Thread by @TheCharlieton

I just finished reading Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves.

This one wasn’t on my radar until @JVMeredith pointed it out - and I’m glad he did.

Quick refresher on how I went from deep Munger cuts to deep marketing cuts, then I’ll do my top takeaways from Reeves (thread)

I work in the consumer packaged goods industry as an owner operator.

This industry IS marketing, and until a few years ago, yours truly had never read an advertising book or taken a marketing class.

That made me a one legged man in an ass kicking contest

So I started reading

I started with the best sellers. These were modern books about modern platforms like Google & Facebook. I assumed marketing WAS advertising, right?

Turns out the only use of those books was as kindling

Platforms change too fast. As soon as books are printed they’re obsolete

What I found was that OLD marketing books often packed a huge punch.

And bc I didnt know what I didnt know, I got the joy of stumbling upon marketing “quake” books

For a reader, I don’t think there’s a better feeling than a surprise quake book.

Reality in Ads is a quake book

Reeves starts w a simple idea about how to judge the success of an ad.

He called it the “pulled & the unpulled”

Imagine the whole population of the US divided into two rooms

In one room are the ppl who do NOT know your ads. You interview these ppl and find 5% buy your product

Because these ppl didn’t know your ads, they must have made their decision to buy based on something other than the influence of yours ads (maybe a word of mouth recommendation).

Now go to the other room, where you’ve put everyone who DOES remember your ads.

What percentage of these people has bought your product? Let’s say it’s 25%.

In that case, you’ve stumbled upon one of the most exciting stats in advertising.

You have proof that yours ads “pull” or convert an extra 20% of people into buyers as compared to your control group.

Painfully, this situation could be reversed.

It’s possible that your ads REPEL buyer compared to the control. In that case, every dollar you spend is a waste.

This is the beginning of knowledge about the reality of advertising,

The second key metric that Reeves pioneered is “penetration”- what percentage of people has your advertising reached?

What part of the population has gotten your message into their heads?

Reeves gives a case study to prove the point.

Imagine two advertisers spending $10M/year each.

A poll reveals the first advertisers campaign is recalled by with 44% of Americans. The second campaign only registered with 1.8%.

That’s a 2200% difference with equal budgets.

To review:

Penetration: what percent of heads have we gotten the message into?

Pull: when exposed to our message, what percent are convinced to buy?

With these metrics “the shape of reality in advertising begins to appear.”

From these two master metrics, Reeves draws many important lessons.

“Too frequent change of your advertising destroys penetration”

“Changing a story has the same effect as stopping the money, as far as penetration is concerned”

“The consumer tends to remember just one thing from an advertisement - one strong claim, or one strong concept”

The ads that gain penetration the fastest present “one moving claim or concept...like a burning glass which focuses the rays of the sun into one hot, bright circle”

And what does Reeves call this condensed idea?

The Unique Selling Proposition.

“It is the theory of the ideal selling concept - of what makes campaigns work.”

Reeves and his agency originated the USP in the 1940s & w/ it grew their agency into one of the best on Madison Ave.

Writing in 1961, Reeves called the USP “perhaps the most misused series of letters in advertising...it is used with the casual looseness of Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, when he said ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less’”

But to Reeves the USP has a precise definition:

Each ad must say to the reader “buy this product & you will get this specific benefit”

The proposition MUST be one that the competitor either cannnot or does not offer

The proposition must be so strong that is can move millions

These three master concepts: Pull, Penetration and the USP are the three cornerstones of seeing reality in advertising.

Reeves believed in these three concepts so much he thought the classic definition of advertising (“salesmanship in print”) needed to be updated to this:

“Advertising is the art of getting a unique selling proposition into the heads of the most people at the lowest possible cost.”

Highly recommended!

End.