The Unpublished David Ogilvy
Page 4
If you enjoy being a scholar, and like the company of scholars, go to a university. Who knows, you may end your days as a Regius Professor. And bear in mind that British universities are still the best in the world – at the undergraduate level. Lucky you. Winning a Nobel Prize is more satisfying than being elected Chairman of some large corporation or becoming a Permanent Undersecretary in Whitehall.
You have a first-class mind. Stretch it. If you have the opportunity to go to a university, don’t pass it up. You would never forgive yourself.
Tons of love,
David
From a memo to the Board, undated:
Not long ago, I overheard a conversation between two men sitting beside me in an airplane. It went like this:
“What business you in?”
“I’m an account executive in an ad agency.”
“Accountant?”
“No.”
“You write ads?”
“No.”
“Who writes the ads?”
“Copywriters.”
“That must be a fun job.”
“It’s not that easy. We do a lot of research.”
“You do the research?”
“No, we have research people to do that.”
“You sell the ads to the clients?”
“No, the copywriters do that.”
“Do you bring in new clients?”
“That’s not my job.”
“Forgive me, but what is your job?”
“I’m a marketing man.”
“You do marketing for the clients?”
“No, they do it themselves.”
“Are you in Management?”
“No, but I soon will be.”
From a memo to the Directors of Ogilvy & Mather preceding the arrival in their hands of his new book, “Ogilvy on Advertising,” which none of them had yet seen:
July 25, 1983
(1) You will notice that I exaggerate my role in the agency today. I figured that few people would take me seriously if I came across as a man living in the past.
(2) I hope you will also notice repeated references to my partners. This is a change from the unrelieved egotism of Confessions, and conveys the impression that Ogilvy & Mather is a large group of able people.
(3) The book includes many examples of good work by other agencies. I have never done this before. It is calculated to dilute the impression that the book is nothing more than a new business presentation for Ogilvy & Mather.
(4) Another departure: I admit several mistakes.
(5) You may feel that the book errs on the side of being anti-creative and pro-cash-register, and that this will damage our reputation. I have two excuses:
A) I wrote what I really believe. My last will and testament.
B) I think that more new business prospects will be attracted by the cash-register stuff than will be repelled by my attacks on pseudo-creativity.
David Ogilvy
•
An Australian journalist, compiling a book on lengthy careers, asked David how he has “lasted so long.” Here are excerpts from his reply, sent to Australia in April 1986.
David Ogilvy’s Marathon Innings
I am Scottish. When I was thirty-eight, I went to New York and started an advertising agency. It was an instant success and is now one of the biggest in the world, with 9,000 employees in 41 countries.
Now seventy-five, I am no longer Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, but am still a Director and a member of the Executive Committee.
In the early days I could not afford to hire outstanding professionals, so I did almost everything myself …
As my company’s income grew, I was able to hire some able partners, but it remained a one-man band. I continued to monopolize all the power and all the publicity. If I had been hit by a taxi, Ogilvy & Mather would have gone up in smoke.
So I turned over a new leaf. I stopped seeing clients. Stepped out of the limelight. Stopped creating campaigns. Gave up day-to-day management. And started taking vacations – bicycling in France and vegetating on my farm in Pennsylvania.
This self-abnegation was difficult for me, but it worked. My partners blossomed, and the agency continued to grow – faster.
I have done my best to avoid getting in the hair of my successors. I take no part in line management …
My successors and I have seen eye-to-eye on most issues. We have lived with the same corporate culture for 25 years.
I travel a lot, visiting Ogilvy & Mather offices in various countries – particularly those I can reach by train and ship; I am frightened of flying. Increasingly I am communicating by videocassette; tapes have more import than memoranda.
My marathon innings have been due, more than anything else, to four things:
1. I have outlived all my competitors.
2. My obsessive interest in advertising has not dimmed.
3. My younger partners have tolerated my presence in their midst.
4. I had the wisdom to give them a free run. As a result, Ogilvy & Mather has outgrown its founder.
HOBBIES
I cannot play golf, tennis or bridge. Only croquet. I cannot, alas, ski or sail. I still ride a bicycle.
I spend several hours a day working with my gardeners, and several hours at my desk.
And I read a great deal, mostly biography.
A letter in response to a query from Ray Calt, an executive at another advertising agency:
April 19, 1955
Dear Mr. Calt:
On March 22nd you wrote to me asking for some notes on my work habits as a copywriter. They are appalling, as you are about to see:
1. I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.
2. I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years.
3. I am helpless without research material – and the more “motivational” the better.
4. I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until that statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.
5. Before actually writing the copy, I write down every conceivable fact and selling idea. Then I get them organized and relate them to research and the copy platform.
6. Then I write the headline. As a matter of fact I try to write 20 alternative headlines for every advertisement. And I never select the final headline without asking the opinions of other people in the agency. In some cases I seek the help of the research department and get them to do a split-run on a battery of headlines.
7. At this point I can no longer postpone doing the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas.
I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)
8. I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts.
9. If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.
10. Next morning I get up early and edit the gush.
11. Then I take the train to New York and my secretary types a draft. (I cannot type, which is very inconvenient.)
12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry – because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.
Altogether it is a slow and laborious business. I understand that some copywriters have much greater facility.
Yours sincerely,
D.O.
Rare photograph: Quite possibly a first attempt at typing.
Lists
Lists
David is fond of lists. Here are a few, the first
from a talk to the staff:
The qualifications I look for in our leaders are these:
1. High standards of personal ethics.
2. Big people, without prettiness.
3. Guts under pressure, resilience in defeat.
4. Brilliant brains – not safe plodders.
5. A capacity for hard work and midnight oil.
6. Charisma – charm and persuasiveness.
7. A streak of unorthodoxy – creative innovators.
8. The courage to make tough decisions.
9. Inspiring enthusiasts – with thrust and gusto.
10. A sense of humor.
* * *
MIXED MARRIAGE
Although he admits to no prejudices regarding race, religion, etc. – and has never displayed any in his management practices – David is well aware of who’s what.
One September day, shortly after a Jewish copywriter had married a Catholic copywriter, he came bounding down the hall and greeted the husband with “Happy Saint Rosh Hashanah!”
* * *
An account manager wrote to David wondering what he considered his worst shortcomings. The reply:
1. I am intolerant of mediocrity – and laziness.
2. I fritter away too much time on things which aren’t important.
3. Like everyone of my age, I talk too much about the past.
4. I have always funked firing people who needed to be fired.
5. I am afraid of flying and go to ridiculous lengths to avoid it.
6. When I was Creative Head in New York, I wrote too much of the advertising myself.
7. I know nothing about finance.
8. I change my mind – about advertising and about people.
9. I am candid to the point of indiscretion.
10. I see too many sides to every argument.
11. I am over-impressed by physical beauty.
12. I have a low threshold of boredom.
To heads of U.S. offices, preceding a swing around the country:
February 2, 1981
MY VISIT
I have already sent you my schedule. Now Bill Phillips has suggested that I should give you “some idea of the things you would like to do in each city.”
In principle, I place myself in your hands. However:
(1) The fewer speeches the better. I have to make big ones to an American Express meeting in Florida this month, and to the 4A’s in April. I don’t have much left to say, and writing speeches takes me forever.
(2) Maybe you could invite some people (staff and clients) to see my film The View From Touffou. To be followed by questions?
(3) I hate cocktail parties.
(4) I would like to visit with your best Creative people.
(5) I would like to meet major clients – but only if I know something about their business. Which is not the case, for example, with Mattel.
(6) I get tired after 11 PM and go to bed.
(7) Please give me a little time-off to visit friends.
(8) Please don’t meet me at the railroad station, and please don’t see me off. I hate that. Let me arrive and depart on my own.
(9) Don’t put me in a suite at the hotel. A bedroom is what I like.
(10) Please give me an office, however small. And a copy of The New York Times every day.
(11) I hate drinking in bars, and have to start eating the moment I sit down in restaurants. Waiting for food puts me in a foul mood.
D.O.
A memo to the creative directors of Ogilvy & Mather offices worldwide:
July 1, 1979
ARE YOU THE GREATEST?
1. Are you creating the most remarkable advertising in your country?
2. Is this generally recognized, inside and outside your agency?
3. Can you show new-business prospects at least four campaigns which electrify them?
4. Have you stopped overloading commercials?
5. Have you stopped singing the sales pitch?
6. Do all your commercials start with a visual grabber?
7. Have you stopped using cartoon commercials when selling to adults?
8. Do you show at least six Magic Lanterns to everyone who joins your staff?
9. If they don’t understand English, have you had all the Lanterns translated into their language?
10. Do you repeat the brand name several times in every commercial?
11. Have you stopped using celebrity testimonials in television commercials?
12. Have you got a list of red-hot creative people in other agencies, ready for the day when you can afford to hire them?
13. Do all your campaigns execute an agreed positioning?
14. Do they promise a benefit – which has been tested?
15. Do you always super the promise at least twice in every commercial?
16. Have you had at least three Big Ideas in the last six months?
17. Do you always make the product the hero?
18. Are you going to win more creative awards than any other agency this year?
19. Do you use problem-solution, humor, relevant characters, slice-of-life?
20. Do you eschew life-style commercials?
21. Do your people gladly work nights and weekends?
22. Are you good at injecting news into your campaign?
23. Do you always show the product in use?
24. Does your house reel include some commercials with irresistible charm?
25. Do you always show the package at the end?
26. Have you stopped using visual clichés – like sunsets and happy families at the dinner table? Do you use lots of visual surprises?
27. Do the illustrations in your print advertisements contain story appeal?
28. Are you phasing out addy layouts and moving to editorial layouts?
29. Do you sometimes use visualized contrast?
30. Do all your headlines contain the brand name – and the promise?
31. Are all your illustrations photographs?
32. Have you stopped setting copy ragged left and right?
33. Have you stopped using more than 40 characters in a line of copy?
34. Have you stopped setting copy smaller than 10 point and bigger than 12 point?
35. Do you always paste advertisements into magazines or newspapers before you OK them?
36. Have you stopped setting body copy in sans-serif?
37. Have you stopped beating your wife?
If you can answer YES to all these questions, you are the greatest Creative Director on the face of the earth.
D.O.
A memo drafted for the management to circulate as it saw fit:
September 7, 1982
HOW TO WRITE
If everybody in our company took an exam in writing, the highest marks would go to the 14 Directors.
The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.
Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.
Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:
(1) Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing.* Read it three times.
(2) Write the way you talk. Naturally.
(3) Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
(4) Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
(5) Never write more than two pages on any subject.
(6) Check your quotations.
(7) Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning – and then edit it.
(8) If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
(9) Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
(10) If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.
David
Another note to the Board:
January 24, 1983
INDIA
I seem to be big in India. The Sunday Magazine recently published photographs of 54 men and women who made news in 1982. Eleven of them were not Indians:
Andropov
Brezhnev
David Ogilvy
Mitterand
Princess Diana
Pope John Paul II
Lech Walesa
Ayatolla Khomeini
Yasser Arafat
Jimmy Connors
Menachem Begin
* * *
Wanted by Ogilvy & Mather International
Trumpeter Swans
In my experience, there are five kinds of Creative Director:
1. Sound on strategy, dull on execution.
2. Good managers who don’t make waves… and don’t produce brilliant campaigns either.
3. Duds.
4. The genius who is a lousy leader.
5. TRUMPETER SWANS who combine personal genius with inspiring leadership.
We have an opening for one of these rare birds in one of our offices overseas.
Write in inviolable secrecy to me, David Ogilvy, Touffou, 86300 Bonnes, France.
* * *
Note to Trumpeter Swans:
David Ogilvy no longer handles job applications.
Write to Ogilvy & Mather in your country.
This list, sent to the Board, was later converted into the “help wanted” advertisement overleaf:
May 23, 1981
Five Kinds of Creative Heads
(1) Those whose personal talent amounts to genius; they don’t always make the best managers.
(2) Good managers who get the work out – punctual and competent. They don’t make waves, but they don’t make hot agencies either.
(3) Hep on strategy. Useful on some accounts. Apt to be dull.
(4) Trumpeter Swans. Very rare birds. They combine personal genius with inspiring leadership.
(5) Duds.