced; how could we measure and demonstrate its effectiveness? This desire to demonstrate the value for money of what we were doing came from the USA, and with the internationalization of package-goods advertising there was a move to introduce the same pretesting and post-testing techniques here as were used there. The British, not for the first nor last time, rebelled. We found the measurement systems that were suggested likely to penalize the sort of advertising we were producing