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Reality in advertising

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As a student of advertising I read Reality In Advertising and learned more about the nuts and bolts of effective advertising than I learned from four years of college or any other source. The writing was succinct and the examples well chosen and revealing. I can't recommend it highly enough for anyone interested in the subject.

Despite being touted by some as a brilliant advertising book, Reality in Advertising was a letdown - offering just a few interesting insights. It may have been revolutionary decades ago, but there is a reason that it's now out of print.

It's a pleasant, quick read, but its insights are few and far between.

Here are the interesting tidbits, some obvious, others less so.

1. You need a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) - the concept that the reader comes away with. It must tout a specific benefit, that is unique in the category (or at least not claimed by or widely recognized in others), and be persuasive enough to lure new customers over to you.

2. Advertising is the art of getting a USP into the heads of the most people at the lowest cost.

3. Ad effectiveness varies enormously. Measure the following factors to make sure you're not wasting your money - and to see how your competitors stack up.

(3A) Penetration: The percentage of people who remember your current advertising.

(3B) Usage Pull: The percentage of customers among people who remember versus don't remember your advertising. This can be negative for a bad ad.

An ad campaign's overall effectiveness is the Penetration times the Usage Pull. Doubling the effectiveness effectively doubles the ad dollars.

4. Techniques to optimize effectiveness:

(4A) Stick to a single, strong claim, to avoid diluting the power of your core message. Secondary messages are fine only if they reinforce the core message.

(4B) Copy sometimes fails to convey the intended USP. Test the copy by asking readers to articulate the message, and calculating the percent that get it right.

(4C) Don't change your ad campaign - even over decades. Doing so will destroy Penetration. Readers won't get bored by your campaign or even remember it well.

(4D) It's better to spend your budget reaching more people less frequently, than fewer people more frequently.

(4E) Avoid visuals and gimmicks that attract attention to themselves at the expense of your USP's recall. Even jewelry can be distracting. Test to check the recall of your USP.

(4F) All senses should express the same message at the same time, to more successfuly convey it. Remove elements of an ad that don't help you convey the message. For instance, depicting a narrator is just a distraction.

Interesting? Sure - but that's the extent of the book's insight!

The single greatest book on modern advertising ever written. The word "bible" is overused to decribe great books, but this is worthy of the tag. Rosser Reeves virtually invented the USP--unique selling proposition--the basis of all great marketing and selling. It is more relevant today than when it was written 40 years ago. Read this book and you'll know more than 90% of the ad execs in NY who make $600,000 a year.

Rosser Reeves was a dynamic and powerful copywriter one of the few in 1960 inducted into the Copywriters Hall of Fame. There's a reason for that: He knew and practiced reality in advertising. He stripped away the myths that were long held and that are still held today. He provided his clients with the practice of good principles that you'll read in this book.

Any copywriter or advertiser who is not fortunate enough to own a copy of this book is a sad character indeed. It is a gem. If you have to pay $300 for it, buy it. In your hands you'll own the most dynamic truth ever written about selling your clients products and services and writing great copy, making advertising pay major dividends.

You say this book was written in 1960. How valuable could it be today? Perhaps more valuable than many books being offered up by contemporary writers. What you discover in this book are practices that most people no longer use. That's sad because they're taking money, profits, off the table. They're losing market share. Advertisers are paying for sales copy and ad campaigns that will never work because big egos are involved.

While many of the books written today about advertising on the Internet, for example, will be outdated in a few years, this book, I venture, will never be outdated. While many copywriters today attempt to be great writers who are admired by their peers; writers who are puffy and more interested in selling their own skills than their client's products, Rosser Reeves was interested in one thing --- selling every widget he could for his clients. That's what this book is all about. That's why I love it and value it. That's why it is indeed a classic.

In the book, Reeves shoots down many of his contemporaries. He shoots down myths. Yes, he talks about the unique selling proposition, which he helped make famous. The USP is remarkably important. Yet few copywriters even bother to discover their client's USP. They're not salespeople. They want a showcase for their own so-called talent and not a tool with which to sell products. Trouble with all this is, you simply can't sell without having a handle on the USP.

Reeves wrote copy to sell. He didn't write to win awards. He knew that awards were unimportant. He gives the example of two television commercials that the advertising community said were terrible. They laughed about them and explained how they would make them better. And yet, these two commercials made their advertisers rich --- they outsold all other commercials that the ad people thought were so great. You see, ad people are not good judges of what's good. The consumer is the ultimate and most effective judge. The consumer is the only award that counts.

I've read some unkind reviews about this book. I challenge anyone to find a greater book for the advertising professional. I have some four decades of advertising experience under my belt and I learn each time I read this book. I value the words as if they were freshly found gold coins. If I had a choice of being a copywriter like Rosser Reeves and one of these "gurus" of today who is so in love with his own words and style and wants to showcase his own talents, I'll choose to model after Reeves.

For in the end, advertising and copywriting is about selling the client's product or service to as many consumers as possible. And that's what Reality in Advertising is all about.

VERY highly recommended.

- Susanna K. Hutcheson

The enduring contribution of this book is the Unique Selling Proposition, or USP. In short, the USP says: Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit. Reeves cited USP headlines, such as, "Stops B.O.," "Get's Rid Of The Film On Teeth," "Our Bottles Are Washed With Live Steam," "Wonder Bread Helps Build Strong Bodies 12 Ways," and "M&Ms Melt In Your Mouth, Not In Your Hands."

Reeves was an opponent of image advertising, literary copy, and changing ads frequently. He saw advertisements as salespeople, not performers. He also believed you should try to reach more people instead of reaching a focused market more frequently.

Previous theories stated that advertising existed to increase name awareness or build a brand image. "Reality In Advertising" was a blunt break from these earlier traditions. By the 1960s Reeve's was seen as ham-handed old timer by proponents of the advertising creative revolution, which fused ironic advertising with social movements. In the 1970s, Al Ries and Jack Trout coined the positioning concept, which suggests a more competitive approach. Another common term is the "value proposition," which measures the difference between benefit and price. Today some believe that advertising itself is outdated, and that only user generated content such as this review will advance a brand.

I believe all of these approaches can be useful depending on the situation. Many of the ideas in "Reality In Advertising" are out of date, but the concept of a Unique Selling Proposition can be effective. For example, the iPhone apps advertising used a USP. The USP works well when you have a really unique feature of your product or service.

I used Reeve's USP to positive effect for an advertising campaign to increase recycling in the City of Minneapolis. The headlines in newspaper ads included, "This Is Not Garbage," with a picture of recyclables, and "Recycle This Newspaper," with a photo of the newspaper it ran in. Recycling tonnage doubled within four months. These ads were blunt, to the point, and successful.

I never knew that my book was a collectable. If I had known, I would not have taken a highlighter to it.

(As a side note, Reeves was a proponent of smoking, and the model for Don Draper on Mad Men.)

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, 20th Anniversary Edition

Relationship Marketing: Successful Strategies For The Age Of The Customer

the book brings a bit of statistics into the advertising world.
nothing today is not well understood and achieved.

Neverteless the USP pages are enlightening.

worth every penny.

The video vampire is one of the most common errors in advertising. Trying to be cute and sheek is often given more weight than the advertising message.