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How Advertising Works: The Role of Research
edited by John Philip Jones
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998, 358 pages
In his classic work, Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy (1985), one of the most successful and wisest advertising men in the business and a fervent believer in advertising research, wrote that research is often misused by agencies and clients to prove that they were right in the first place. Like drunks clinging to a lamppost, Ogilvy says, both use research more for support than for illumination.
How Advertising Works, dedicated to David Ogilvy, is part of a grand design on advertising illumination by John Philip Jones. The first in a planned series of five books covering the advertising field and ranging from research procedures and operations to building the brand, tackling multinational advertising, and providing a comprehensive resource guide on organizations and publications, How Advertising Works is itself an ambitious effort, and Jones is the person to undertake it. His name is one long familiar to academics, clients, and agencies alike, and his writing is among the most lucid in the field.
However, the problem of getting a handle on what advertising research can and cannot do is a vast one. Although we have arrived at a place where information from such sources as supermarket scanners can yield precise sales data that can then be correlated with television brands advertised when sets are switched on in a particular geographic area, the question of why people buy is still central to advertising research and still elusive. When researchers try to evaluate the impact of advertising on product purchase, they tend to fall somewhere between two extremes: those who, like Arthur Ehrenberg ("Repetitive Advertising and the Consumer"), view consumers as rational beings who buy only out of internal needs and considered preferences and see the effect of advertising as mostly confined to making people aware of the product, and those who, like the creatives who produced the multiaward-winning Absolut vodka campaign, never pretested or tracked the ads to see if they were any good. (This campaign brought the sinking Swedish company exports of 20,000 cases of vodka to the United States in 1981 to more than 3 million cases in 1995.) Believing that advertising is more art than...