The Decline of Advertising

I usually have the radio on while I work, but the commercials are so annoying I sometimes have to turn it off. I listen to the classical station as a refuge from the noise of contemporary life, and it defeats the purpose when a Mozart piece is followed by a series of raucous ads.

What makes commercials especially annoying is that most of them are so badly done. They don’t interest you in the product or give you any useful information about it. And they certainly aren’t entertaining. The harder they try to be funny, the worse they are.

One commercial the station plays several times a day is a skit featuring two former football players joshing each other and breaking up in laughter at the end. It might have been mildly amusing the first time, though that’s giving it the benefit of a doubt. I know it lost any charm it had a long time ago. When I hear these two guys guffawing at the same silly lines for the fortieth time, I feel a migraine coming on.

And you know the worst part? Having endured this ad for weeks, I can’t even remember what product it’s pushing. In my observation, this is the chief fault of advertising: cute or flashy commercials that fail in their primary purpose of making you think of the product being advertised.

Advertising is a huge and lucrative industry, yet ad men are more overpaid than Hollywood scriptwriters. They don’t give the advertiser his money’s worth. Apparently the “creative” people at the ad agencies are so preoccupied with putting their stamp on the ads that they neglect to communicate anything about the product.

In his classic Confessions of an Advertising Man, David Ogilvy stresses the importance of information. Ogilvy, a Scottish immigrant who took Madison Avenue by storm, was noted for the high quality of his ads. He believed in lots of no-nonsense copy that told the reader something important about the product. His book is well worth reading not only for people in the ad business, but for anyone who wants to know the secrets of good writing and communicating.

One of Ogilvy’s most successful ads had a small picture of a luxury car over nearly a full page of type, under the headline: “At sixty miles an hour, the loudest sound in this Rolls-Royce is the ticking of the clock.” You didn’t forget a line like that; chances are you read the whole ad with fascination.

Today’s ads and commercials are often assaults on your attention; Ogilvy made you want to read. He subtly flattered your intelligence. And he got very rich doing it. His exposition of what makes a good ad is as enthralling and authoritative as Ted Williams’s counsel on how to hit a baseball. Nowadays you can study advertising in college — you can probably major in it — but you’ll learn less than Ogilvy’s little book teaches.

Ogilvy objected to musical jingles in commercials because even if the consumer recognized the jingle, he probably wouldn’t remember what product it was associated with. So true: I’ve noticed it a thousand times. A jingle goes through my mind, and I ask myself: “What product was that again?” You’d think people in the business would have learned this lesson by now.

A generation ago, there were successful jingles, many of them for cigarettes and beers. “Winston tastes good — like a (clap clap) cigarette should”; it was irritating, but at least you didn’t forget it. “You get a lot to like with a Marlboro — filter, flavor, flip-top box.” “Call for Philip Morris!” Salem, Pall Mall, Lucky Strikes, Benson & Hedges — they all had memorable tag lines, even if they didn’t meet Ogilvy’s standards of dignity and content.

But for the most part, advertising people no longer know what they’re doing. No need to take a marketing survey; you can prove it to yourself by trying to remember the last ad or commercial you enjoyed, learned something from, or were moved to seek a product by.

Too bad, because a good ad can not only move a product but deserve admiration for its own artistry. I might add that several lousy commercials were endured during the writing of this column.

Joseph Sobran