During my years building our B2B advertising agency in Atlanta, I’ve always been interested in advertising history, and especially ad characters. Recently, I came across some kindred spirits in the form of a new book, ADBOY – Vintage Advertising with Character, by Warren Dotz and Masud Husain. This excerpt gives a brief glimpse of what you’ll find within the pages of this rich history of ad characters.
Every brand makes an implied promise with its customers, but the best brands do a better job of reinforcing that promise across every touch point with their customers. These brands believe that no piece of communication or detail is too small to not be designed for functionality and brand presence.
From the marketing classic Positioning: Battle for Your Mind, authors Al Ries and Jack Trout, challenge that the human mind is an inadequate container. Ries and Trout assert that, under constant bombardment of advertising and marketing, the mind becomes saturated by brands and can only hold a finite number at any one time. According to psychological studies, the maximum number of product brands we can remember for a given category, the brand saturation point for the mind, is seven.
As an advertiser and/or marketer, branding is where it all begins. And all brands start with a logo. Logo design is a skill set all in itself. There are plenty of agencies in the US that only do branding work. It is quite a fascinating art form.
Welcome to the Man On the Street Beat, an advertising and marketing blog with an insider’s eye on the industry. Here you’ll find personal observations on the ever changing nature of marketing, as well as insightful commentary on the best (and worst) ads we’ve seen lately. Every day, we’ll be here to entertain, inform, inquire and include anyone who shares our passion for “the pitch.”
