#306 David Ogilvy (Confessions of an Advertising Man)

23:35I just love this guy. It is very fascinating because I think this is, you know, you hear me talk over and over again, the importance of building ourselves into formidable people. And I'm pretty sure like becoming a formidable individual. I've repeated over and over again for over the last couple of years. And I'm pretty sure that idea came from Ogilvy 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 great idea where I do think like you have. The benefit of being incapable of logical thought. This is going to sound crazy, but listen to what he says here.

24:06The 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 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.

24:42I think that is the most important phrase in 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 of telegrams from my unconscious, and these become the raw material for my advertisements. But more is required, and he's going to 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.

25:22I 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 it is led 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 cantankerous egotists, the kind of men who are unwelcome in the modern corporation. Consider Winston Churchill. He drank like a fish.

26:03He 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 thank God that I was given the opportunity of working alongside of such a man and having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on the earth. Okay, so then he has an entire chapter on how to get clients. And he goes into what are some of the customer acquisition techniques that he used when he was starting his advertising agency.

26:47He says, 15 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 $55 million a year. How did this come to pass? On the day in 1948, when I hung out my shingle, I issued this following order of the day. So now this is Ogilvy 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 brains. And what's remarkable is how much he wrote this out in advance and he wound up becoming true.

27:25Agencies are as big as they deserve to be. We are starting this one on a shoestring, but we are going to make it a great agency before 1960, 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 Soup Company. Remember, this is more than half a century ago. Shell, all these other companies. This is the crazy thing. He has this 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 Ogilvy 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.

28:01So he's like, okay, well, what's the smartest play here? And he does something that's really smart. He's like, okay, well, if you're an existing company, you already have an advertising agency, maybe you like them, what's the chance I'm going to be able to go in there and convince you to go with me? I have no proven 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 did something that I thought was genius, because this is genius the first time I read this book.

28:30and I still think he's genius. He does this like highly targeted direct mail campaign, but it's not just, hey, I'm Ogilvy and 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 600 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 115. He's got a crazy life story.

29:00For example, when I solicited part of the Seagram account, Sam Brockman played back to me the last two paragraphs of a 16 -page speech that I had sent him shortly before. And he hired us. 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 20 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 the shell people saw the work that he had done this is later in his career he had done some great advertising work for Rolls Royce.

29:58And so they show people send this like long questionnaire. And I think it's they're trying to test out or there's a competition. I think there's like something like, I don't know, 15 or 18 different potential advertising agencies. And so Ogilvy is like, OK, there's maybe a thousand advertising agencies out there. I'm down to maybe the now that that number is from a thousand. Now I'm to 15. How can I make myself stand out again? How bad do you want it? So they send out this long questionnaire. All these agencies are supposed to fill it out, send it back. And Ogilvy does it himself. He says, I stayed up all night drafting answers to the Shell questionnaire.

30:31My 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 it's customary. But I thought they would make a favorable impression on Max Burns, who at that time was the president of Shell. The next morning, I learned that he had gone to England. So he fills out the questionnaire, sends it to Max, thinks Max is going to get it. He's like, oh, no, Max isn't in New York. He went to England. What do you think Ogilvy is about to do? What would most people do? They're like, oh, just sit there and just wait till he gets back.

30:59No, 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 10 days, there was no reply and I had almost given up hope. When my telephone rang and it said, 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, luck and midnight oil, right? That's what you need in the hunt for new business. So imagine trying to chase down the president of Shell to prove to him how bad you wanted his account, right? Doesn't hear from him for 10 days.

31:34The day he says, oh, come to lunch with me tomorrow, Ogilvy was going to be lunching with the Secretary of State of Scotland, right? Again, that looks good on Ogilvy. He's like, oh, this guy must be important. For 10 days, there was no reply. I'd almost given up hope. My telephone rang. Mr. Burns wanted me to lunch with him in 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. Ogilvie, now this is hilarious, he's writing this. He doesn't say, hey, I'm having lunch. Mr. Ogilvie is lunching with the Secretary of State of Scotland at the House of Commons.

32:07They would be delighted if you would join them. He wrote it himself. I don't know why I found this so funny. He wrote it himself. So what happens? Mr. Burns is 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 important. So I gave him my answer to a 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. Three weeks later, the new president telephoned me to say that we got the account.

32:41So let's go back to this idea of the importance of making yourself into a formidable individual. One of the reasons is the better you are doing that, the less competition you have. And he talks about this, 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 there might be a thousand good agencies in the world. There might be 15 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.

33:19And as a result, you'll just have less competition than 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 of one hand. He clearly knows that he's one of them. He calls them, he calls, he's got a weird term for this, for super 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?

33:55They must be sure -footed judges of campaigns for a wide range of 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 do you use the word midnight oil in the book so far? It's probably like the fifth time I read it. And I'm only on page 69. 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 agency, even if it took, even if they had to take my whole agency to get me.

34:29And so what he's referencing there is that real recognizes real. So you have all these other formidable advertising agency founders. They're a little bit more established than Ogilvy 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 descriptions of the role of the founder came from this description of Steve Jobs.

34:57It says that Apple was just Steve Jobs with 10 ,000 lives. Ogilvy 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 is a single agency of any consequence. So again, it goes back to this whole thing. He's like, I don't care about you, the mediocre majority. I care about excellence, right? And the way to think about it is like an agency of any consequence.

35:28So he's like not talking about the agencies that are ruled by committee, only 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 10 ,000 lives. Then he continues on this theme that's really important to have ridiculously, like 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.

36:06Speak your mind loud and clear. Disastrous 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.

36:37Make 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 foreword of this book is written by an advertising guy who was like a young guy starting out his career in the early 1960s when this book was originally published. And he read it when he was a young man and it had a huge influence on the quality of his work throughout his entire career. And I thought it was interesting because it tells you a lot about Ogilvy's perspective and what was important to him. And it says Ogilvy was an Englishman interested in baseball.

37:10He would say, don't bunt. Aim out of the park. Aim for the company of immortals. And in the world of advertising, Ogilvy did that. He is in the company of immortals. And then Ogilvy continues, not only setting high standards and being excellent, but you need to hustle. You need to work with gusto, as he always said. 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 marketing by dividing time into months.

37:42Instead of locking himself into annual plans, Lambert reviewed his advertising and his profits every month. The result was that he made $25 million in eight years. So that'd be what, probably 10x because he's talking about like 1950, 1960 dollars. So he says he made $25 million in eight years. In Jerry Lambert's day, the Lambert Pharmaceutical Company lived 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.

38:22There 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 going to see that he had a lot in common with Napoleon. If you heard the recent episode I did on Napoleon, episode 302, 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. Ogilvy is 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.

38:59I have learned much from studying the successful campaigns. Napoleon would 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 curriculum and education I have my son. It's like, study the great work that came before you. So Ogilvie 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 Ogilvie and advertising, which I have not read probably in three or four years, maybe, but I've read the highlights over and over again. He says in Ogilvie and advertising, that is the most important sentence in the book.

39:30And he tells you to read it again, that you have to figure out the most important thing you do. The most important thing to 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 worth of merchandise every year by giving the facts. In my Rolls Royce 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.

40:10She 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, 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 50 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 maxims here. We make advertisements that people want to read.

40:49You 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. A thousand times. 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 the one I is definitely want to repeat the most in my day to day life, the one I think about the most. You are not advertising to a standing army.

41:21You are advertising to a moving parade. Three million customers get married every year. The advertisements which 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 20 years. Because the idea that you think the same people are reading the magazine every time, or the same people happen to see that ad, or the same spot in their life where they actually need the product that you're advertising, you're crazy. You're not advertising to a standing army. You're advertising to a moving parade.

41:59This 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 enormous amount of time talking about headlines. And this will make sense why he spends so much time talking about headlines. All right, here. The headline is the most important element in advertisements.

42:33It 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 80 cents out of your dollar. If you haven't done some selling in your headline, you have wasted 80 % of your money. A change of headline can make a difference of 10 to 1 in sales. I never write fewer than 16 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.

43:11Research has found that headlines of 10 words or longer consistently sold more merchandise than short headlines. The best headline I ever wrote contained 18 words. And this is the best headline he ever wrote. At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in the new Rolls -Royce 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 50 or something of like this internal Rolls -Royce engineering document.

43:48where 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 than the puffery of an anonymous copywriter. Keep your opening paragraph down to a maximum of 11 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.

44:22It'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 10 ,000 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 sister suggested that the name of his ad agency should be changed to Ad Nauseam 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.

45:01I 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 this information is right there at your fingertips. And we're going to see Olgavy echoing that very sage advice. After watching the careermanship of my own employees for 14 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 assigned.

45:36If, 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 client's refineries and research laboratories. Study the 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.

46:14They remain permanently superficial. Nowadays, it is fashioned 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 in adequate papers of five or six pages.

46:55But a young man on my staff took the trouble to assemble every conceivable statistic and working day and night for three weeks came up with an analysis which covered 177 pages. His lazy colleagues sneered at him as a compulsive worker. But one year later, he was elected to our board of directors. On such isolated incidents are 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 Ogilvie. 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.

47:37Using 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 10 highlights of every book that I read. Winnowing this book down to just 10 great sentences is going to be really, really difficult because he's probably got 50 or 100 great sentences in the book. But if you want to get an email every week for the top 10 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 306 books down, 1 ,000 to go.

48:11And I'll talk to you again soon.