nature of the event: his interface program - a medium by its very nature - was becoming the most important message, taking over an incredible amount of computer memory space and resources, and that reminded him very much of a brazen new Russian running the funds for teachers’ salaries through the accounts in his bank.
The further he penetrated into the jungles of the advertising business, the more questions he had to which he couldn’t find the answer, neither in Al Rice’s Positioning: a Battle for your Mind, nor even in the latest book on the same topic. The final Positioning. One colleague swore to Tatarsky that all the themes that Al Rice hadn’t touched on were analysed in Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. In his heart of hearts Tatarsky suspected Ogilvy was really the same character who appeared for a second in George Orwell’s 1984 in the consciousness of the hero in order to perform an imaginary feat of heroism and then disappear into the ocean of oblivion. The fact that comrade Ogilvy, despite his double unreality, had nonetheless made it to the shore, lit his pipe, donned his tweed jacket and become a world-famous advertising guru filled Tatarsky with a mystical, rapturous admiration for his own profession.
But the book he found particularly helpful was by Rosser Reeves: he discovered two terms in it - ‘penetration’ and ‘involvement’ - that proved very useful when it came to throwing curves. The first project he managed to design on the basis of these two concepts was for Nescafe Gold.
‘It has long been recognised,’ Tatarsky wrote just twenty minutes after he first learned about it, that there are two basic indicators of the effectiveness of an advertising campaign: penetration and involvement. ‘Penetration’ is the percentage of people who remember the advertisement. ‘Involvement’ is the percentage of people the advertisement has persuaded to consume the product. The problem is, however, that a brilliantly scandalous advertisement, capable of producing high-level penetration, is absolutely no guarantee of high levels of involvement. Likewise a campaign that cleverly demonstrates the virtues of a product and is capable of producing high levels of involvement is no guarantee of high-level penetration. Which is why we propose taking a new approach and creating a kind of binary advertising, in which the functions of penetration and involvement will be performed by different sets of information. Let’s examine how this approach would work in an advertising campaign for Nescafe Gold coffee.
The first step in the campaign is directed exclusively at implanting the brand name ‘Nescafe Gold’ in the consciousness of the largest possible number of people (we start from the assumption that any means are justified to this end). For example, we organise the planting of fake bombs in several large shops and railway stations - there should be as many of them as possible. The Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Security Services receive calls from an anonymous terrorist organisation informing them that explosive devices have been planted. But the searches carried out by the police at the sites named by the terrorists produce nothing but a large number of jars of Nescafe Gold packed in plastic bags. Next morning this is reported in all the magazines and newspapers and on television, following which we can regard the penetration phase as complete (its success is directly dependent on the scale of the operation). Immediately after this comes phase two - involvement. At this stage the campaign is waged according to the classical rules: the only thing linking it with phase one is the basic slogan:
‘Nescafe Gold: The Taste Explosion!’ Here is the scenario.’or the advertising clip:
A bench in a small city square. A young man in a red tracksuit sitting on it, with a serious expression on his face. Across the road from the square a
The further he penetrated into the jungles of the advertising business, the more questions he had to which he couldn’t find the answer, neither in Al Rice’s Positioning: a Battle for your Mind, nor even in the latest book on the same topic. The final Positioning. One colleague swore to Tatarsky that all the themes that Al Rice hadn’t touched on were analysed in Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. In his heart of hearts Tatarsky suspected Ogilvy was really the same character who appeared for a second in George Orwell’s 1984 in the consciousness of the hero in order to perform an imaginary feat of heroism and then disappear into the ocean of oblivion. The fact that comrade Ogilvy, despite his double unreality, had nonetheless made it to the shore, lit his pipe, donned his tweed jacket and become a world-famous advertising guru filled Tatarsky with a mystical, rapturous admiration for his own profession.
But the book he found particularly helpful was by Rosser Reeves: he discovered two terms in it - ‘penetration’ and ‘involvement’ - that proved very useful when it came to throwing curves. The first project he managed to design on the basis of these two concepts was for Nescafe Gold.
‘It has long been recognised,’ Tatarsky wrote just twenty minutes after he first learned about it, that there are two basic indicators of the effectiveness of an advertising campaign: penetration and involvement. ‘Penetration’ is the percentage of people who remember the advertisement. ‘Involvement’ is the percentage of people the advertisement has persuaded to consume the product. The problem is, however, that a brilliantly scandalous advertisement, capable of producing high-level penetration, is absolutely no guarantee of high levels of involvement. Likewise a campaign that cleverly demonstrates the virtues of a product and is capable of producing high levels of involvement is no guarantee of high-level penetration. Which is why we propose taking a new approach and creating a kind of binary advertising, in which the functions of penetration and involvement will be performed by different sets of information. Let’s examine how this approach would work in an advertising campaign for Nescafe Gold coffee.
The first step in the campaign is directed exclusively at implanting the brand name ‘Nescafe Gold’ in the consciousness of the largest possible number of people (we start from the assumption that any means are justified to this end). For example, we organise the planting of fake bombs in several large shops and railway stations - there should be as many of them as possible. The Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Security Services receive calls from an anonymous terrorist organisation informing them that explosive devices have been planted. But the searches carried out by the police at the sites named by the terrorists produce nothing but a large number of jars of Nescafe Gold packed in plastic bags. Next morning this is reported in all the magazines and newspapers and on television, following which we can regard the penetration phase as complete (its success is directly dependent on the scale of the operation). Immediately after this comes phase two - involvement. At this stage the campaign is waged according to the classical rules: the only thing linking it with phase one is the basic slogan:
‘Nescafe Gold: The Taste Explosion!’ Here is the scenario.’or the advertising clip:
A bench in a small city square. A young man in a red tracksuit sitting on it, with a serious expression on his face. Across the road from the square a
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