品牌二三事（四）
日期：2019-05-18
奥格威谈广告
I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it 'creative.' I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip.'
In my Confessions of an Advertising Man, published in 1963, I told the story of how Ogilvy & Mather came into existence, and set forth the principles on which our early success had been based. What was then little more than a creative boutique in New York has since become one of the four biggest advertising agencies in the world, with 140 offices in 40 countries. Our principles seem to work.
But I am now so old that a French magazine lists me as the only survivor among a group of men who, they aver, contributed to the Industrial Revolution -- alongside Adam Smith, Edison, Karl Marx, Rockefeller, Ford and Keynes. Does old age disqualify me from writing about advertising in today's world? Or could it be that perspective helps a man to separate the eternal verities of advertising from its passing fads?
When I set up shop on Madison Avenue in 1949, I assumed that advertising would undergo several major changes before I retired. So far, there has been only one change that can be called major: television has emerged as the most potent medium for selling most products.
Yes, there have been other changes and I shall describe them, but their significance has been exaggerated by pundits in search of trendy labels. For example, the concept of brand images, which I popularized in 1953, was not really new; Claude Hopkins had described it 20 years before. The so-called Creative Revolution, usually ascribed to Bill Bernbach and myself in the fifties, could equally have been ascribed to N.W. Ayer and Young & Rubicam in the thirties.
Meanwhile, most of the advertising techniques which worked when I wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man still work today. Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on. All over the world.
In saying this, I run the risk of being denounced by the idiots who hold that any advertising technique which has been in use for more than two years is ipso facto obsolete. They excoriate slice-of life commercials, demonstrations and talking heads, turning a blind eye to the fact that these techniques still make the cash register ring. If they have read Horace, they will say that I am difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti. Se puero, castigator, censorque minorium. (Testy, a grumbler, inclined to praise the way of the world when he was a boy, to play the critic and to be a censor of the new generation.) So what? There have always been noisy lunatics on the fringes of the advertising business. Their stock-in-trade includes ethnic humor, eccentric art direction, contempt for research, and their self-proclaimed genius. They are seldom found out because they gravitate to the kind of clients who, bamboozled by their rhetoric, do not hold them responsible for sales results. Their campaigns find favor at cocktail parties in New York, San Francisco and London but are taken less seriously in Chicago. In the days when I specialized in posh campaigns for The New Yorker, I was the hero of this coterie, but when I graduated to advertising in mass media and wrote a book which extolled the value of research, I became its devil. I comfort myself with the reflection that I have sold more merchandise than all of them put together.
I am sometimes attacked for imposing 'rules.' Nothing could be further from the truth. I hate rules. All I do is report on how consumers react to different stimuli. I may say to a copywriter, 'Research shows that commercials with celebrities are below average in persuading people to buy products. Are you sure you want to use a celebrity? Call that a rule? Or I may say to an art director, 'Research suggests that if you set the copy in black type on a white background, more people will read it than if you set it in white type on a black background.' A hint, perhaps, but scarcely a rule.
In 18th-century England, a family of obstetricians built a huge practice by delivering babies with a lower rate of infant and maternal mortality than their competitors. They had a secret -- and guarded it jealously, until an inquisitive medical student climbed onto the roof of their delivering room, looked through the skylight and saw the forceps they had invented. The secret was out, to the benefit of all obstetricians and their patients. Today's obstetricians do not keep their discoveries secret, they publish them. I am grateful to my partners for allowing me to publish mine. But I should add that the occasional opinions expressed in this book do not necessarily reflect the collegial opinions of the agency which employs me.
This is not a book for readers who think they already know all there is to be known about advertising. It is for young hopefuls -- and veterans who are still in search of ways to improve their batting average at the cash register.
I write only about aspects of advertising I know from my own experience. That is why this book contains nothing about media, cable television or advertising in Japan.
If you think it is a lousy book, you should have seen it before my partner Joel Raphaelson did his best to de-louse it. Bless you, Joel.
小编贴心附上中文版：
小编贴心附上中文版：
我不把广告当作娱乐或艺术形式，而是作为信息的媒介。当我写广告的时候，我不希望你告诉我你觉得它“有创意”。我希望你觉得它很有趣，以至于你买了这个产品。以斯金人说话的时候，他们说，他说得多好。但底摩斯帖人说话的时候，他们说，我们去攻击腓力吧。
在1963年出版的《我对一个广告人的忏悔》中，我讲述了奥格尔维和马瑟是如何诞生的，并阐述了我们早期成功的原则。从那时起，纽约的一家创意精品店已成为世界四大广告公司之一，在40个国家拥有140个办事处。我们的原则似乎奏效了。
但我现在这么老了，以至于一家法国杂志把我列为一群为工业革命做出贡献的人中唯一的幸存者——亚当·史密斯、爱迪生、卡尔·马克思、洛克菲勒、福特和凯恩斯。老年是否使我丧失了写当今世界广告的资格？或者，这种观点能帮助一个人将广告永恒的真实性与它过去的时尚区分开来吗？
1949年，我在麦迪逊大街开了一家商店，当时我以为在我退休之前，广告会经历几次重大变化。到目前为止，只有一个变化可以称为重大变化：电视已经成为销售大多数产品的最有效媒介。
是的，还有其他的变化，我将对它们进行描述，但是专家们在寻找流行标签时夸大了它们的重要性。例如，我在1953年普及的品牌形象概念并不是什么新鲜事物；克劳德·霍普金斯在20年前就描述过它。所谓的创造性革命，通常在50年代归于比尔·伯恩巴赫和我自己，同样可以在30年代归于N.W.艾耶尔和扬&卢比坎。
与此同时，大多数在我写广告人自白时起作用的广告技巧今天仍然起作用。消费者仍然购买那些广告承诺他们物有所值的产品，如金钱、美丽、营养、减轻痛苦、社会地位等，甚至是全世界。
说这句话，我冒着被那些白痴指责的风险，他们认为任何使用了两年以上的广告技术实际上都是过时的。他们痛斥生活中的广告、示威和说话的头脑，对这些技术仍然使收银机响亮的事实视而不见。如果他们读过贺拉斯，他们会说我是难辨症、槲皮素、雅诗兰黛。波多黎各东南部，谴责者，审查室。（脾气暴躁，发牢骚的人，在他还是个孩子的时候，倾向于赞美世界的方式，扮演批评家，做新一代的审查员。）那又怎样？在广告业的边缘总是有吵闹的疯子。他们的贸易储备包括民族幽默、古怪的艺术指导、对研究的蔑视以及他们自称的天才。他们很少被发现，因为他们倾向于那些被他们的花言巧语蒙蔽的客户，而这些客户并不认为他们对销售结果负责。他们的竞选活动在纽约、旧金山和伦敦的鸡尾酒会上很受欢迎，但在芝加哥却没有那么严肃。在我专门为《纽约客》做广告的时候，我是这个小圈子的英雄，但当我毕业于大众传媒的广告业，写了一本赞美研究价值的书，我就成了它的魔鬼。我安慰自己，因为我卖出的商品比所有商品加起来还要多。
有时我会因为强加“规则”而受到攻击，没有什么比这更离谱的了。我讨厌规则。我所做的就是报告消费者对不同刺激的反应。我可能会对一位广告撰稿人说，“研究表明，在劝说人们购买产品方面，名人的广告低于平均水平。你确定要用名人吗？这是规则吗？或者我可以对一位艺术总监说，“研究表明，如果你把这本书用黑色字体放在白色背景上，那么阅读它的人会比你把它用白色字体放在黑色背景上的人多。”这也许是一个提示，但几乎没有规则。
在18世纪的英国，一个产科医生的家庭建立了一个巨大的实践，他们生产的婴儿和产妇死亡率低于竞争对手。他们有一个秘密——并且小心翼翼地保护着它，直到一个好奇的医科学生爬上他们传送室的屋顶，透过天窗看到了他们发明的镊子。这个秘密是公开的，对所有的产科医生和他们的病人都有利。今天的产科医生不把他们的发现保密，他们出版了它们。我感谢我的合作伙伴允许我出版我的。但我要补充的是，本书中偶尔表达的意见并不一定反映聘用我的机构的学院意见。
这不是一本读者认为他们已经知道所有关于广告都知道的书。这是为年轻的希望者和退伍军人，他们仍然在寻找方法来提高他们的击球率在收银机。
我只根据我自己的经历写广告。这就是为什么这本书对日本媒体、有线电视或广告一无所知的原因。
如果你认为这是一本糟糕的书，你应该在我的搭档乔尔·拉斐尔森尽力去把它弄得一团糟之前看到它。祝福你，乔尔。