ogilvy

So I was cleaning out one of my old external hard drives last night in order to free up some much-needed space when lo-and-behold I came across this old favorite of mine. It’s a scan of an advertisement Ogilvy & Mather’s put out to promote themselves.

It is definitely something that you don’t see too often these days, especially in long-form copy.
For more great pearls of wisdom from some of advertising’s best, I’ve kept up an online storage of interesting articles that can be reached by following the “Knowledge Base” link on the right sidebar of my blog.

But here is - How to create advertising that sells - by David Ogilvy. (click on the link or image for the full-size version, i know the following cropped one is too small to read).

So what do you guys think, is self-promotion a thing of the past? Or have we just forgotten that every now and then, advertising does actually work…. even if you happen to be your own client?

Here’s a video showing all the work that goes into preparing a model for commercial use. My favorite part is where they place her face about 2-3 inches up her neck via photoshop. Done for The Campaign for Real Beauty, a recent piece by Dove, it guides you to their website with hopes of you joining their Self Esteem forum. At first I expected a forum filled with comments touting how horrible it is that modern fashion retouches photos used in spreads, but then came across this posting by someone named Roderick:

The movie does not make a point. It just shows you can make a not that extreme beauty an extreme beauty. But if that “fake” beauty is your definition of beauty you should go out some more. Compare it to a car commercial. The car is shown glimmering, while it drives trough dust en water. Compare it to laundry commercials, where they always show you the soap used cleans *anything*. It is widely accepted though that those advertisements are somewhere fake. Everybody knows a car cant stay clean after driving trough dust and water. Everybody knows brand-a soap cant clean anything. Its very naive to think women on beauty product commercials are real then.

Or in other words, again, let yourself think first instead of pointing your finger to these commercial’s companies.”

Nicely put. Kudos to Dove for allowing comments from both sides to be shown, thus adding a sense of credibility to the site and its’ purpose. Created by Ogilvy Toronto with help from Reginald Pike, Soho post production, Gabor Jurina(photographer), Rogue editing, and Vapor music (also Diana Carreiro for makeup).