Ally Bank's Excellent Advertising Campaign

by Frank Strong

Ally Bank’s current TV advertising campaign is one of the best I’ve seen in a while. The message is clear, the timing couldn’t be better and it is both entertaining and humorous. It prompted me to go look up an excerpt from a book I’ve read long ago.

If you can look past the gender preference expressed (it was originally published in a different era), there is a lesson to be learned. The words below are adopted from Guerrilla Marketing, (1998) by Jay Conrad Levisnon and the lesson is, assuming you’ve done your homework, about committing to your marketing campaign.

1. The first time a man looks at an ad, he doesn’t see it.
2. The second time, he doesn’t notice it.
3. The third time, he is conscious of its existence.
4. The fourth time, he faintly remembers having seen it.
5. The fifth time, he reads the ad.
6. The sixth time, he turns up his nose at it.
7. The seventh time, he reads it through and says, “Oh brother!”
8. The eighth time, he says, “Here’s that confounded thing again!”
9. The ninth time, he wonders if it amounts to anything.
10.The tenth time, he will ask his neighbor if he has tried it.
11.The eleventh time, he wonders how the advertiser makes it pay.
12. The twelfth time, he thinks it must be a good thing.
13. The thirteenth time, he thinks it might be worth something.
14. The fourteenth time, he remembers that he wanted such a thing for a long time.
15. The fifteenth time, he is tantalized because he cannot afford to buy it.
16. The sixteenth time, he thinks he will buy it someday.
17. The seventeenth time, he makes a memorandum of it.
18. The eighteenth time, he swears at his poverty.
19. The nineteenth time, he counts his money carefully.
20. The twentieth time he sees the ad, he buys the article or instructs his wife to do so.