Cybernetics and The Amazing Mind of Howard Gossage

From Advertising, to the Theory of Relativity, this course still blows my mind sometimes. 

there are two ways of running a campaign
-Advertise simple USP ,block book your adverts, repeat until the message is heard.
- Print the advert, sequence for 3 to 6 months, see the reaction and then repeat.

Gossage went against this by measuring feedback. He would create an advert, listen to the consumer support, and if it was successful continue. It meant more work but it yielded greater and richer rewards.

He states that advertising had gone past static transmission, and was very much Dynamic. He said that

"I will go further and say that it is not only wrong to influence an audience without involving it but it is unethical and dishonest"

In short, this guy basically understood the rewards of engaging an audience, whilst single handedly pioneering what today is interactive advertising. He did this decades before the invention of the internet, and realised that speaking directly one to one with an audience is the way into the audiences hearts, and in turn wallets.

His ideologies are one that I follow strictly, and writes that it isn't always needed for the advert to be about the product or service, your challenge is to sell an idea, and an idea alone.

Amazingly, this can be linked to Isaac Newton's laws of relativity. In saying how ever action has an equal and opposite reaction, It can be said that:

 "every advert has an equal and opposite consumer response." 

He changed the perception of advertising, into it being a passive mundane activity, into a conversation between the product and its consumer (very active). the method he used to do this was through Parrallel structures, which can be explained in 4 easy steps:
1) Find the product you want to sell
2) Find an unrelated idea with an underlying message
3) Link the two and tell to the audience
4) Consumers have better understanding, measure feedback.

Gossage vs Ogilvy
You cant really say that Gossage and the advertising god David Ogilvy really saw "eye-to-eye". They has completely different approaches when it came to advertising.

Ogilvy is a man of rules, and prefers structure, routine, and regime. he felt the consumers should be put in their place, with the product being given to them as clear and as simple as possible, with not emotional engagement, just facts and figures.

Gossage came in and believed the complete opposite, and blurred the lines between consumer and product relationships. He felt it was wrong to provide magical USP's into products, and that adverts should be methodical, precise, yet from the heart.

An example of the cybernetics information loop is from the company Froyo Factory. I had a first hand experience of this whilst on holiday in California. As you went in,, you were handed a cup, and allowed to select and choose what your favourite flavours were. From here once you pay, the combination is logged and added to the "Scoreboard" to see which flavours is the best. The most popular flavour was then given a 20% discount for that week, and users could vote on facebook/twitter.

So in short, it allowed its customers to vote for the Flavour if the week, and give a discount on that per week.