Good stories

My copy of Ogilvy on Advertising sits on a shelf miles from here. I wanted to re-read the section on advertising tourism for Jamaica, as that might be the closest this genius of promotion came to weighing in on nation branding. I found, however, a student’s book report which summarizes Ogilvy’s tips on tourism advertising: “Ogilvy then addresses how to advertise foreign travel. A classical campaign in travel advertising is Doyle Dane Bernbach’s (DDB) Jamaica campaign [from 1960s]. When Ogilvy started an ad campaign for Britain, it was the fifth most visited European country by the time he wrote this book it was first.”

About the communications side of nation branding, David Ogilvy says:

1. Advertising for countries should be designed to plant a long term image in the reader’s mind.
2. Choose to illustrate things that are unique to the country concerned and not something people can do at home.
3. The job of the advertising is to convert people’s dreams about visiting foreign countries into action; this is best done by combining “mouth-watering photographs with specific how-to-do-it information” (Ogilvy 133).
4. Whenever the advertising is for a little known country, it is important to give the people a lot of information in the advertisement such as the weather, language, food, etc.
5. Charm and differentiation work well in tourism advertising.

Everybody, please take particular note of 1, 4 and 5 on that list.

Now, a final, and separate, point about these particular Jamaica ads, I want to draw your attention to the original campaign. The only example of it I could find online is at the AIGA archives. It’s a grainy black and white full-page magazine ad from 1964 that shows a photo of the Blue Mountain Inn followed by an evocative long-copy story:

Under cover of darkness, the town’s lonely bachelors climbed to this secluded inn on Blue Mountain. And it wasn’t for dinner.