Ogilvy on tourism advertising

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.

Blue Mountain Inn has led a wicked, wicked life. For years, she was the queen of Kingston’s bordellos.

Can you imagine a more beautiful location? A thousand feet up a mist-touched mountain, on the banks of a crystal stream, with its own waterfalls and surrounded by giant tree ferns, climbing vines, flaming wild flowers and gorgeously plumed tropical birds.

No wonder there were mumblings of discontent among certain segments of the population when the lady was rehabilitated into an elegant inn. (Even though she’s reformed, she’s lost none of her appeal. Jamaicans still climb there. But, now, for dinner.)

In this once-scandalous stone great house, you can now order Chateaubriand and Mouton Rothschild, ’47. These days, a plump bed costs you $10, including breakfast. On another mountain, four miles from Kingston, is Casa Monte, of a style best described as neo-Italian-Jamaican. $6.50 buys you a room with a view so fantastic, visitors have been known to cap their bottles of Jamaican rum—just so they wouldn’t miss anything.

At the other extreme of the island is a hotel room (if you can call something that’s 50’ X 35’ a “room”) that’s at the other extreme of price. It’s the Honeymoon Suite at the Jamaica Inn in Ocho Rios, $100 a day for two, including your own private outdoor swimming pool. At that price, you may want to leave here under cover of darkness.

For more information about formerly wicked inns, $6.50 views and $100 a day suites, see your travel agent or Jamaica Tourist Board, Dept. IA, 630 Fifth Ave., N.Y.C.

Now, my question is, why don’t more advertisements tell real stories like this? My suspicion is it’s because writing a good story requires, among other things, massive selectivity — a knack for including the telling detail, the discipline to eschew the arguably attractive but contextually irrelevant “And what’s more…”, and the guts to leave in certain bits which whilst factually unimportant (“Do we have to say it was once a bordello?” I hear the modern-day marketing director ask) are narratively or tonally vital.

People as individuals are bad enough at all that; committees and ‘steering groups’ are hopeless.