Are You Throwing Your Money Away On Brand Awareness Advertising?

Creativity The Most Dangerous Word in The Lexicon of Advertising

David Ogilvy

I remember the 80s. I had just finished doing an HND in graphic design and was looking for a job in advertising. Back then there were a large number of award winning "creative" agencies that dominated the business. They spent a fortune of their clients money on expensive creative brand awareness campaigns.

It seemed back then that winning awards was the most important goal of the agencies. However since then most of them are now long gone they went out of business by the mid 90s. The problem is that this type of "creative" advertising is not accountable and rarely gets a good return on investment.

My only guess is that the companies who used to be clients eventually got fed up spending huge amounts of money to win awards. Even so most businesses still use Brand Awareness when Direct response would be more profitable for them. For one thing Direct response is not only accountable but can also be systemized. This means you should only ever use marketing that's profitable.

I am not sure when the video below was filmed perhaps the late 60s or early 70s?. But the message seems to be as relevant to today than when it was shot. It is a "message" from David Ogilvy a real legend in the world of advertising. If you are involved in any kind of sales and marketing for your business then the key message will be important to you. Simpley put spending your money on brand awareness is as good as throwing it away if you are a small to medium sized business. It may work for huge global companies such as Coke or Nike, but you don't have a huge budget to throw away.