Though we can research till we're blue in the face, no other source of information is as telling as a book written in the time period by one of the leading ad men of the time, David Ogilvy. Ogilvy was partner in the firm Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising agency that still exists today. Though the book primarily is informative for the wanna-be ad executives of the sixties, today it serves as a commentary on how and why the advertising industry targeted the audiences it did. It was an ad man's job to see the trends in the tumultuous sixties and predict where society was headed. Getting inside Ogilvy's head is like getting inside the 1960's grocery store, television, and newspaper.
Some of my favorite lines I pulled from the text below:
"The two most powerful words you can use in a headline are FREE and NEW. You can seldom use FREE but you can almost always use NEW- if you try hard enough"
(from "How to Write Potent Copy")
"(7) Give a recipe whenever you can. The housewife is always on the lookout for new ways to please her family."
"(16) Be serious. Don't use humor or fantasy. Don't be clever in your headline. Feeding her family is a serious business for most housewives."
( both from "How to Make Good Campaigns for Food Products, Tourist Destinations, and Proprietary Medicines")
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