The Unpublished David Ogilvy

by David Ogilvy

  1. Does anyone in Top Management really want the account? We should never take an account unless at least one key man can approach it with enthusiasm.

  2. Can good advertising sell the product? It does not pay to take on terminal cases.

  3. Would it be a happy marriage? Unhappy marriages do not fructify – and do not last.

  4. Will the account contribute significantly to our profits? Has it significant potential for growth?

  5. If we take this account will it risk losing us another account – anywhere?

  6. Will the account involve heavy risks? An account that bills more than 30 percent of the total billing in an office places the whole office at risk, and this is irresponsible. (In the early days of a new office, it makes sense to accept this risk.)

  Try to avoid new business contests when the prospective client is going to publish the names of the contenders. Only one agency can win; the others will be publicly branded as failures. We like to succeed in public, to fail in private.

  The best way to get new accounts is to create for our present clients the kind of advertising that will attract prospective clients.

  We do not have New Business departments in our offices. No first-class man will take the job; no second-class man can do it effectively.

  The prime responsibility for new business must lie with heads of offices. They should not allow Management Supervisors to spend too much time in this area; their prime responsibility must always be to our present clients.

  POLITICAL ACCOUNTS

  We do not handle political party accounts. Our reasons are:

  1. They preempt too much of the time of our top men, thereby causing trouble with our permanent clients.

  2. When an agency espouses one party, it is unfair to those of our people who are rooting for the other party.

  3. By identifying the agency with one party, we would incur the enmity of important people in the other party; we cannot afford this.

  However, good citizenship requires us to encourage our people to participate in political life – in their private capacity.

  In the same way, we applaud when they make their special skills available to charitable causes.

  It is reasonable for our office heads to involve their offices in helping non-political charities which are of special interest to them.

  WHEN TO RESIGN AN ACCOUNT

  If you resign accounts every time you feel like doing so, you will empty your portfolio every year. However, there are two circumstances in which resignation is the wisest choice:

  1. When the agency would be more profitable without the account; this is uncommon.

  2. When the client bullies the agency to such an extent that the morale of your staff is seriously impaired and starts hurting their performance on other accounts.

  REMUNERATION BY FEE

  In all countries where it is legal, we offer clients a choice of fee or commission. Fees offer five advantages over commissions:

  1. The agency can be more objective in its recommendations; or so many clients believe.

  2. The agency has adequate incentive to provide non-commissionable services if needed.

  3. The agency’s income is stabilized. Unforeseen cuts in advertising expenditure do not result in red figures or temporary personnel layoffs.

  4. The fee enables the agency to make a fair profit on services rendered. The advertiser, in turn, pays for what he gets – no more, no less.

  5. Every fee account pays its own way. Unprofitable accounts do not ride on the coattails of profitable accounts.

  Then there is the commission system, and some clients prefer it.

  Both systems will continue for years to come. We should be open-minded about our use of them.

  Corporate Culture

  A dinner address to the Directors of The Ogilvy Group, and to the heads of a number of The Group’s agencies, in London at Fishmongers Hall, June 1985:

  Three years ago Terrence Deal and Allen Kennedy wrote a book about corporate culture. They said:

  “The 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.”

  Now the concept of corporate culture has caught on in a big way, not only in the U.S.A., but also in England. In a recent article, Frances Cairncross of The Economist wrote, “The common characteristic of success is the deliberate creation of a corporate culture.”

  I have been wondering if Ogilvy & Mather has a corporate culture. Apparently we do.

  The head of one of the biggest agencies recently told us, “Yours is the only agency in the world with a real corporate culture.”

  We seem to have an exceptionally strong culture. Indeed, it may be this, more than anything else, which differentiates us from our competitors.

  It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to write it down. I have put it in the form of a letter to Bill Phillips. He has asked me to read it aloud to you. Here goes.

  Dear Bill:

  You have asked me to describe our corporate culture as I see it.

  Corporate culture is a compound of many things – tradition, mythology, ritual, customs, habits, heroes, peculiarities, and values.

  Here is how I see our culture.

  A NICE PLACE TO WORK

  Some of our people spend their entire working lives in our agency. We do our damnedest to make it a happy experience. I put this first, believing that superior service to our clients and profits for our stockholders depend on it.

  We treat our people like human beings. We help them when they are in trouble – with their jobs, with illness, with alcoholism, and so on.

  We help our people make the best of their talents. We invest an awful lot of time and money in training – perhaps more than any of our competitors.

  Our system of management is singularly democratic.

  * * *

  RUSSIAN DOLLS

  (from an interview)

  OGILVY: When you hire people from outside, it’s very important how you do it. We had a board meeting some time ago, and every director had at his place one of those Russian dolls.

  I said: “That’s you. Open it.”

  So they opened the doll, and inside was a smaller one. And they opened it up and each doll got smaller and smaller. And finally, when they got to the very inside, in the smallest doll they found a tiny piece of paper on which I had written a motto.

  When they unfolded it, it said: “If you always hire people who are smaller than you are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants.”

  * * *

  We don’t like hierarchical bureaucracy or rigid pecking orders.

  We abhor ruthlessness.

  We give our executives an extraordinary degree of freedom and independence.

  We like people with gentle manners. Our New York office goes so far as to give an annual award for “professionalism combined with civility.” The Jules Fine Award, named after the first winner.

  We like people who are honest. Honest in argument, honest with clients, honest with suppliers, honest with the company – and above all, honest with consumers.

  We admire people who work hard, who are objective and thorough.

  We do not admire superficial people.

  We despise office politicians, toadies, bullies and pompous asses.

  We discourage paper warfare. The way up the ladder is open to everybody. We are free from prejudice of any kind – religious prejudice, racial prejudice or sexual prejudice.

  We detest nepotism and every other form of favouritism.

  In promoting people to top jobs, we are influenced as much by their character as anything else.

  Like all companies with a strong culture, we have our
heroes – the Old Guard who have woven our culture. By no means have all of them been members of top management. They include people like Borgie, our immortal Danish typographer. Shelby Page, who was our Treasurer and Chief Iconoclast in New York for 34 years. Arthur Wilson, the roving English art director who is the funniest man in our history. Paul Biklen, who has shepherded thousands of us through training programs. And Joel Raphaelson, editor of Viewpoint, veteran copywriter, lanternist, and ghostwriter extraordinary.

  ATTITUDE TOWARDS CLIENTS

  The recommendations we make to clients are the recommendations we would make if we owned their companies, without regard to our own short-term interest. This earns their respect, which is the greatest asset an agency can have.

  What most clients want from agencies is superior creative work. We put the creative function at the top of our priorities.

  * * *

  A MATTER OF UNIMPORTANCE

  One Vice President, ambitious to become a Senior Vice President, had a meeting with David on a number of matters. He brought along a typed agenda. The last item was Senior Vice Presidency.

  With a couple of points still to go, something urgent came up and brought the meeting to an abrupt end. The Vice President left, forgetting his agenda, which David found later and returned to him with a handwritten note:

  “I believe we covered all the important items.”

  * * *

  The line between pride in our work and neurotic obstinacy is a narrow one. We do not grudge clients the right to decide what advertising to run. It is their money.

  Many of our clients employ us in several countries. It is important for them to know that they can expect the same standards of behavior in all our offices. That is one reason why we want our culture to be more or less the same everywhere.

  We try to sell our clients’ products without offending the mores of the countries where we do business. And without cheating the consumer.

  We attach importance to discretion. Clients don’t appreciate agencies which leak their secrets. Nor do they like it when an agency takes credit for their success. To get between a client and the footlights is bad manners.

  We take new business very seriously, and have a passion for winning. But we play fair vis-à-vis our competitors.

  PECULIARITIES

  We have a habit of divine discontent with our performance. It is an antidote to smugness.

  Our far-flung enterprise is held together by a network of personal friendships. We all belong to the same club.

  We like reports and correspondence to be well written, easy to read – and short.

  We are revolted by pseudo-academic jargon, like attitudinal, paradigms, demassification, reconceptualise, suboptimal, symbiotic linkage, splinterisation, dimensionalisation.

  Some of us write books.

  We use the word partner in referring to each other. This says a mouthful.

  We take our Christmas get-togethers seriously. On these elaborate occasions we take our entire staff into our confidence – and give them a rollicking good time.

  When we opened the New York office in 1948, I had it painted battleship grey. The result was depressing, so I changed to white walls and red carpets. Most of our offices are still white and red.

  EX CATHEDRA

  Through maddening repetition, some of my obiter dicta have been woven into our culture. Here are ten of them:

  1. “Ogilvy & Mather – one agency indivisible.”

  2. “We sell – or else.”

  3. “You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.”

  4. “Raise your sights! Blaze new trails” “Compete with the immortals!!!”

  5. “I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance. We pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles.”

  6. “We hire gentlemen with brains.”

  7. “The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Don’t insult her intelligence.”

  8. “Unless your campaign contains a Big Idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”

  9. “Only First Class business, and that in a First Class way.”

  10. “Never run an advertisement you would not want your own family to see.”

  AS OTHERS SEE US

  This letter describes our culture as I see it. How do outsiders see it? A recent survey among advertisers and other agencies revealed that our New York office is seen as “sophisticated, imaginative, disciplined, objective and exciting.” This describes exactly the culture I have devoted 36 years to cultivating.

  The head of another agency recently told us, “You are not only the leaders of our industry, you are gentlemen, you are teachers and you make us proud to be in the advertising business.”

  David

  In Houston in 1980.

  “Leadership: The Forgotten Factor in Management”

  Leadership

  The Charles Coolidge Parlin Memorial Lecture,

  Philadelphia, May 10, 1972:

  Charles Coolidge Parlin was the father of market research, but only five of the thirty-two men who have received the Parlin Award have been researchers. I am proud to be one of them.

  I started my career in this country with George Gallup at Princeton, and I owe him more than I owe any other man.

  Nowadays I earn my living in the advertising business. However, I am not going to talk about advertising this evening. To tell you the truth, I have nothing to say on the subject that I have not said elsewhere – and it seems to me that the least a recipient of the Parlin Award can do is to say something which he hasn’t said before.

  After advertising, the subject which interests me most nowadays is leadership. I have discovered that when Ogilvy & Mather appoints good leaders to manage our offices, everything blossoms. When we appoint a poor leader, everything withers.

  For the last 24 years, I have had unique opportunities for observing the men who manage great corporations. Most of them are fine problem-solvers and decisionmakers, but relatively few of them seem to be outstanding leaders. Some of them, far from inspiring their lieutenants, display a genius for castrating them.

  ELECTRIFYING

  It has been my observation that great leadership can have an electrifying effect on the performance of any corporation. Perhaps the best leader I have encountered in corporate life was General Wood of Sears, Roebuck.

  In my own trade, the best leaders I have observed have been Raymond Rubicam, Leo Burnett and Bill Bernbach.

  I have had the good fortune to work for three superb leaders – Monsieur Pitard, my old boss in the kitchens of the Majestic Hotel in Paris; George Gallup; and Sir William Stephenson of British Intelligence.

  There has been a huge amount of social science research into leadership. Twelve years ago, a summary of the literature cited 111 references.

  It is the consensus among the social scientists that success in leadership depends on the circumstances. For example, a man who has been an outstanding leader in an industrial company is sometimes a flop when he goes to Washington as Secretary of Commerce.

  The kind of leadership which works well in a young struggling company seldom works well in a large, mature company.

  ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT NOT ESSENTIAL

  There appears to be no correlation between industrial leadership and high academic achievement. I was relieved to learn this, because I have no college degree, still less an MBA. It appears that the motivation which makes a man a good student is not the kind of motivation which makes a man a good leader.

  There is a tendency for corporations to reject executives who do not fit their conventions. How many corporations today would promote an unorthodox maverick like Charlie Kettering of General Motors? I suggest that corporations should try to tolerate and encourage their mavericks. The best leaders are apt to be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their characters. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolize it – and companies seldom grow without innovation.r />
  Great leaders almost seem to exude self-confidence.

  They are never petty. They are big men. They are never buck passers.

  They are resilient; they pick themselves up after defeat – in the way that Howard Clark picked himself up after the salad oil swindle in his company. Under his indomitable leadership, the price of American Express shares has increased fourteen fold since that swindle.

  GUTS

  Great industrial leaders are always fanatically committed to their jobs. They are not lazy, or amateurs.

  * * *

  POLICY GAP

  It used to be the policy of the agency, when employees married each other, that one of them had to leave. (In those days it wasn’t against the law.) A month or so before the wedding of one such couple, David explained to them why this was a good policy, in their own interest as well as the company’s.

  Warming to the subject, he reminisced about two other employees who, years before, had shared living quarters out of wedlock while both continued to work at the agency. He hadn’t much cared for that, from a business point of view. “But you see,” he said, “I couldn’t do anything about it because we don’t have any agency policy against living in sin.”

  * * *

  They do not suffer from the crippling need to be universally loved; they have the guts to make unpopular decisions – including the guts to fire non-performers.

  Gladstone once said that a great Prime Minister must be a good butcher. The only President in recent years who has had the guts to fire people was Harry Truman. He was a great leader within his Cabinet.