Gems David Ogilvy Bequeaths to You

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How to get the ship launched:

1. Invite reporters, share agency vision, gain free publicity and valuable business leads.

2. Deliver two bold annual speeches to provoke maximum buzz on Madison Avenue.

3. Befriend consultants and salesmen who connect with major advertisers through mutual benefit.

4. Send regular updates to 600 influencers, ensuring lasting impressions and winning new clients.

Gentle reader, if you are shocked by these confessions of 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.

When a good man quits, his cronies wonder why, and generally suspect that he has been mistreated by management. Recently I have found a way to prevent this misunderstanding. When my young copy chief resigned to become Vice Chairman of another agency, he and I exchanged letters in the style of a cabinet minister resigning to a Prime Minister, and they were printed in our staff magazine. The dear defector wrote to me: 

You must accept the blame for what I am as an advertising man. You invented me and have taught me how much I do not know. You once said that you should have charged me tuition all these years, and it’s true. 

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Few of the great creators have bland personalities. They are cantankerous egotists, the kind of men who are unwelcome 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. His conversation was Rabelaisian. He was inconsiderate to his staff. Yet Lord Alanbrooke, his Chief of Staff, could write:

I shall always 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 thank God that I was given the opportunity of working alongside of such a man, and of having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth. 

Account criteria:

1. The product must be one which we would be proud to advertise.
2. I never accept an account unless I believe that we can do a conspicuously better job than the previous agency.
3. I steer clear of products whose sales have been falling over a long period.
4. It is important to find out whether the prospective client wants his agency to make a profit.
5. If the account is unlikely to be profitable, would it give you a chance to create remarkable advertising?
6. The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor.
7. I avoid clients for whom advertising is only a marginal factor in their marketing mix.
8. I never take new products, before they have emerged from the laboratory, unless they are included in a hamper with another product.
9. If you aspire to produce great advertising, never take associations as clients.
10. Sometimes a prospective client offers you business on condition that you hire an individual whom he believes to be indispensable to the management of his advertising.

Illustrating the ninth point:

“Mr. Ogilvy,” said the chairman, “we are interviewing several agencies. You have exactly fifteen minutes to plead your case. Then I will ring this bell, and the representative of the next agency, who is already waiting outside, will follow you.” Before launching into my pitch, I asked three questions: “How many of the end-uses for rayon must be covered in your campaign?” Answer: automobile tires, furnishing fabrics, industrial products, women’s clothing, men’s clothing. “How much money is available?” Answer: $600,000. “How many people must OK the advertisements?” Answer: the twelve members of the Committee, representing twelve manufacturers. “Ring the bell!” I said, and walked out. Them’s the conditions what prevail with almost all association accounts. Too many masters, too many objectives, too little money.

Picking an agency:

The sensible way to pick an agency is to employ an advertising manager who knows enough about what is going on in the advertising world to have an informed judgment. Ask him to show you representative advertisements and commercials from the three or four agencies he believes to be best qualified for your account.

Then call some of their clients on the telephone. This can be particularly revealing when you call advertisers like Procter & Gamble, Lever, Colgate, General Foods, and Bristol-Myers, who employ several agencies; they can give you cross-bearings on most of the top agencies.

Then invite the chief executive from each of the leading contenders to bring two of his key men to dine at your house. Loosen their tongues. Find out if they are discreet about the secrets of their present clients. Find out if they have the spine to disagree when you say something stupid. Observe their relationship with each other; are they professional colleagues or quarrelsome politicians? Do they promise you results which are obviously exaggerated? Do they sound like extinct volcanoes, or are they alive? Are they good listeners? Are they intellectually honest?

Above all, find out if you like them; the relationship between client and agency has to be an intimate one, and it can be hell if the personal chemistry is sour.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that your account will be neglected in a big agency. The young men at the working levels in big agencies are often abler and harder-working than the nabobs at the top. On the other hand, don’t assume that a big agency can give you more service than a small one. The number of bodies deployed against your account will be roughly the same in a small agency as in a big one

Here, then, are my recipes for cooking up the kind of advertising campaigns which make the cash register ring—eleven commandments which you must obey if you work at my agency:

1. What You Say Is More Important Than How You Say It.
Once upon a time I was riding on the top of a Fifth Avenue bus, when I heard a mythical housewife say to another, “Molly, my dear, I would have bought that new brand of toilet soap if only they hadn’t set the body copy in ten point Garamond.”
Don’t you believe it.

2. Unless Your Campaign Is Built Around a Great Idea, It Will Flop.
It isn’t every client who can recognize a great idea when he sees it. I remember presenting a truly brilliant idea to a client who said, “Mr. Ogilvy, you have here the mucus of a good idea.” When I started writing advertisements, I was determined to blaze new trails, to make every one of my campaigns the most successful in the history of the industry concerned.

3. Give the Facts.
Very few advertisements contain enough factual information to sell the product.
There is a ludicrous tradition among copywriters that consumers aren’t interested in facts. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

4. You Cannot Bore People into Buying.
The average family is now exposed to more than 1500 advertisements a day. No wonder they have acquired a talent for skipping the advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and going to the bathroom during television commercials. The average woman now reads only four of the advertisements which appear in the average magazine.

5. Be Well-Mannered, But Don’t Clown.
People don’t buy from bad-mannered salesmen, and research has shown that they don’t buy from bad-mannered advertisements. It is easier to sell people with a friendly handshake than by hitting them over the head with a hammer. You should try to charm the consumer into buying your product.

6. Make Your Advertising Contemporary.
The young housewife of 1963 was born after President Roosevelt died. She is living in a new world. At the age of fifty-one I am finding it increasingly difficult to tune in on the young married couples who are starting out in life.

7. Committees Can Criticize Advertisements, But They Cannot Write Them.
A lot of advertisements and television commercials look like the minutes of a committee meeting, and that is what they are. Advertising seems to sell most when it is written by a solitary individual. He must study the product, the research, and the precedents.

8. If You Are 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, largely because their sponsors got sick of seeing them.
Sterling Getchel’s famous advertisement for Plymouth (“Look at All Three”) appeared only once, and was succeeded by a series of inferior variations which were quickly forgotten.
But the Sherwin Cody School of English ran the same advertisement (“Do You Make These Mistakes in English?”) for forty-two years, changing only the type face and the color of Mr. Cody’s beard.

9. Never Write an Advertisement Which You Wouldn’t Want Your Own Family To Read.
You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife.
Don’t tell them to mine.
Do as you would be done by.

10. The Image and the Brand.
Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.
If you take that long view, a great many day-to-day problems solve themselves.
How do you decide what kind of image to build?

You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who get married next year. One million, seven hundred thousand consumers die every year, and 4,000,000 new ones are born. They enter the market and they depart from it. An advertisement is like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar, and keep It sweeping.

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One of our Rinso advertisements told housewives how to remove stains. It was better read (Starch) and better remembered (Gallup) than any detergent advertisement in history. Unfortunately, however, it forgot to feature Rinso’s main selling promise —that Rinso washes whiter; for this reason it should never have run. The photograph showed several different kinds of stain— lipstick, coffee, shoe-polish, blood and so forth. The blood was my own; I am the only copywriter who has ever bled for his client

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When you use a photograph of a woman, men ignore your advertisement. When you use a photograph of a man, you exclude women from your audience. 

If you want to attract women readers, your best bet is to use a photograph of a baby. Research has shown that they stop almost twice as many women as photographs of families. When you were a baby you were the cynosure of every eye, but by the time you became a mere member of the family, you attracted no special attention.

Men don’t like the same kind of girls that girls like. 

Advertisements are twice as memorable, on the average, when they are illustrated in color. 

Avoid historical subjects. They may be useful for advertising whiskey, but for nothing else.

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Magazine editors have discovered that people read the explanatory captions under photographs more than they read the text of articles; and the same thing is true of advertisements. When we analyzed Starch data on advertisements in Life, we found that on the average twice as many people read the captions as read the body copy. Thus captions offer you twice the audience you get for body copy. It follows that you should never use a photograph without putting a caption under it, and each caption should be a miniature ad , complete with brand name and promise.

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Food products on TV:

(18) Use the problem-solution gambit whenever you can do so without being farfetched. 

(19) Whenever possible, give news—and play it loud and clear.

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Tourism:

(2) Tourists do not travel thousands of miles to see things which they can see next door. For example, people who live in Switzerland cannot be persuaded to travel five thousand miles to see the mountains in Colorado. Advertise what is unique in your country. 

(3) Your advertisements should establish in the reader’s mind an image which she will never forget. The period of gestation between exposure to an advertisement and the purchase of a ticket is likely to be very long.

When deciding which countries to visit when he goes abroad, the American tourist is influenced by his attitude to the local inhabitants. My surveys show that he expects the British to be polite, cultured, honest, straightforward, clean and moral. But he also expects them to be aloof, pompous and doleful. So, in our advertising, we do our best to correct the disagreeable aspects of this stereotype by writing about the friendliness of English people.

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How to Rise to the Top of the Tree

When Dr. William B. Shockley studied the creativity of scientists in the Bell Laboratories, he discovered that those in the most creative quartile applied for ten times as many patents as those in the least creative quartile, but were paid only 50 per cent more. Unfair? Yes, I think so. Albert Lasker used to pay the less productive copywriters at Lord & Thomas $1000 a week, but he paid Claude Hopkins $50,000 for every $1,000,000 worth of advertising he wrote.

First, you must be ambitious, but you must not be so nakedly aggressive that your fellow workers rise up and destroy you. Tout soldat pone dans sa giberne le baton de marechal. Yes, but don’t let it stick out.

After a year of tedious training, you will probably be made an assistant account executive—a sort of midshipman. The moment that happens, set yourself to becoming the best-informed man in the agency on the account to which you are assigned. If, for example, it is a gasoline account, read text books 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 client’s refineries and research laboratories. Study the advertising of his competitors. At the end of your second year, you will know more about gasoline than your boss; you will then be ready to succeed him.

In my bachelor days I used to work until the small hours. If you prefer to spend all your spare time growing roses or playing with your children, I like you better, but do not complain that you are not being promoted fast enough. Managers promote the men who produce the most.

Il faut epater les clients

Frank Hummert, who succeeded Claude Hopkins as copy chief of Lord & Thomas and then made a fortune as the inventor of soap operas, once told me: “All clients are pigs. You may start by thinking otherwise, but you will change your mind.” 

This has not been my experience. I have encountered a handful of pigs and I have resigned them. But with a very few exceptions, I have loved my clients.

I offer this recipe for refreshing vacations:

 Don’t stay at home and putter around the house. You need a change of scene.

 Take your wife, but leave the children with a neighbor. Small fry are a pain in the neck on a vacation. Shut yourself off from exposure to advertising.

Take a sleeping pill every night for the first three nights.

 Get plenty of fresh air and exercise.

 Read a book every day—twenty-one books in three weeks. (I assume that you have already taken the Book-of-the-Month Club’s rapid reading course, and that you can do 1,000 words a minute.)

 Broaden your horizons by going abroad, even if you have to travel steerage. But don’t travel so much that you come back cross and exhausted.

Orwell on French hygiene:

In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell gives a scathing yet vivid account of his experiences working in the kitchens of Parisian hotels and restaurants. His depiction of French kitchens, especially in the lower-tier establishments, is far from flattering. Some key points Orwell makes include:

1. Filth and Squalor: Orwell describes the kitchens as disgustingly dirty. He notes that food is often prepared in unsanitary conditions, with grime, rats, and general neglect being commonplace. For example, in the Hôtel X, where he works as a plongeur (dishwasher), he talks about the filth, roaches, and casual attitude toward cleanliness.

2. Hierarchical Brutality: The structure within the kitchens is rigid and almost military-like, with head chefs ruling by fear. Orwell portrays the plongeur's life as one of constant exhaustion, low pay, and no respect, caught in a cycle of toil that leaves no time or energy for anything else.

3. Illusion of French Culinary Excellence: One of Orwell’s striking observations is how the celebrated glamour of French cuisine is, in reality, propped up by overworked, underpaid staff laboring in filthy conditions. The outward appearance of fine dining is maintained at the expense of those behind the scenes.

4. Desensitization and Survival: He describes how workers become numb to the dirt and suffering around them, accepting it as normal because survival demands it.

A representative quote:

“In the kitchen the dirt was worse than in the dining-room. It was dark, stuffy and stinking, with grease-laden air that you could cut with a knife… The dishwasher’s job was one of the hardest and most thankless.”

Orwell’s critique isn’t aimed just at French kitchens, but rather uses them to illustrate broader social injustices and the inhuman conditions of the working poor. The glamour associated with the French culinary tradition stands in stark contrast to the grimy, backbreaking reality he exposes.

1. On the filth in the scullery adjacent to the dining room:

“It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that only a double door was between us and the dining-room. There sat the customers in all their splendour—spotless table-cloths, bowls of flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim; and here, just a few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For it really was disgusting filth. There was no time to sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered about in a compound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, torn paper and trampled food.”​Telelib

— Chapter 12

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2. On the state of the kitchen at the Auberge de Jehan Cottard:

“Looking round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among the refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours.”​Lib Quotes

— Chapter 21

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3. On the unsanitary practices of French cooks:

“In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the soup—that is, if he is not going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness.”​Commander Kelly

— Chapter 10

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