Main conference presentation

How the advertising industry thinks

Eric Reiss

Sunday March 25 2007, 10:15 - 11:00AM

Our world is changing. Advertising agencies blew the web opportunity the first time around, but they’re not going to let this happen again. They’re smart. They understand communication. They can run persuasive rings around BJ Fogg. And they’ve been doing user research since before Jakob Nielsen was born.

Ad agencies generally stayed out of the blast range when the dot.bomb went off. And they’ve since waited patiently. Happily, most ad folks still haven’t got a clue as to what IAs do. But when they finally do “get it,” we are either going to learn to get along with them or find ourselves relegated to an unenviable group of semi-human subcontractors -- a status otherwise reserved for printers, layouters, and the gopher who delivers lunch each day.

The last couple of years, IAs have learned to appreciate business thinkers like Philip Kottler, Don Peppers, and Peter Drucker. Now it’s time to get acquainted with Claude Hopkins, John Caples, Rosser Reeves, Bill Bernbach, and David Ogilvy.

This presentation will take a closer look at what ad agencies consider “good” advertising, how they interpret “concept,” and why our notion of “proof of concept” is completely nonsensical in the world of advertising. We’ll examine some successful campaigns and some award-winning campaigns -- these are not necessarily the same thing -- and find out why these are admired by so-called “creatives” at ad agencies. We’ll explore why advertising creatives despise web types in general and usability folks in particular. We’ll discover why stuff that “works” on screen doesn’t work in print ads -- and vice versa. And we’ll dispel some of the popular myths about advertising, such as “all advertising is good advertising.”