Rosser Reeves: The Hard Sell

Reeves did not believe in entertaining people with his advertising. He believed that advertising should grab attention and repeat one single message over and over (1998). He explained this thought, "The consumer tends to remember just one thing from advertising-one strong claim, or one strong concept (Reeves, 1961)." His selling pitch was 'buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit (1998),' thus the USP: Unique Selling Proposition. Reeves would use scientific evidence in his commercials, for example, he would dress actors in lab coats to portray doctors.

Despite the lack of art in Reeves advertisements, many advertisers to this day use the same techniques that he developed. In advertising, creative portfolio classes at the University of Texas at Austin students are instructed to find one main point to feature as a selling point with their ads. On TV commercials, actors will wear lab coats and point to charts of evidence as to why their product works.

Some of Reeves' most famous campaigns that employed the USP approach are:

Wonder Bread helps build strong bodies in eight ways.
M&M's melt in your mouth, not in your hands.
Certs breath mints with a magic drop of retsyn.
Colgate cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth.
How do you spell relief? R-O-L-A-I-D-S.
Only Viceroy gives you 20,000 filter traps in every filter.

Fifty years later, these advertising slogans are still being used to this day despite Ted Bates and Company's creative overhaul that was attempted after Reeves retired from the advertising business.

One of Reeves' most famous advertisements that represent the hard sell, USP approach, is the advertisement for Anacin. This advertisement portrayed three boxes in a head of a headache sufferer. The first contained a coiled spring, the next a sledgehammer, and the third a jagged thunderbolt. The three types of headaches were all cured by "Anacin" bubbles that were floating up from the stomach, and the slogan: "Anacin, the pain reliever that doctors recommended most" (1998).

When asked, most people said that they absolutely hated that advertisement, yet sales rose dramatically when the advertisement aired. Another interesting fact was that the advertisement claimed that aspirin wouldn't cure a headache, and yet Anacin contained aspirin. Thus the tagline could read "pain reliever that doctors recommended most" since doctors recommended aspirin at the time.

Reeves believed that advertisers needed to steer away from 'artsy-craftsy' advertising, advertising that had distractions. In an interview with Reeves, he mentioned that on the way to the interview, he noticed a bus that had a giant advertisement with a beautiful Swedish woman and the headline said, 'The most startling innovation to come out of Sweden since girls…since blondes' (Higgins, 1989). Reeves went on to explain that after the bus had left his sight, he had no idea what the product was that the advertisement was trying to sell.

Reeves' no nonsense, repetitious USP had brought the Bates agency from $16 million in 1945 to $130 million in 1960 (Fox, 1984). Despite the fire that several of Reeves campaigns received. The National Association of Broadcasters television code forbade television commercials from showing men in white coats posing as doctors. When the Federal Trade Commission issued orders to drop campaigns that broke the TV codes, most of these complaints came to the Bates agency and Reeves' commercials.