#306 David Ogilvy (Confessions of an Advertising Man)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/f977322811a4a532

Fourteen years before writing these confessions, I had gone to New York and started an advertising agency.
Americans thought it was crazy.
What could Scotsman know about advertising?
My agency was an immediate and meteoric success.
I wrote this book during my summer vacation in nineteen sixty two.
I thought it would sell four thousand copies.
To my surprise, it was a runaway bestseller.
And so far has sold over a million copies.
Why did I write it?
First, to attract new clients to my advertising agency.
Second
To condition the market.
for a public offering of our shares.
Third.
To make myself better known in the business world.
It achieved all three of these purposes.
My colleagues at Ogee and Mather have largely followed my ideas, and they have sold a lot of products for a lot of manufacturers.
With the result that our agency is now sixty times as big as it was when I wrote this book. The book was first published in nineteen sixty three. He is writing the introduction to the updated version twenty five years later.
I get letters from strangers who thank me for the dramatic improvement in their sales when they follow the advice contained in this book.
And I meet big shots in the world of marketing who say that they owe their careers to reading my book.
If you detect a slight stench of conceit in this book.
I would have you know that my conceit is selective.
I am a miserable duffer.
In everything except advertising.
I cannot read a balance sheet.
Work a computer, ski, sail, play golf, or paint.
But when it comes to advertising
Advertising Age magazine says
That I am the creative king of advertising.
When Fortune magazine published an article about me entitled it
Is David Ogy a genius?
I asked my lawyer to sue the editor.
For the question mark.
Funny enough, that's how I originally discovered Ogave. I was reading Warren Buffett's shareholder letters and he kept referring to David Ogie as a genius.
Confessions of an advertising man says nothing about corporate culture.
notably the corporate culture of advertising agencies. In nineteen sixty two, I had never heard of corporate culture.
Nor had anybody else.
But thanks to two students of business, Terrence Deal and Alan Kellen Kennedy,
We now know that people who built the companies for which America is famous all worked obsessively.
To create strong cultures within their organizations.
Companies that have cultivated their individual identities by shaping values.
Making heroes.
Spelling out rites and rituals.
And acknowledging the cultural network.
Have an edge.
The head of one of the biggest agencies recently told me that Ogovie and Mather is the only agency in the world with a real corporate culture.
It may be this more than anything else which differentiates us from
From our competitors.
Through maddening repetition, some of my maxims have been woven into our culture.
Here are some of them.
Number one.
We sell.
Or else.
Number two.
You cannot bore people into buying your product.
You can only interest them in buying it.
Number three.
We prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance.
We pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles.
A blind pig can sometimes find truffles, but it helps to know that they grow in oak forests.
Number four.
We hire gentlemen with brains. That's one of my favorite ones.
Number five.
The consumer is not a moron.
She is your wife.
Don't insult her intelligence.
Number six.
Unless your campaign contains a big idea.
It will pass like a ship in the night.
I doubt.
If more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.
I'm supposed to be one of the most fertile inventors of big ideas, but in my long career I have not had more than twenty.
Number seven, only first class business and that in a first class way.
Number eight.
Never run an advertisement you would not want your own family to see.
And number nine is Ogrevi's reaffirmation of his belief in the individual capacity for greatness.
Search all the parks in your cities.
You'll find no statues of committees.
That was an excerpt from the book I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is Confessions of an Advertising Man, and it was written by David Ogy.
Ogy has become one of my personal heroes, somebody I did not know.
uh even existed before I started uh Fowners Podcast.
It's been over almost two over two years now, almost two years.
Since I've last done an episode on him.
This will be the fifth podcast.
That I've made about him.
And I just think it's been way too long since I spent some time in the mind of David Ogreby, so that's why I'm reading rereading this book.
Right now, I wanna finish out the introduction before I go into a little bit of it about his early life.
'Cause you just got a great a bunch of great ideas.
That's really what the I think this podcast will be. It's just a bunch of fantastic ideas.
that Ogilvie learned over his multiple decade career.
This is something that he's famous for saying. It's one of his uh most repeated
Aphorisms.
And that's uh pay peanuts and you get monkeys.
Clients who haggle over their agency's compensation are looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
Instead of trying to shave a few measly cents off the agency's fifteen percent.
They should concentrate on getting more sales.
results from their eighty five percent that they spend on time and space.
That is where the leverage is.
No manufacturer ever got rich.
By underpaying his agency.
pay peanuts and you get monkeys.
And that right there is an example of why spending time reading Olgie I think he's the best writer.
That I've ever read.
Uh for anybody.
Uh an out of any of the books.
uh that I've read for the podcast because he he he's a master at language
And just getting
Condensing these ideas down so that you actually stick in your brain.
Right. You can read that entire paragraph.
Or you could just read the last sentence, pay peanuts and you get monkeys and you understand what he's saying.
And he'll do this. He he like repeats these aphorisms and maxims over and over and over again.
And it's just a way to express these ideas that he deeply, deeply believes in. One idea that he deeply deeply believes in.
is that you should study the experience and the great work that came before you and if you don't, you're an ignorant amateur, which I love.
He says advertising agencies still waste their clients' money repeating the same mistakes.
During a 10 hour train ride, I read the ads in three magazines. Most of them violated elementary principles, which were discovered in years gone by.
The copywriters and art directors who created them are ignorant amateurs.
What is the reason for their failure to study experience?
Are they afraid that knowledge would impose some discipline on them?
Or expose their incompetent.
So he ends the introduction of this updated copy of Confessions of an Advertising Man.
with his last will and testament. He's like, Okay.
These are the most valuable lessons that I've learned.
And this is updated in nineteen eighty eight. He's gonna die about ten years later, eleven years later in nineteen ninety nine.
And he says such so I'm just gonna give you a couple of these ideas that I think are good.
Uh, creating successful advertising is a craft. It's part inspiration, but mostly know-how and hard work.
If you have a modicum.
Of talent.
and know which techniques work at the cash register, you will go a long way.
Here's another one.
The temptation to entertain instead of selling is contagious as something he does not like.
That's why his uh in when he's building his corporate culture.
The second thing that he would repeat over and over again is that we sell or else.
We're not here to win awards, we're here to sell products.
For our customers.
Another uh
Uh another one of his lessons.
The difference between one advertisement and another, when measured in terms of sales,
can be as much as nineteen to one. So that sentence right there is why.
If you're listening to this right now, I would immediately
Uh
Search for Og V and advertising and
and buy that book before you finish this podcast because that is the most
That book, I think, was also published in nineteen eighty eight.
Or
Sometime in the yeah, I think it was written twenty years after this book.
And so he had ha he had accumulated another like two decades of your of experience in advertising.
Uh between
writing the confessions of an advertising man and overly on advertising.
There is a bunch of examples in Ogbey and advertising of what he just said and why it's so important to learn this craft.
'Cause you're thinking you're running ads.
And yet one ad the difference between one ad or or another can generate as much as nineteen times the amount of sales.
Another idea from Og V The Key to success is to promise the consumer a benefit.
Like better flavor.
White or wash.
More miles per gallon.
and a bet or a better complexion.
Another one what works in one country almost always works in other countries.
Something I realized in rereading this book right after I read
uh James Dyson's autobiography for the third or fourth time.
is a lot of their ideas are the same. Uh James says that one editorial
One great editorial is worth a thousand advertisements.
Uh Og he says editors of magazines are better communicators than advertising people. Copy their techniques.
This is also another idea that Dyson repeats in his book.
that Wog repeats in this one. Most campaigns are too complicated.
They reflect a long list of objectives and try to reconcile the diversent view diversent views of too many executives. By attempting to cover too many things, they achieve nothing nothing.
Their advertisements
Look like the minutes of a committee.
In Dyson's autobiography, which I just covered again on episode three hundred, he says you simply cannot mix your messages when selling something new.
A consumer can barely handle one great new idea.
Let alone two or even several.
And then the last idea is from this section.
Is good campaigns can run for many years without losing their selling power.
My eye patch campaign for Hathaway shirts
Ran for twenty one years.
My campaign for Dove Soap has been running for thirty one years and it is now a bestseller.
So the first time I read this book was over four years ago, and in my mind, the reason I picked it up, I was like, Okay
I want more
I want like an autobiography.
of Olgovy.
And that's that's how I remember the book in my mind.
And realize that
The autobiogra biographical section of the book is like three pages.
And most of it is just straight
Idea after idea after idea that help you sell more products.
So I didn't want to go over his background because
Again, I just I love his writing and you'll see
H personality jumps off the page.
My mother was a beautiful and eccentric Irish woman.
She disinherited me on the grounds that I was likely to acquire more money than was good for me without any help from her.
I could not disagree.
At the age of nine, I was sent to board
А на ерристократи скулф.
The headmaster wrote of me
He has a distinctly original mind.
He's inclined to argue with his teachers and to try and convince them that he is right.
And the books are wrong.
But this is perhaps
Further proof.
Of his originality.
At the age of thirteen, I was sent to a Scottish school.
Whose Spartan disciplines had been established
By my great uncle.
After I went to Oxford and made a botch of it.
I was too preoccupied to do any work and was duly expelled. And then this paragraph

I think his his his personal story just so amazing.
He went through multiple decades of trying to find his life's work.
That was in nineteen thirty-one, the bottom of the depression. For the next seventeen years, while my friends were establishing themselves as doctors lawyers, civil servants, and politicians.
I adventured about the world.
Uncertain of my perp.
I was a chef in Paris.
A door to door s door to door salesman.
A social worker
In the slums of Edinburgh.
An associate of doctor Gallup.
In research for the motion picture industry.
and an assistant to Sir William Stevenson.
I think this was the guy that was the
One of the
Inspirations for the character James Bond.
An assistant to Sir William Stevenson in the British Security Coordination Department.
And
A farmer.
with the Amish in Pennsylvania.
And then he goes into the fact that that's not what he expected when he was growing up. I had expected to become Prime Minister when I grew up. Instead, I finally became an advertising agent on Madison Avenue.
The revenues of my nineteen clients are now greater than the revenue of Her Majesty's government.
My father used to say of a product that it was very well spoken of in the advertisements.
I spend my life speaking well of products in advertisements.
By writing this book in the old fashioned
first person singular, I have committed an offense against a convention of contemporary American manners.
But I think it's artificial to write we
When I am confessing my sins.
And describing
My adventures.
And then for the rest of the book, it's just David giving us
ideas that he learned through the experience.
of his multiple decade career.
This is one of my favorite parts of the entire book.
It's the fact these are lessons that David learned working under a master chef.
And
he realizes like oh these lessons can be applied to
Any field.
She says managing an advertising agency is like managing any other creative organization. A research laboratory, a magazine, an architect's office, or a great kitchen.
Thirty years ago I was chef at the hotel Met Majestic in Paris.
There were thirty seven chefs in our brigade.
From morning to night we sweated and shouted and cursed and cooked.
Every man was inspired by one ambition.
To cook better than any other chef had ever cooked before.
So he's going to work under the head shaft.
This guy named Pitar.
And so it says, I have always believed that if I can understand how Patar, the head chef, inspired such white hot morale.
I could apply the same kind of leadership to the management of my advertising agency.
To begin with
He was the best cook in the whole brigade.
And we knew it.
It was inspiring.
to work for a supreme master.
He ruled with a rod of iron, and we were terrified of him.
He praised very seldom, but when he did, we were exalted to the skies.
Today I praise my staff.
As rarely as he praised his chefs, in the hopes that they too will appreciate him more,
Then a steady gush.
of appreciation.
Here's another trait that Ogy copied.
from the head chef. And this is why he mentioned it earlier. He
Can't stand people.
that are bad at their jobs.
Uh he calls them ignorant amateurs. He is rather Ogee was rather ruthless.
And so was a head chef. He did not tolerate incompetence. He knew that it is demoralizing for professionals.
To work s to work alongside incompetent amateurs. He uses that w th that term incompetent.
Amateurs a lot.
This part when I got to this part.
Reminded me of what Steve Jobs Steve the the the Steve Jobs is
A player theory.
So says jobs had latched on to what he believed was a key management lesson from his Macintosh experience.
You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. Let me pause there.
What did
The head chef do he did not tolerate incompetence. He knew that it was demoralizing for professionals to work alongside.
incompetent amateurs. Let's go back to a quote from Steve Jobs. It's too easy as your team grows to put up with a few B players.
And then they attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C C players, Steve said.
The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only
Only
with other A players, which means you cannot indulge
Be players.
Back to more lessons from the head chef.
He taught me the exorbitant standards of service.
For example, he once heard me tell a waiter that we were fresh out of
The plate de jour.
And almost
Fire me for it.
In a great kitchen, he said.
One must always honor what one has promised on the menu.
And then Ogie tells us how he used this idea, building Ogvey and Mather.
Today I see red.
When anybody at Ogbey and Mather tells a client that we cannot produce an advertisement on the day we have promised it.
In the best establishments, which is the only
The only thing that Ogovy was interested in.
He wanted to build a first class business.
In a first class way. He says over and over again in all of his writings.
Is that
He's not trying to be the biggest. He's trying to be the best.
And you have to understand that if you're gonna read Ogbe, that's all he cares about. Supreme excellence, being better.
than every single other person in his craft. That is what's so fascinating about this guy. And again
Why the hell?
Would Warren Buffett call him a genius? How many people, how many managers, founders of businesses has has Warren seen in his lifetime? There should be like sirens going off in your mind taking, hey, maybe you should pay attention to this guy, maybe should read his book.
I l just love stuff like this. Today I see red when anybody at Ogre and Mather
Tells a client that we cannot produce an advertisement on the day we have promised it. In the best establishments, which is all that he's trying to build, right? In the best establishments, promises are always kept.
Whatever it may cost in agony and overtime.
Damn that is good writing.
Whatever it may cost in agony and overtime.
And then I love how he combines the the lessons he learned and the experiences he learned at Hotel Majestic with now running his world class agency for the last fourteen years at the time he's writing this.
I've come to the conclusion that the top man so he is talking about the role of the founder here, okay? I need to be very clear about this. He is discussing the role of the founder. I've come to the conclusion that the top man has one
Principle responsibility.
To provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks
Can do useful work.
So then he goes into something they ha he had to do as his company grew.
Like when it's small team.
You can talk to them every day.
Uh, but at this point he's writing he's had like five hundred employees. So once a year what he would do is he would gather everybody together.
And
He's just gonna teach, teach, teach. This is where he talked about the importance. They didn't call it company culture.
But that's what we would call it today.
And so he says like every year he'd gather them.
And he talks about
what kind of behavior that he admires and that he expects from every single person in the organization.
So I'm gonna go over the ten things that he tells, but what I thought was so interesting too.
Is after
After he tells
His team what he expects of them.
He tells his team what he expects of himself.
So it says uh I admire this is n this is uh another great thing about his writing.
You remember it, it's very easy to read.
And because he loves these numbered lists.
Uh, number one, I admire people who work hard, who bite the bullet.
I dislike passengers who don't pull their weight in the boat.
It is more fun to be overworked than to be underworked.
There is an economic factor built into hard work. The harder you work, the fewer employees we need.
And the more profit we make.
The more profit we make.
The more money becomes available.
For all of us.
Number two.
I admire people with first class brains.
Because you cannot run a great great advertising agency or a great company without brainy people.
But brains are not enough unless they are combined with intellectual honesty.
Number three.
I have an inviolable rule against employing knee pots and spouses because they breed politics.
Whenever two of our people get married, one of them must depart. I wonder if that's even legal anymore.
Number four.
I admire people who work with gusto.
If you don't enjoy what you're doing, this is this is my favorite one of this entire section.
I admire people who work with gusto. Gusto is a word he uses a lot too.
I admire people who work with Gusto. If you don't enjoy what you're doing, I beg you to find another job. Remember the Scottish proverb.
Be happy while you're living for your long time dead.
Number five, I despise toties who suck up to their buses.
They're generally the same people who bully their subordinates.
Number six.
I admire self confident professionals.
The craftsman.
who do their jobs
with superlative excellence. See what I mean? He's just it's excellence above everything else with all of me.
They always seem to respect
The expertise of their colleagues.
Number seven.
I admire people who hire subordinates who are good enough to succeed them.
I pity people who are so insecure that they feel compelled to hire inferiors
as their subordinates.
Number eight.
I admire people who build up their subordinates.
Because that is the only way we can promote from within the ranks.
I detest
having to go outside to fill important jobs
And I look forward to the day when that will never be necessary.
Number nine, I admire people with gentle manners
Who treat other people as human beings.
I abhor quarrelsome people people.
I abhor people who engage in paper warfare.
The best way to keep the peace is to be candid.
And the last one, number ten.
I admire well organized people who deliver their work on time. The Duke of Wellington never went home until he had finished all the
Of the work on his desk.
And then he transitions into what he expects from himself.
Number one, I try to be fair and to be firm to make unpopular decisions without cowardice.
To create an atmosphere of stability.
And to listen.
More than I talk.
Number two.
I try to sustain
The momentum of the agency, its ferment, its vitality.
It's forward.
Thrust.
And that's just another example of why I consider Ogee one of my heroes. Like I I do uh like I look at him like Man, I wanna be like this. Just his his mastery of language to get you to remember the ideas. Like he's just so good at this.
Number three, I try to build the agency by landing new accounts.
Number four, I try to win the confidence of our clients at the highest level.
Number five.
I try to make sufficient profits to keep you all from Pernary in old age.
Number six, I plan our policies far into the future.
Number seven, I try to recruit people of the highest quality at all levels.
To build the hottest staff.
In the agency business.
And number eight, I try to get the best out of every man and woman in the agency.
And then he goes into the fact that his goal is to pursue excellence over bigness.
I have no ambition to preside over a vast bureaucracy.
That is why we only have nineteen clients.
The pursuit of excellence is less profitable.
Than the pursuit of bigness.
But it can be more satisfying.
My success or failure.
And this is something that he just
I mean he shares again. I'm gonna use the the the the
Uh the example of Steve Jobs.
This is from episode two ninety nine from that new book on Steve Jobs that was just released for free by Steve Jobs Archive.
Where Steve said, that's been the most important lesson I've learned in business, that the dynamic range of people dramatically exceeds things.
you encounter in the rest of our normal lives.
And to try to find those really great people who love what they do. Oh, we'll be saying the same thing right here.
To all of his people.
My success or failure at the head of this agency depends more than anything else on my ability to find people
Who can create great campaigns.
People with fire in their belllies.
And then he gives advice to other people trying to recruit really talented people.
He's got a maxim that he's gonna repeat.
five thousand times. And it's two words. Tolerate genius. Everybody's like, Oh, I want the most talented people, not realizing the most talented people are usually highly disagreeable. They're mavericks, they're nonconformist, they're very, very difficult to deal with.
And he says, like, don't strangle the goose that lays the golden egg. You have to understand that there there's a reason
Like the most talented people are going to, you know, have the the
In many cases uh these hard to deal with personalities.
And he says the business community wants remarkable advertising, but turns a cold shoulder shoulder to the kind of people who can produce it. So then he's going to reference.
one of his advertising heroes, this guy named Albert Lasker.
I read
Just like I always do. If I find somebody I admire and then they talk about who they admire, I have to go and read their biography, make an episode on it. If you haven't listened to it, it's episode two oh two oh six, two hundred and six.
Auburn Lasker made more money in advertising than anybody else.
And because he was able to

Like he understood what what Og V is trying to tell us. It's like
you want remarkable advertising, you want remarkable talent, and then you
Want them to be like conformists and like
That's not gonna work.
And so he says that is why most advertisements are so infernally dull.
Because they don't
They're made by dole people, right? Albert Lasker made fifty million dollars.
Partly because he could stomach the atrocious manners of his great copywriters.
And they list them.
One of these guys
is this guy named Claude Hopkins, who I've done two podcasts on.
Og talks about Hopkins over and over again. He says you could you shouldn't no one should be allowed to ever create an ad without reading Hopkins' book Scientific Advertising six times.
And so Hopkins is a main character in Albert Lasker's biography as well.
And then Ogrevi expounds on why there's such crappy advertising everywhere. He says some of the mammoth agencies are now being managed by second generation caretakers.
who floated to the top of their organizations.
Because they were smooth contact men.
But these type of men cannot create potent campaigns.
And Ogie summarizes his main point here.
Beautifully.
Talent.
I believe is most likely to be found among nonconformists
Dissenters and rebels.
And so just like he said in the introduction, he is constantly
insulting and making fun of these businesses that are run by committee. He
Like Edwin Lan, like Steve Jobs.
Like a bunch of the people you and I study on the podcast.
He believes
in indiv the capacity for individual greatness. He hates teamwork calls teamwork
Uh
There's a line later on the book. It's like
Teamwork is just like this made up term.
uh by mediocre men.
So
This is very I'll get there in one second. I just love this guy. Uh
is very fascinating because I think this is you know, you hear me talk over and over again the importance of uh uh building
ourselves into formidable people and I'm pretty sure like be becoming a formidable individual
I've repeated it over and over again for over the last couple of years and I'm pretty sure
that idea came from Og V in this book. I think that might be the first time I ever heard that.
And something that just stuck in my mind.
But before I get there, he has this this great idea where I do think like you ha
The the benefit of being incapable of logical thought. This is gonna sound crazy, but listen to what he says here. The majority of businessmen are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason.
Their imaginations are blocked.
I am almost incapable of logical thought.
But I have developed techniques for keeping open the telephone line to my unconscious, in case that disorderly re repository has anything to tell me.
I listen to a great deal of music.
I take long hot baths.
I garden.
I go into retreat among the Amish. He's not kidding about that, by the way.
I watch birds.
I go for long walks in the country.
And I take frequent vacations.
So that my brain can lie.
fallow. I think that is the most important phrase in this entire
This entire paragraph. Give your brain a rest. So my brain can lie fallow.
No golf, no cocktail parties, no tennis, no bridge, no concentration, only a bicycle.
While thus employed in doing nothing.
I receive a constant stream.

From my unconscious
And these become the raw material for my advertisements.
But more is required and he's gonna list some traits that he desires in himself and others.
But more is required.
Hard work.
An open mind.
and an ungovernable curiosity.
And then he states his belief in the individual capacity for greatness. I have observed
That no creative organization, whether it is a research laboratory, a magazine, a parish kitchen,
an advertising agency will produce a great body of work.
Unless you
It is leading.
By a formidable
individual.
And if founders wasn't called founders.
That's what it would be called because that is who we are studying. We are studying formidable
individuals.
And formidable individuals do not have bland
Personalities. Few of the great creators have bland personalities.
They are cantanerous egotists, the kind of men who are unwelcome to
In the modern corporation.
Consider Winston Churchill.
He drank like a fish.
He was capricious and willful.
When opposed, he sulked.
He was rude to fools.
He was wildly extravagant.
He wept on the slightest provocation.
He was inconsiderate to his staff.
Yet Lord Allenbrook, his chief of staff, would write later.
I shall look back on the years I worked with him as some of the most difficult and trying ones in my life.
For all that, I think God.
That I was given the opportunity of working alongside of such a man.
And having my eyes open.
To the fact.
that occasionally such supermen exist on the earth.
Okay, so then he has an entire chapter.

What like what are some of the customer acquisition techniques that he used?
when he was starting his um his advertising agency, he says fifteen years ago, I was an obscure tobacco farmer in Pennsylvania.
Today I preside over one of the best advertising agencies in the United States with billings of fifty five million a year.
How did this come to pass?
On the day in nineteen forty eight when I hung out my shingle
I issued this following order of the day. So now this is all be writing.
He says this is a new agency struggling for its life.
For some time we shall be overworked and underpaid.
In hiring, the emphasis will be on youth.
We are looking for young Turks.
I have no use for toadies or hacks.
I seek
Gentlemen with brain.
And what's remarkable is how much he wrote this out in advance and it wound up becoming true.
Agencies are as big as they deserve to be. We are starting this one on a shoestring.
But we are gonna make it a great agency before nineteen sixty, what he did.
And he also the very next day.
He made a list of the five clients that he wanted the most.
And so some of these are like Campbell Shoop Soup Company, remember this more than half a century ago.
Uh shell
All these other companies. This is the crazy thing.
He has his footnote here. He says to pick such blue chip targets was an act of mad presumption.
But all five of them.
Are now clients.
of Ogee and Mather.
And so when he has no money and no one knows who he is, all of his client acquisition has to be outbound.
So it's like okay, well
What's the smartest play here? And he comes he does something that's really smart. He's like, Okay, well
if you already have if you're an existing company, you already have an advertising agency, maybe you like them.
What's the chance I'm gonna be able to go in there and convince you to go with me? I'm I have no proven rec record. So
This is what he did.
Following Henry Ford's advice to his dealers that they should solicit by personal visitation,
I started by soliciting advertisers who did not employ an agency at all.
He also does something that
I thought was genius'cause I wrote this is genius the first time I read the bo this book.
And I still think it's genius.
He does this like highly targeted direct mail campaign, but it's not just, hey, I'm Ogrevine, I can do your advertising. He doesn't even do that at all.
He sends useful and valuable information that pertains to them.
Let me tell you what I mean.
I sent frequent progress reports to six hundred people in every walk of life.
This barrage of direct mail was read by the most august of advertisers.
For example, when I solicited part of the Seagram account
Sam Bronfman, who's the founder of Seagrams, I think I covered him back on like episode one fifteen. He's got a crazy life story.
For example, when I s solicited part of the C room account, Sam Brockman played back to me the last two paragraphs of a sixteen page speech.
That I had sent him shortly before.
And he hired us.
Gentle reader, if you are shocked by these confessions of self self advertisement.
I can only plead that if I had behaved in a more professional way, it would have taken me twenty years to arrive.
I had neither the time nor the money to wait.
I was poor.
Unknown.
And in a hurry.
And so another thing that he repeats over and over again
Is his belief in midnight oil, his belief in hard work.
He says next to luck.
Midnight oil is the best weapon to use in hunting new business. And so a few pages later, he demonstrates this, and I just wrote at the top of the page.
How bad do you want it?
How bad do you want it?
The biggest account I ever got was Shell, so the oil company, right?
Sho uh the shell people saw the work that he had done. This is later in his career, he had done uh some great advertising work for Rolls Royce.
And so they the show people send this like long questionnaire.
And I think it's uh they're trying to test out
Or there's a competition, I think there's like something like I don't know, fifteen or eighteen different
Potential advertising agencies.
And so Og V's like okay, there's you know, maybe a thousand advertising agencies out there.
I'm down to maybe the the the
Now now that that number's from a thousand.
Now I'm to fifteen.
How can I make myself stand out again? How bad do you want it?
So they send out this long questionnaire, all these a a agencies are supposed to fill it out, send it back.
Og it himself. He says I stayed up all night
Drafting answers to the shell questionnaire.
My answers were more candid than it's customary.
Another way to say
I was trying to differentiate myself, right? My answers were more candid than is customary.
But I thought they would make a favorable impression on Max Burns, who at that time
uh was the president of Shell.
The next morning I learned that he had gone to England. So he fills up the questionnaire
sends it to Max, thinks Max's gonna get it. He's like, Oh no, Max isn't in New York. He went to England.
What do you think Ogie's about to do?
What would most people do? They're like oh sit there and just wait till he gets back.
No.
Wrong answer.
The next morning I learned that he had gone to England. So I flew to London.
And left a message at his hotel saying that I wanted to see him.
For ten days there was alm there was no reply, and I had almost given up hope.
When my telephone
rang and it said, uh and it reported that Mr. Burns wanted me to lunch with him on the following day. Now this is just a good this is also
He said
Midnight o Luck and Midnight Oil, right? That's what you need in the hunt.
For uh
For new business. So imagine
Trying to
Chase down the president of Shell to to prove to him how bad you want his account, right?
Doesn't hear from him for ten days. The day he says, Oh, come to lunch with me tomorrow
Yeah.
Oh we
We're gonna be lunching with the Secretary of State of Scotland.
Right. Again, that that looks good on all be like, Oh, this guy must be important.
Uh, for ten days there was no reply, I had almost given up hope, my telephone rang, mister Burns wanted me to lunch with him on the following day. I had already engaged myself to lunch with the Secretary of State for Scotland, so I sent Burns the following signal.
Mr. Ogie No this is hilarious.
He's writing this.
Yeah.
It doesn't say hey I'm having lunch, Mr Ogy is lunching with the Secretary of State f of Scotland.
At the House of Commons.
They would be delighted if you would join them.
The he wrote it himself.
I don't know why I find this a funny. He wrote it himself.
Uh, so what happens? Mr. Spring's like, Yeah, I'll come along.
And so he says on the way to the house
I was able to give Burns the gist of my answers to his questionnaire in person. You cannot.
understate how important in person is. It'll always be
Uh important.
So I gave him my answer to my questionnaire. Back in New York the next day he introduced me to the man who was about to succeed him as the president of Shell.
Три векс лета на нею президент тефон ми.
To say
That we got.
The account.
So let's go back to this idea of the importance of making yourself into a formidable individual.
Uh one of the reasons is uh the better you are at doing that, the less competition you have.
And he talks about this.
uh he like he knows how good they are. So he says we take immense pains to select our clients.
It is not generally realized that there aren't enough first class agencies to go around.
So by prioritizing excellence, right?
Maybe they're
There might be
A thousand
Good.
Agencies in the world.
There might be
Fifteen great.
Agencies in the world.
There might be five
truly excellent agencies in the world. So his whole point is like just keep doing more work that other people won't do.
make yourself into a formidable individual and as a result you'll just have
Less competition.
Then
The mediocre majority.
If you set high standards in one department, you're likely to set high standards in every department.
The number of men who can preside over an agency's entire creative output.
can be numbered on the fingers. He clearly knows that he's one of them. He calls them
He calls he's got a weird term term for this.
For super tal supremely talented people. He calls them trumpeter swans, which is just bizarre.
He says these rare trumpeter swans must be capable of inspiring a motley crew.
of talented people like writers and artists, right?
Uh, they must be sure footed judges of campaigns for a wide range of diff different products. They must be good presenters.
And also salespeople, and they must have a colossal appetite for midnight oil. See?
See what I mean here?
He finds these terms.
these distinctive terms and he repeats them over and over and over and over again.
How many times have you used the word midnight oil in this book so far? It's probably like the fifth time I read it.
And I'm only on page sixty nine.
Word got around that I was one of these rare birds, and it occurred to several of the big agencies that they should hire me.
Even if they had to take my whole agents, even if it took
Even if they had to take my whole agency to get me.
And so what he's referencing there is that real recognizes real. So you have all these other formidable
uh advertising agency founders.
they're a little bit more established than Ogre V was at this point in his career. And so what do they always try to do? They try to buy him.
Smart on their part, no doubt, and also smart on his part to say.
Nope.
And part of the reason he would say no is because he wants to be a great man. He doesn't want to work for a great man. He's got this great
I always say one of my favorite um descriptions
of the role of the founder.
came from this description of Steve Jobs. It says
That uh Apple was just Steve Jobs with ten thousand lives.
Ogy says that a great company is just a lengthened shadow, the lengthened shadow of a great individual.
Some agencies pander to the craze for doing everything in committee.
They boast about teamwork and decry the role of the individual.
But no team can write an advertisement.
And I doubt whether there's a there is a single agency of any consequence. So again
goes back to this whole thing, is like I I don't care about you.
The mediocre majority. I'm care about excellence, right?
And the way to think about it is like an agency of any consequence. So he's like not talking about
the the HCs that are rule by committee. Only am interested
in competing with and being
My peer group is excellent people, right?
So he says they boast about teamwork and decry the role of the individual, but no team can write an advertisement, and I doubt whether there is a single agency of any consequence.
Which is not the lengthened shadow.
Of one
Man.
Or said another way, Apple is Steve Jobs with ten thousand lives.
Then he continues on the steam that's really important to have ridiculously
Like your entire y you hold your team to ridiculously high standards.
And he says, If you think that your business is performing badly, don't beat around the bush.
Speak your mind loud and clear.
Disaster's consequences can arise
When a founder Pussyfoots
in his day to day dealings with his business.
It is better to say
What you have just shown me is not up to your usual high standard.
Please take another crack at it.
That's a great that's very diplomatic, actually, right?
It's better to say what you have just shown me is not up to your usual high standard. Please take another crack at it.
At the same time you should explain exactly what you find inadequate about the submission.
Do not leave your team to guess.
Set high standards. Discourage bunting.
Make it plain that you expect your agency to hit home runs.
And pour on the praise when they do.
And when I got to that part it reminded me of this section from the forward, so the forward of this book.
It's written by an advertising guy who was like a young guy.
starting out his career in the early nineteen sixties when this book was originally published and he he read it when he was a young man and it like had a huge influence.
on like the the quality of his work throughout his entire career.
And I thought it was interesting'cause it tells you a lot about
Ogile's perspective and what was important to him. And it says a uh Og V was an Englishman
interested in baseball. He would say, don't bunt.
Aim out of the park.
Aim for the company of immortals.
And in the world of advertising, Ogrefeed
Did that. He is in the company of immortals.
And then overview continues and like not only setting high standards of being excellent.
But you need to hustle. You need to work with gusto, as he always said.
Th this is under the subheading.
Hurry.
Most big corporations behave as if profit were not a function of time.
When Jerry Lambert scored his first breakthrough with Listerine, which is a new product at this point.
He speeded up the whole process of markba of marketing by dividing time into months.
Instead of locking himself into annuals,
Lambert reviewed his advertising and his profits every month.
The result was that he made twenty five million dollars in eight years. So that'd be what, ten probably ten X.
Uh'cause he's talking about in like nineteen fifty, nineteen sixty dollars.
Uh, so he says he made twenty five million dollars in eight years.
In Jerry Lambert's day, the Lambert Farmaceutical Company
Live by the month.
Instead of by the year.
And then he repeats his observation not only that he sees inside of his company, but he also sees with his best
Clients tolerate genius. My observation has been that mediocre men recognize genius.
Resent it.
and feel compelled to destroy it.
There are very few men of genius.
But we need all we can find. Almost without exception, they are disagreeable.
Do not destroy them.
They lay golden eggs.
So then he goes into how to build a great advertising campaign.
And we're gonna see that he had a lot in common with Napoleon. If you heard uh episode
the recent episode I did on Napoleon, uh episode three or two.
Uh n it's it's called the mind of Napoleon. It's just literally Napoleon speaking directly to you.
He's
Constantly referencing. This is what Alexander did. This is what Julius Caesar did.
All give you the same thing.
I am an inveterate brain picker and the most rewarding brains I've picked are the brains of my predecessors.
And of my competitors.
I have learned much from studying the successful campaigns.
Napoleon repeat that over and over again.
He did it for himself.
When he's close to death he's like this is what I want my son to do, like this is the the curriculum and education I have
My son is like study the great work that came before you.
Uh so Og he says your most important job is to decide what you are going to say about your product, what benefit
You are going to promise in Ogvian advertising, which I have not read probably
Three or four years, maybe.
But I've read the highlights over and over again. He says in Ogvian advertising that is the most important sentence in the book, and he tells you to read it again.
That you have to figure out the most important thing you do, the most important thing decide.
Is what benefit you're going to promise.
Another one of his maxims is the more you tell, the more you sell. Give facts.
Very few advertisements contain enough factual information to sell the product.
Study the copy in Sears catalog. It sells a billion dollars.

advertisements I gave nothing but facts.
No adjectives, no gracious living.
The consumer is not a moron.
She is your wife.
You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few
Vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything.
She wants all the information you can give her.
When I was a door to door salesman, I just he sold ovens door to door for God's sake.
When I sold uh when I was a door to door salesman, I discovered that the more information I gave about my product, the more I sold.
Claude Hopkins made the same discovery about advertising.
Fifty years ago.
But most modern copywriters find it easier to write short
Lazy advertisements.
Because collecting facts
Is hard work.
So he wants you to collect facts, but he says you cannot.
You absolutely cannot bore people. This is one of his most famous maximums here.
Uh, we make advertisements that people want to read. You can't save souls in an empty church.
And then here's another one of his most famous maxims. I have repeated this in private conversations
I'm not kidding.
А таузен там.
It is amazing how many times
This comes up.
over and over again how many different things you can apply this to.
If you're lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops pulling.
Scores of good advertisements have been discarded before they lost their potency.
This is the maximum, maybe m the the one I it's definitely the one I repeat the most in my day to day life, the one I think about the most.
You are not advertising to a standing army.
You're advertising to a moving parade.
Three million customers get married every year.
The advertisements were sold a refrigerator.
To a
New married couple last year.
Will work just as successful to those who get married.
Next year.
That is also why he would run the same ad.
In the same magazine.
For
Like twenty years.
'Cause he's you're not out you the idea that you think the same p people are reading the magazine every time.
or the same people see that happen to see that ad, or are the same spot in their life where they actually need w the the product that you're advertising. You're you're crazy.
You're not advertising.
to a standing army. You're advertising to a moving parade.
This is so difficult for people to understand and to actually implement because we're humans are obsessed with novelty. So he says, it takes uncommon guts.
To stick to one style in the face of all the pressures.
to quote unquote come up with something new
Every six months.
It is tragically easy.
To be stampeded into change.
And then he has an entire section of the book.
on how to write really good copy.
And he spends an en enormous amount of time talking about headlines and this is this will make sense why he spent so much time talking about headlines.
Right here. The headline is the most important element.
In advertisements.
It is the telegram which decides the reader whether to read the copy five times.
As many people read the headline as read the body copy.
When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.
If you haven't done some selling in your headline.
You have wasted eighty percent of your money.
A change of headline can make a difference of ten to one in sales.
I never
Write fewer than sixteen headlines.
For a single advertisement.
Every headline should appeal to the customer's self interest.
It should promise her a benefit.
He repeats that, include your selling promise in your headline.
This requires long headlines.
Research has found that headlines of ten words or longer consistently sold more merchandise.
than short headlines. The best headline
I ever wrote.
Contained eighteen words.
I and this is the the best headline he ever wrote.
At sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise in the new Rolls Royce was
comes from the electric clock.
And what's fascinating about that headline is the fact that, you know, he's a big advocate of just doing more work
than anybody else would. He's a big advocate about researching.
He was reading like I think he was on like page fifty of something.
of like this internal
Rolls Royce Rolls Royce engineering document.
Where he came across that line.
If he had not done all that research and that reading that very few other people were willing to do, he wouldn't have come up with the best headline.
he ever made in his entire career.
More advice you should always include testimonials in your ad.
The reader finds it easier to believe the endorsement of a fellow consumer
Then the puffery.
Of an anonymous copywriter.
Keep your opening paragraph down to a maximum of eleven words.
A long first paragraph frightens readers away.
All your paragraphs should be as short as possible.
Long paragraphs are fatiguing.
And a perfect description of that is the book itself.
It's full of short, easy to read, memorable paragraphs.
Early in the book he talked about the importance of repetition and building your company culture.
Repeats it again in advertising, the average consumer is subjected to over ten thousand advertisements a year.
Make sure that she knows the name of the product being advertised in your commercial.
Repeat it.
Ad nauseum throughout.
He repeats the same idea so much, he says that his w his sister suggested
That the name of his ad agency should be changed to Ad Nauseum Incorporated.
And then he gives a lot of advice on how to rise to the top.
I've told you before that I think the best talk available on YouTube for any founder
is this presentation that Bill Gurley gave a couple years ago.
I think it was at the University of Texas MBA students. It's called Running Down a Dream, How to Succeed.
And thrive in a career you love.
And one of my favorite lines from that talk.
was that Bill said that you have zero excuse for not being the most knowledgeable person in any subject that you want.
because these information is right there at your fingertips. And we're gonna see Og V
Echoing that very sage advice.
After watching the careermanship of my own employees for fourteen years, I have identified a pattern of behavior which leads rapidly to the top.
First, you must be ambitious.
Set yourself to becoming the best informed man in your agency
on the account to which you are signed.
If for example it is a gasoline account.
Read textbooks on the chemistry.
Geology and distribution of petroleum products.
Read all the trade journals in the field.
Read all the research reports and marketing plans that your agency has ever written on the product.
Spend Saturday mornings in service stations pumping gasoline and talking to motorists.
Visit your clients refineries and
And research laboratories.
Study advertising of all of his competitors.
At the end of your second year, you will know more about gasoline than your boss.
And you will be ready to succeed him.
Most of the young men in agencies are too lazy to do this kind of homework.
They remain
Permanently superficial.
Nowadays it is fashion to pretend that no single individual is ever responsible for a successful advertising campaign.
This emphasis on teamwork is bunk.
A conspiracy of the mediocre majority.
No ad, no commercial, and no image can be created by committee.
Most top managers are secretly aware of this.
And they keep their eyes open for those rare individuals who lay golden eggs.
Several years ago, a client of ours asked their seven advertising agencies to submit papers.
on the television medium, which was then quite new.
The other agencies put inadequate papers of five or six pages.
But a young man on my staff.
Took the trouble.
To assemble every conceivable statistic.
And working day and night for three weeks.

Which covered one hundred and seventy seven pages.
His lazy colleagues sneered at him, and
as a compulsive worker.
But one year later, he was elected to our board of directors.
On such isolated incidents.
Our most successful careers.
Built.
And that is where I'll leave it.
Highly recommend.
Buying this book.
Reading it, spending some time inside the mind.
Of
David Ogilvy.
You'll learn a lot and he'll hold you to a very high standard.
There's a link down below in the show notes if you want to buy the book.
Using that link you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.
If you haven't already joined my email list, that link is down below as well.
Every week I email the top ten highlights of every book.
That I read.
Winnowing this book down to just ten great sentences is gonna be really, really difficult,'cause he's probably got fifty or a hundred great sentences in the book. But if you want to get an email
Every week for the top ten highlights of the book that I'm reading.
The link to get on that list is down below in the show notes.
Available on your podcast player and at founderspodcast.com.
That is three hundred and six books down.
One thousand ago.
And I'll talk to you again soon.