Rosser Reeves

Rosser Reeves (10 September 1910–24 January 1984) was an American advertising executive and pioneer of television advertising. He believed the purpose of advertising is to sell. He insisted that an advertisement or commercial should show off the value of a product, not the cleverness of a copywriter. His most typical ad is probably that for Anacin, a headache medicine. The ad was considered grating and annoying by almost all viewers but it was remarkably successful, tripling the product's sales. In 7 years the 59-second commercial made more money than the movie Gone With The Wind had in a quarter-century.

Reeves generated millions for his clients, the Ted Bates agency where he rose to chairman (existing today as Bates 141. The AMC program, Mad Men, uses Reeves as one model for the professional accomplishments of the series' protagonist, Don Draper (Jon Hamm).

His ads were focused around what he called the unique selling proposition, the one reason the product needed to be bought or was better than its competitors. These often took the form of slogans — Reeves oversaw the introduction of dozens, some that still exist to this day, such as M&M's "melt in your mouth, not in your hand." He argued that advertising campaigns should be unchanging with a single slogan for each product. His commercials for Bic pens, Minute Maid orange juice, M&M candies, Colgate toothpaste and other products used similar methods, often making dramatic demonstrations.

Reeves pointed out that to work, advertising had to be honest. He insisted the product being sold actually be superior, and argued that no amount of advertising could move inferior goods. He also disagreed that advertising was able to create demand where it did not exist. Successful advertising for a flawed product would only increase the number of people who tried the product and became dissatisfied with it. If advertising is effective enough and a product flawed enough, the advertising will accelerate the destruction of the brand. Similarly, Reeves believed it was a waste of money to claim uniqueness that doesn't exist, because consumers will soon find out, and they won't come back to the brand. This is important because historically fortunes are made from repeat business. Money would be better spent building some kind of meaningful advantage into a product before launching a costly advertising campaign to promote it.

Reeves advised clients to be wary of brand image advertising which is less likely to be successful than his claim-based strategy. This is because when communication relies on an image, the claim is unarticulated. An image can almost always be interpreted different ways, many if not most of which won't do a product any good. The message that a viewer takes away from an image is often very different than what the advertiser had intended.

Or to put it another way: practically every product has a number of benefits that might be claimed. Commonly one of the benefits is more popular than the others, even more popular than the others combined. Therefore, it's imperative to do everything to make people understand the most important benefit, to achieve credibility and to avoid distractions. The aim is to have as high a percentage of people as possible take out of an advertisement what the advertiser intends to put into it. This is most likely to be achieved if a claim is articulated and proven with credible evidence—in a brief commercial, some kind of dramatic demonstration.

Reeves expressed his views in his 1961 book, Reality in Advertising (Knopf). An interview with Reeves was included in The Art of Writing Advertising (1965). His greatest contributions were to express more clearly than anyone else the philosophy of a claim and to show how the philosophy could be applied to commercials that involve severe time constraints.

Reeves is also notable for creating Dwight Eisenhower's presidential ads for the 1952 election. He packaged Eisenhower as a forthright, strong, yet friendly leader. The commercials all included a regular person asking a question to the upper right of the screen. They would cut to Eisenhower, not wearing glasses to look stronger, looking to the lower left and then turning to the camera and responding. They were created by letting Eisenhower speak for a number of hours. Then questions were crafted later that best fit his answers.

In the 1960s Reeves' techniques began to fail. Consumers became more savvy and learnt to tune out uninteresting commercials, and within the advertising industry itself the Creative Revolution (exemplified by Bill Bernbach's "Think Small" campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle), which rejected many of his precepts, began. At age 55 Reeves retired. He declared that he had always planned to retire at that age, but many felt it was because of the decline in his influence.

Reeves did not shy from questionable ethics, including using doctors to sell cigarettes. He came out of retirement in 1967 to form the Tiderock Corporation, which he described as a "think tank" for corporate business. ^[1] One of its projects was a promotion in 1968 of a pro-smoking article by Stanley Frank published in True magazine. The promotion was paid for by the Tobacco Institute, who also paid Frank to write the article. ^[2]

Notes

Reeves also wrote a well received novel, Popo, (Knopf) about a poet who leaves a life of material wealth to move to Greeenwich Village in New York City, to pursue his poetry, and also wrote The 99 Critical Shots in Pool to explain both Euclid and Sir Isaac Newtons' geometric proofs.

Rosser Reeves was also a poet and the following is one of his poems -

Infinity

The probing eye of Palomar peers skyward to reveal A billion molten, fiery stars in our galactic wheel... And shows that even this great disc is but a firefly burning, Within a much more monstrous wheel, slowly, slowly turning.

May not this next celestial wheel be but an atom's glow In some big molecule of stars in some huge flake of snow? For may not space flow on and on from door to opening door, Like seas that open into seas and never reach a shore?

If in our atom's tiny flame a billion stars are whirled And millions of these lonely suns has each a captive world, Just follow to the trillionth power and on beyond to see, What must be true when ciphers link down to infinity.

Somewhere red planets swing around a triple silver sun, And pale, pale rainbows interlock their arches one by one. Somewhere, dark girls upon their brows grow curving, scarlet horns, And ride in tinkling gardens on great golden unicorns.

Somewhere rains of diamonds fall on foaming, milk-white seas, Where rockets follow streaming light from star to star with ease. And soft-eyed girls with honeyed lips swim up to sing and free Their water-weighted lashes from their native shining sea.

Great blue-white giant blazing suns control a thousand spheres Where reptiles march in glistening ranks and fight with jeweled spears; Where lizards lounge on ivory thrones and keep to weave and spin, To clean their overlapping scales, a smooth-skinned race of men.

Somewhere crustaceans think like Gods and muse eternal laws And write the music of the spheres with clicking bony claws. Or beetles, fish and furry things emerge as sentient breeds, Or, working with atomic fires are thinking centipedes.

Or, coal-black spiders sway in webs beneath chill alien moons, And finger gemlike instruments to strum immortal tunes. Or serpent-men on serpent worlds evolve to racial prime, And glide in fourth dimensions where the riddle solved is time.

For if there is no end of worlds and nature keeps her laws, Who knows which life will win which world: the hands...the coils...the claws? So feathered things and crawling things and creeping things all go Their separate ways on separate worlds, around, above, below.

If God employs infinity His wonders to perform, And there's no end of endlessness, can there, then, be a norm? Would God give souls to sentient beasts or would they still be clods? If evolution is God's way, whose image, then, is God's?

An endlessness of worlds implies a world of every kind: Worlds where our past repeats itself until the end of time. Worlds where our future's far events enact themselves before; Where every closing portal means another opening door.

So if there is infinity, if endlessness is true, Somewhere, Napoleon walks again the fields of Waterloo; And somewhere, always, in the depths of time's vast shoreless sea, Upon the ghastly Hill of Skulls, Christ hangs upon the tree.

The poem appeared in "The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, Tenth Series" in 1961.

The editor's comment about the poem was as follows -

"The author is chairman of the board of a large corporation, and we confess we find it intriguing and comforting to know that a man whose workday is devoted to the harsh realities of multi-million-dollar profit and loss has in him that good old-fashioned sense of wonder."

Born the son of Baptist Preacher in Virginia, he briefly attended The University of Virginia until he was expelled for drunkenly crashing a friend's car during the Prohibition era. Luckily he had just won one hundred dollars as a prize for a state-wide chemistry contest that served as his final exam for first year Chem 101. While other students wrote novel chemical formula as their submission, Reeves, by virtue of not knowing anything about chemistry having spent the semester drinking, dancing and gambling, blithely submitted an essay titled "Better Living Through Chemistry". He would later use this title for DuPont campaign. The one hundred dollars was enough money to move to Richmond where he was hired at a new bank that was hiring young contest winners. Finding that he was horrible at accounting but verbally gifted he began writing advertisements. He soon moved to New York City to found Ted Bates & Co with Ted Bates.

1. ^ Dougherty, Philip H. (1967-08-04). "Advertising: Rosser Reeves Is Back Again". New York Times: p. F44. 
2. ^ "The truth about...True's Article on Smoking". Consumer Reports: 336–339. June 1968. http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/cgv82f00. Retrieved 2008-08-07. 

References

Johnston, Laurie (January 25, 1984). Rosser Reeves, 73, Ad Executive Dies. New York Times

Reeves, Rosser (1961). Reality in Advertising. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. LCCN 61007118. 

External links

• A collection of Reeve's Eisenhower ads